Twentieth-Century Spanish American Research Articles

Governing Juana: Madness and the Manipulation of Power in Three Spanish American Plays on Juana la Loca

This article examines the representation of Juana of Castile in three twentieth-century Spanish American plays — Zavalía's El corazón extraviado — (Argentina, 1957), Sabido's Falsa crónica de Juana la Loca (Mexico, 1985), and Rueda's Retablo de la pasión y muerte de Juana la Loca (Dominican Republic, 1996) — that portray the queen sympathetically as the victim of elaborate plots to usurp her authority. While the plays expose her madness as a pretext used by her father King Fernando and her son Emperor Carlos V to confine her for nearly half a century in the palace of Tordesillas, they do not deny the basic premises of the official history of "Juana la loca." Thus, the captive queen is represented on stage as not only unable to govern Spain, but also as unable to control herself, leading others to "govern Juana."

The Politics of Form: Three Twentieth-Century Spanish American Poets and the Sonnet

This article engages the idea of poetic form to create a dialogue among three very different twentieth-century Spanish American poets: Argentine Alfonsina Storni, Chilean Enrique Lihn, and Cuban Reinaldo Arenas. Each of them uses the sonnet's privileged position in Western aesthetic tradition to manifest shifting relations to this tradition and to modernity. In this, they open a dialogue with the lettered elite and use part of their cultural inheritance as letrados to confront the old order through an established aesthetic form, to reconfigure or question the opposition between high and low cultural forms to varying degrees and to different ends. These poets resignify their cultural legacy and in the process demonstrate its malleability—the sonnet is not monolithic, but mutable. An invitation to reinvent, the sonnet as employed by these poets embodies a range of intercultural experiences of both continuity and transformation. These readings, which engage with a range of poetic traditions (such as North American New Formalism), reveal how the choice of poetic form both shapes and depends upon the author's and his or her readers' experience and how a particular aesthetic form is both charged and changed by circumstance.

Voices from the fuente viva: The Effect of Orality in Twentieth-Century Spanish American Narrative (review)

230 Revista Hispánica Moderna 60.2 (2007) understanding and analysis of how contemporary Hispanism has come to be, with incisive and exciting proposals on how to shift the terrain of study and register the discursive formation of Spanish identity in our work and in our classrooms. Spain Beyond Spain: Modernity, Literary History, and National Identity is an important book. Not only does it brilliantly question the discursive pillars that anchor the foundational fictions of Spanish literary history, it also provides lucid and alternative ways of redefining our object of study. In the wake of the imperative spirit of this volume, I would recommend that it be required reading for Peninsularists on both sides of the Atlantic. ALDA BLANCO, University of Wisconsin nauss millay, amy. Voices from the fuente viva: The Effect of Orality in TwentiethCentury Spanish American Narrative. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2005. 222 pages. The complicity of writing in the historical trauma of conquest and domination has made it a guilty activity that yearns for the purity and innocence of language before writing, the language of those who have been silenced by that traumatic history. The fascination of Latin American writers with the ‘‘primitive’’ or ‘‘barbaric ’’ voice of the Other has of course a long history, beginning in colonial times and continuing through post-Independence to the present day. Millay’s study explores how the twentieth-century Spanish American ‘‘anthropologistwriters ’’ Lydia Cabrera, José Marı́a Arguedas, Miguel Barnet, Elisabeth Burgos and Augusto Roa Bastos inscribe orality as Other in their literary and ethnographic texts. Each of these writers, Millay suggests, invents an ethnopoetics in order to evoke the presence of the Other’s voice and create the effect of orality in their works. In order to create this effect, the writers take on the role of mediators, in Rama’s transcultural sense, establishing their authority to speak as the Other by invoking their uniquely intimate knowledge of both worlds. This rhetorical strategy, according to Millay, requires them to maintain the binary opposition between oral and literate cultures, an opposition that is ideologically constructed so that the writer becomes a necessary conduit for the disempowered voice to be heard, salvaged, and ultimately, contained. In the first chapter, Millay outlines how critics have treated the oral/literate divide since Ángel Rama wrote of the ciudad letrada in opposition to the oral culture of Latin America’s unlettered masses, and transcultural writers as mediators between these polarized worlds. Post-Rama critics she invokes who have thoughtfully examined Latin American writers’ inscription of orality in their texts include Antonio Cornejo Polar, Martin Lienhard, William Rowe, Carlos J. Alonso, Josefina Ludmer, Anı́bal González, Jorge Marcone, and Carlos Pacheco. Disappointingly missing from this distinguished list is Neil Larsen’s brilliant early reading in Modernism and Hegemony of Juan Rulfo’s use of oral language, a reading that would particularly enrich and support her notion that the textualization of oral language conceals an ideological agenda that involves subjugating the oral while creating the illusion of letting it speak for itself. Millay’s theoretical Reviews 231 discussion and readings are particularly indebted to Pacheco’s ideas about the ‘‘fictionalization of oral discourse,’’ which involves appropriating the discursive strategies of oral language to create textually ‘‘an aesthetic effect of orality.’’ In critiquing writers in her study, Millay argues for ‘‘a fluid approach that does not consider orality and literacy in purely oppositional terms’’ (18). Here she cites Marcone’s ‘‘theory of orality as a category that functions within writing’’ rather than outside it. Orality as an object of desire in this sense is an invention of literate culture that the writer deploys in order, paradoxically, to subvert the authority of writing. In Chapter Two, Millay discusses Lydia Cabrera who, like Carpentier, was inspired to explore Afro-Cuban culture during her years in Paris in the 1920s and 30s when ethnographers and surrealists became fascinated by non-European cultures . Cabrera’s ethnopoetics developed as a means to create the effect of the oral presence of the Afro-Cuban informants in her collections of folklore. Millay emphasizes the key role that poetry, seemingly closer to an oral aesthetics than prose, played in Cabrera’s artistic development. Of...

