Una Casa Research Articles

The Criticism is Coming from Inside the Casa: Sor Juana’s Colonial Critique

The debates surrounding Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s fictional work have frequently centered on her use of autobiographical details to inform her characterizations and plots. In Los empeños de una casa, Sor Juana incorporates not only her personal details but also her deep connections to Mexico as a colonized state, to an extent not yet fully explored by scholars. Thus, she breaks the rules of her peninsular counterparts, and subsequently critiques Spain as an imperial power under the guise of a simple comedia de capa y espada. Although the gracioso servant, Castaño, has always been obviously a colonial figure, there are arguments that two more of the protagonists have New World roots. As the play progresses, we find they can overcome the machinations of their peninsular foils at least in part due to their outsider status, ultimately demonstrating a kinder, gentler form of living and loving. Given the play’s original intended audience of religious and secular powers, this demonstrates not only Sor Juana’s subtle genius, but her ability to fly under the radar of her potential censors, ultimately foreshadowing the issues that would arise as Spain’s reach grew into an uncontrollably large empire, destined to fail.

Beatriz Allende: A Revolutionary Life in Cold War Latin America

Beatriz Allende: A Revolutionary Life in Cold War Latin America

Academics in Practice: Moving Beyond Appreciation

Abstract: In this short article, a professor and her student reflect on an ongoing project that brings them into close contact with theatrical adaptations. They discuss the ups and downs of working closely with Sor Juana’s Los empeños de una casa and Mexican actor Fernando Villa Proal of EFE TRES Teatro throughout the pandemic that started in early 2020 and has extended long into 2021. The piece also includes interview materials from theater practitioners who are interested in the overlap between theater and research. These are just some of the conclusions and suggestions that they have arrived at throughout this process, with an aim to bring academic and artistic practices into closer alignment.

Accounting for Black Insurgencies in Los empeños de una casa by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Abstract: I examine the first performance of Los empeños de una casa in the context of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's experiences with finance and investment, arguing the centrality of the enslaved Juana de San José to her namesake's engagement with concepts of debt, worth, and price. I analyze these entanglements by considering economic historians' discussions of accounting's role in the formation of capitalism as a political economy. I then read the Sarao of Empeños as an accounting abstraction that includes Black voices of New Spain via Sor Juana's reckoning with marronage along silver routes; these were salient to the site of the first performance: the house of Fernando de Deza, the factor for the Spanish crown in New Spain. I thus explore the abstraction of Blackness in the Sarao , which, I contend, is like the fetishization and erasure performed by double-entry bookkeeping vis à vis commodities.

Contributors

Contributors

El uso expresivo de los posesivos en tres dialectos venezolanos.

In this research, I analyze five use of the first-person singular possessive, typical of Spanish spoken in Venezuela: alternation in nominal context (mi casa ~ la casa mía), alternation in adverbial context (delante de mí ~ mío), alternation in verbal context (se burla de mí~mío, una casa hecha mía ~ por mí), redundant possessive (mi casa mía) and ponderative possessive (me compró mi casa). I study the cases in the dialects of three cities (Caracas, Maracaibo, Mérida) and I present the results in two parts; in the first, I statistically analyze the possessive in nominal context (mixed effects and conditional trees) to determine if the forms are conditioned by linguistic and social factors; in the second, I describe the other cases –less abundant in the sample– to specify their occurrence and establish the expressive character of their pragmatic use. The results show that: i. the semantic relationships of social coexistence and self-realization, the attribute function, and low-level adult speakers favor the use of the postnominal stressed forms; ii. in contrast, emphatic possessives (postadverbial, appreciative, ponderative, and redundant) are more common in young Caracas speakers and their use constitutes an effective strategy to give expressive enhancement to the statement.

‘Heterowingka patriarcado del salario’ en Desde el fogón de una casa de putas williche (2010) de Graciela Huinao. Una intersección de género, etnia, clase y raza

The aim of this article is to analyze Graciela Huinao’s novel Desde el fogon de una casa de putas williche (2010) from an intersectional prism of gender, class, ethnicity and race. In this work a mapuche brothel is presented in a border territory between the wingka and the mapuche world, in this space the women are in charge of the administration, generating a place of relative autonomy in the middle of the state and wingka violence that meant the occupation of their territories. Our hypothesis of reading is that this work can be read in the context of a patriarchal junction, between the Mapuche patriarchy and the wingka. The junction consolidates, through violence a ‘heterowingka patriarchy of salary’, against which, the brothel is established as a space for opposition and subversion that disjoint the wingka and mapuche patriarchal logic.

Inverted Home Architectures: Rewriting The Haunted House

The haunted house is a very popular topic in the horror genre that seems inextricably related to the Anglo-Saxon Gothic tradition. However, taking into account the abundant and successful recreations of this type of uncanny space in English cultural products, it is not an unfamiliar subject in our literatures in Spanish either. Indeed, in the last decades, thanks to a considerable group of women writers, it is experiencing a narrative peak that, so far, has not attracted much critical attention. This article aims to analyse precisely this phenomenon considering its general features as an «inverted home architecture», and exploring in depth its literary manifestation through the examination of three representative short stories: «Una noche de invierno es una casa» (2006) by Cecilia Eudave, «Habitante» (2008) by Patricia Esteban Erles, «La casa de Adela» (2016) by Mariana Enriquez.