Spain Beyond Spain: Modernity, Literary History, and National Identity (review)

Reviews 229 Overall, Realism as Resistance offers many worthwhile insights into these literary texts and is, on the whole, cogently argued and elegantly written. AKIKO TSUCHIYA, Washington University, St. Louis epps, brad, and luis fernández cifuentes, eds. Spain Beyond Spain: Modernity, Literary History, and National Identity. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2005. 388 pages. In their excellent introduction to Spain Beyond Spain: Modernity, Literary History, and National Identity, Brad Epps and Luis Fernández Cifuentes warn readers that this collection of essays ‘‘is not a literary history, but at most a series of critical reflections on and about literary history’’ (42) whose objective it is to represent ‘‘a diversity of positions’’ (20) regarding a problematic which for some time now has been central to many Hispanists working within the North American academy : the reconfiguration of our research and curricular agendas beyond the parameters of what ‘‘Spanish’’ and ‘‘literature’’ have come to mean within what Joan Ramón Resina aptly calls ‘‘Cold War Hispanism.’’ That is to say, a Hispanism which ‘‘sidestepped historical materialism, feminism, class, race, and minority issues, all of them congruous with the critique of Spain’s imperialist past’’ (72). While it could be argued that the new generations of Hispanists have already problematized many of the tenets of literary history that they inherited—as evinced by the wealth of feminist and gender work which has been produced in the past twenty years, for example, or the postcolonial gaze that has been cast upon early modern literary production—the majority of the authors in this impressive and thought-provoking volume believe that much more rumination must be undertaken. These scholars suggest that Hispanism continues to be bounded by untenable linguistic, cultural and literary paradigms. In his lucid contribution Mario Santana articulates the critical reflection that runs through the majority of the essays when he states that Peninsular studies must ‘‘redefine its object of study’’ (120). One gets the sense when reading this volume that Hispanism is at an important crossroads and that it needs to be not only problematized but also theorized in new ways. Thus, the tone of the volume is urgent and, moreover, imperative. The book is organized into five parts, each of which reflects upon what are for the editors the crucial or perhaps the most vexed problematics within Peninsular studies: the language of literary history, the nineteenth century as the consolidation of a ‘‘national literature,’’ the pluralities of Peninsularism, contemporary theoretical approaches to Hispanism, and national identity. Each author contributes a very significant piece and, moreover, a distinctive approach to thinking about and through the complex landscape of Spain and its cultural production. Also, since each essay addresses a specific aspect of the manner in which literary history has conceptualized, for example a period, the nation—Spain as a monolingual entity—or the notion literature itself, the essays tend to unravel traditional literary history in order to reveal the discursive foundations upon which it has been constructed. Thus, the essays weave together a very welcome historical 230 Revista Hispánica Moderna 60.2 (2007) understanding and analysis of how contemporary Hispanism has come to be, with incisive and exciting proposals on how to shift the terrain of study and register the discursive formation of Spanish identity in our work and in our classrooms. Spain Beyond Spain: Modernity, Literary History, and National Identity is an important book. Not only does it brilliantly question the discursive pillars that anchor the foundational fictions of Spanish literary history, it also provides lucid and alternative ways of redefining our object of study. In the wake of the imperative spirit of this volume, I would recommend that it be required reading for Peninsularists on both sides of the Atlantic. ALDA BLANCO, University of Wisconsin nauss millay, amy. Voices from the fuente viva: The Effect of Orality in TwentiethCentury Spanish American Narrative. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2005. 222 pages. The complicity of writing in the historical trauma of conquest and domination has made it a guilty activity that yearns for the purity and innocence of language before writing, the language of those who have been silenced by that traumatic history. The fascination of Latin American writers with the ‘‘primitive’’ or ‘‘barbaric ’’ voice of...

Spain's Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire; The Twentieth-Century Spanish American Novel

Book Review| June 01 2007 Spain's Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire; The Twentieth-Century Spanish American Novel Marissa López Marissa López Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2007) 79 (2): 430–432. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2007-014 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Marissa López; Spain's Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire; The Twentieth-Century Spanish American Novel. American Literature 1 June 2007; 79 (2): 430–432. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2007-014 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Duke University Press2007 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Twentieth Century Spanish-American Novel (review)

Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 243 propósito de convertir a los anglicanos a la fe católica. Su misión, según su autobiografÃ-a, es llegar a ser mártir de la fe y sacrificar su vida por Cristo. Cruz propone que se deben interpretar sus intenciones como impulsadas no por su pasión religiosa, sino por su deseo, como mujer, de alcanzar la subjetividad que le ha negado la jerarquÃ-a dominante. En su totalidad, el libro cumple con su propósito de poner en manos del lector, de forma práctica y asequible, una variada selección de temas acerca de las mujeres de la familia Mendoza. Es una publicación de interés por su riqueza informativa y por la novedad de datos presentados. Power and Gender in Renaissance Spain es, sin duda, un valioso texto complementario a cursos del Siglo de Oro y como libro de consulta para estudiosos de la época. Alfonso J. GarcÃ-a Osuna The City University of New York, Kingsborough. The Twentieth Century Spanish-American Novel University of Texas Press, 2003 By Raymond Leslie Williams The Twentieth Century Spanish-American Novel, by Leslie Williams, is an extensive study of the literature of this period. In the first section, dedicated to the period classified as modernismo, Williams observes how novelists of this time tended to be more concerned with political circumstances than with the aesthetics of fiction. According to him, exceptions to this rule were Mariano Azuela in Mexico and Manuel Gálvez in Argentina. In the second chapter of this section he reviews various works, including Azuelas Los de abajo and Gálvez's El mal metafÃ-sico. Part two deals with the criollista and vanguardia novels of the '20s and '30s. While the criollistas celebrated local and regional values, the writers of the vanguardia began experimenting with European avant-garde aesthetics, such as the use of interior monologues. But as the author notes, the novels of the vanguardia occupied a limited space and were met with criticism, while some criollista novels enjoyed great success. The criollista classics discussed in the next section are La vorágine by José Eustasio Rivera, Don Segundo Sombra by Ricardo Guiraleds, and Las memorias de Mamá Blanca by Teresa de la Parra, all canonical works. Williams also dedicates a chapter to various works of the vanguardia that were either ignored or rejected by the predominant criollista literary culture of the time. The next section deals with the 1940s and 1950s. It begins with a discussion of how during this period modernist writing began to flourish, due in large part to the influence of Borges. Novelists such as Miguel Õ ngel Asturias, Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel GarcÃ-a Márquez and others began to deal with the problem of identity through such modernist narrative strategies as transcendent regionalism and oral culture, or magic realism, setting the stage for the Boom ofthe 1960s. Williams includes analyses of El Señor Presidente, by Asturias, Al filo del agua by AgustÃ-n Yáñez, Adán Buenosayres by Leopoldo Maréchal, Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo and La región más transparente by Carlos Fuentes. As in other parts of this book, in the section dealing with the Boom, Williams does a good job of giving credit to less-known writers ofthe period without lessening the importance of the more famous. In addition to Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, GarcÃ-a Márquez, and Cortázar, he also mentions writers such as José Donoso, Clarice Lispector, and many others. He also talks ofthe importance of certain works in the transition to postmodern fiction, such as Guillermo Cabrera Infante's Tres Tristes Tigres, Fuentes's Zona sagrada and Cambio de piel, and others. He includes analyses of Fuentes's La muerte de Artemio Cruz, Cortázar's Rayuela, Vargas Llosa's La casa verde, and Márquez's Cien años de soledad. In keeping with his theme of inclusion, Williams also dedicates a chapter to the analysis of lesserknow modernist works of the period. In his discussion ofthe Post-Boom period of the 1970s and 1980s, Williams mentions the novel of dictator, exile, and history. He also talks ofthe...

The twentieth-century Spanish American novel

The twentieth-century Spanish American novel

Evil, madness, and the occult in Argentine poetry

Melanie Nicholson brings to light three of Argentina's most respected twentieth-century poets within a literary and cultural tradition that traces its roots to German Romanticism. She examines each poet's work under the broadly defined rubric of literary esotericism - the rhetorics of the occult (Olga Orozco), of evil (Alejandra Pizarnik), and of madness (Jacobo Fijman). In doing so, she connects these authors to the European esoteric tradition while illuminating how this tradition is reformulated in a twentieth-century Spanish American context. Nicholson argues that while these poets draw heavily on certain principles of literary esotericism, their work also reveals the contradictions inherent in such an approach for twentieth-century poetry. Although several studies published in recent years point to the esoteric tradition in European literature as a subject of ongoing critical interest, the role of esoteric thought in Latin American literature has yet to be fully developed. Nicholson contributes to the contemporary discourse on the legacy of the avant-grade in Spanish-speaking countries. She traces esotericism from a historical perspective, emphasizing the Modern period, from German Romanticism to French Symbolism and Surrealism in particular. Each chapter focuses on various forms of the esoteric: Gnosticism and hermeticism; alchemy, divination and magic; madness and mysticism; and the literature of evil. Recent scholarship on these poets in particular has also neglected esotericism as a fundamental aspect of their vision and aesthetic attitudes. Building upon the work of such critical thinkers as Paz, Bataille, Foucault, and Felman, Nicholson argues that they maintain an ironic and critical stance with regard to the very precepts that inform their work. The tension created by their strong belief in the magical power of language and the acknowledgment that the logos ultimately fails to change the world is emblematic of their modern re-imagining of esotericism.

Twentieth-Century Spanish American Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: Twentieth-Century Spanish American Fiction Carlos J. Alonso Naomi Lindstrom. Twentieth-Century Spanish American Fiction. Austin: U of Texas P, 1994. 246 pp. This book begins with what for all purposes is a commendable project: “to orient readers, especially English-language readers to the principal tendencies, texts, and writers of twentieth-century Spanish American narrative, and to convey why they are held to be so major and significant.” Given the abundance and variety of the literature produced in the Continent during the period encompassed by the study, it is almost too easy to argue that this or that author or work was excluded, or that too much prominence was accorded to a given tendency or movement. Such an evaluation of the book would also leave unexamined all of its major assumptions, which come through clearly even in the short quotation cited above. There is the question of the monograph’s intended audience—“especially English language readers”—but there is also the related issue of the location from which the works and authors featured in the book “are held to be so major and significant.” Presumably the author is referring here to critical appreciations and rankings made by scholars writing within the field of Hispanic literature, as well as to the publishing success achieved by a number of works in their native countries. Hence, the book opens with the assumption of an inside/outside professional and cultural boundary that it will then attempt to bridge. The difficulty is that, in the context of Spanish American literature, these sorts of border determinations are not as clear and unproblematic as the statement would have them be. As a literature produced within a neocolonial circumstance, Spanish American literature has been fashioned from its beginnings in the nineteenth century with an eye fixed on its assumed European and, [End Page 173] later, American audiences. Conversely, more recent phenomena such as the so-called Boom show the distortions created when, in turn, that intended market subtly imposes its own conceptions regarding the specific characteristics of that literature. The fact that “magical realism” is still widely regarded as synonymous with Spanish American literature in American academic circles is perhaps the most obvious manifestation of that skewed perspective. Therefore, one could say that Spanish American literature has been produced within the space delimited by that back-and-forth movement between what its producers believe will play well with a metropolitan audience (and its local surrogate), and the particular image which that audience reflects back to the Spanish American author. Hence, the attempt to offer academic outsiders an account of Spanish American literature—the avowed purpose of Twentieth-Century Spanish American Fiction—is the professional manifestation of a desire that has been an integral part of the literature under scrutiny all along. This is why, for instance, the book takes as its arbitrary point of departure the date of 1900, since the author deems that the putative reader will mostly be interested in twentieth-century prose developments in Spanish America; that is, those works that can in one way or another “explain” the Boom (the reason that reader is probably interested in the subject in the first place). This decision “creates” the book; but it also violently cleaves the subject from its nineteenth-century past. All of this is by way of arguing that to write a book whose express aim is to give nonspecialists in American academia a panoramic view of our object of study can never be the straightforward enterprise that this monograph would propose. Professor Lindstrom is not unaware of some of these issues, as she shows in several passing comments; but had they been allowed to surface fully, the book’s project would have been thoroughly compromised. There is, furthermore, the issue of timing. This book proposes to give a comprehensive sense of our field and its object at the precise time in which both have lost their anchoring categories and ideological underpinnings. This is the reason why there is an inescapably nostalgic tone to Twentieth-Century Spanish American Fiction, even if its author never intended that impression to be conveyed. The account of the progressive building of an expansive edifice of letters...

Twentieth Century Spanish American Fiction

Twentieth Century Spanish American Fiction

Twentieth-Century Spanish American Fiction

Twentieth-Century Spanish American Fiction

Twentieth-Century Spanish American Fiction

Twentieth-Century Spanish American Fiction

Twentieth-century Spanish American fiction

Twentieth-century Spanish American fiction

Twentieth-Century Spanish American Fiction

Introduction One. Twentieth-Century Modernist Prose, 1900-1920 Two. Realism and Naturalism, 1900-1930 Three. Avant-Garde, Imaginative, and Fantastic Modes, 1920-1950 Four. Realism and Beyond, 1930-1960 Five. The Boom and Its Antecedents, 1950-1970 Six. The Postboom: New Voices and Belated Discoveries, 1968-1990 Conclusion Notes Selected Bibliography Index

The Whorehouse and the Whore in Spanish American Fiction of the 1960s

Spanish American fiction, from its earliest moments, has emphasized the whore as a reflection of society and the basic drives of human beings. José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi's protagonists associate with numerous prostitutes, and one of them, Don Catrín de la Fachenda, works in a whorehouse. Other nineteenth century whores include the sentimental one in Eugenio Cambaceres's Música Sentimental (1884) and the idealistic one in Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera's El Conspirador (1892).Twentieth century Spanish American fiction is replete with man-eaters like Gallegos's Doña Bárbara, Rivera's Zoraida, Rojas González's Angustias, and with promiscuous types like the oddly named Pura, the sensual dancer of El Embrujo de Sevilla (1922). The prostitute as protagonist, however, enters the century through Augusto D'Halmar's Juana Lucero (1902) and Federico Gamboa's now classic Santa (1903). A poor, seduced, and abandoned country girl, Santa becomes first a high- and then a low-class prostitute in brothels and bordellos.