Sor Juana Unveils Calderón’s Feminism as Leonor (Los empeños de una casa) Refashions Laura (El secreto a voces)

ABSTRACT This article investigates the resonances between the heroines Laura of Calderón’s comedia El secreto a voces (1642) and Leonor of Sor Juana’s Los empeños de una casa (1683). After first outlining the archetype of the dama tramoyera (the title bestowed on heroines of Golden Age comedias de capa y espada) and a key figure in Calderón’s approach to comedy, I go on to trace the tactics and temperament of Laura, a late Calderonian version of the archetype, who is also a precursor of Sor Juana’s heroine, Leonor, owing to her cerebral mask of modesty. The ability of Laura and Leonor to appear self-effacing when confronting intrusive authorities shields an underlying individualist stance. While Calderón’s approach is grounded on his commitment to a woman’s right to free will and equal humanity, Sor Juana extends this to education and free thought. Sor Juana’s response to the Spanish dramatist confirms Calderón’s ability to bring to light the increasingly outmoded position of women in his society while indicating her own political agenda, implicit in her enhanced version of a comic heroine crafted in the New World.

El capitalismo como pesadilla: Una comparación entre la novela La Casa de los Náufragos (Boarding Home) de Guillermo Rosales y el documental Balseros de Carles Bosch y Josep Maria Domènech

Este ensayo es un empeño comparatista entre la novela cubanomiamense La casa de los náufragos (Boarding Home) de Guillermo Rosales y el documental catalán Balserosde Carles Bosch y Josep Maria Domènech, utilizándose textos críticos sobre (o relacionados con) ambas obras. Se busca principalmente observar como, a pesar de los géneros creativos y momentos históricos distintos, se puede hacer une lectura de Balserosy La casa de los náufragos (Boarding Home) como críticas contiguas al sistema capitalista y sus promesas desde una perspectiva proveniente de exiliados cubanos. En gran parte, los protagonistas ficcionales (pero que reflejan la vida del autor) y documentales no terminan de ingresar en la clase media de EE.UU., sino que acaban marginados en albergues con ánimo de lucro, centros ultrarreligiosos, barrios precarios, o sobreviviendo por medio del bajo comercio de drogas. Se utilizan aquí tres reportajes para Televisió de Catalunya hechos entre 1994 y 1996, los cuales dieron origen al documental de 2002. También se consideran las letras de las canciones interpretadas por Lucrecia para la banda sonora de Balseros, como en el caso de “Un carro, una casa, una buena mujer”, la cual no se canta integralmente en la película, pero sí en discos musicales.

Staging the Spanish Golden Age: Translation and Performance by Kathleen Jeffs

Reviewed by: Staging the Spanish Golden Age: Translation and Performance by Kathleen Jeffs Christopher C. Oechler Kathleen Jeffs. Staging the Spanish Golden Age: Translation and Performance. oxford up, 2018. 252 pp. this interdisciplinary monograph combines the author's firsthand experience in comedia performance with the literary analysis of a theater scholar, and the resulting study enriches the ongoing conversation about comedia performance for English-speaking audiences. Kathleen Jeffs nods to recent scholarship by Catherine Boyle and David Johnston, Susan L. Fischer, Susan Paun de García and Donald R. Larson, and Duncan Wheeler, among others, while providing her own insightful contribution to this growing field. Jeffs leverages her work as translator and script consultant during the Royal Shakespeare Company's (hereafter, RSC) 2004–05 Spanish season to offer a behind-the-scenes view of the productions and, compellingly, to propose "a model for the successful collaboration between scholars and practitioners engaged in the ever-evolving process of bringing translated drama to the stage" (10). To frame her discussion of the RSC's season as a specific case study, Jeffs draws from translation and performance studies while working through the lens of participant observation and focusing on the "roles and responsibilities of the consultants and collaborators" (6). Her analysis of the processes that contribute to the final productions builds on studies of versification, characterization, and metatheater in the comedia. As she notes, her project seeks to elucidate and propose viable solutions to the complications that arise when traditional scholarship, understood as textual analysis, is cast into a supporting role in comedia performance. Jeffs divides her study into an introduction and six chapters supported by five appendices, a well-researched bibliography, and an index that is helpful for those interested in a specific work. The plays that receive the most attention, notably because of Jeffs's close participation in their preparatory phases, are Lope de Vega's El perro del hortelano, translated by David Johnston as The Dog in the Manger and directed by Laurence Boswell, and Cervantes's Pedro de Urdemalas, translated by Philip Osment as Pedro, the Great Pretender and directed by Mike Alfreds. Jeffs also considers James Fenton's translation of Tirso de Molina's La venganza [End Page 287] de Tamar (Tamar's Revenge, directed by Simon Usher), Catherine Boyle's translation of Sor Juana's Los empeños de una casa (House of Desires, directed by Nancy Meckler), and Sarah Woods's translation of Calderón's La hija del aire (Daughter of the Air, radio play). In chapter 1, Jeffs contextualizes the comedia within its historical time and space as well as in academic discussions today. Special attention is paid to the plays that were performed during the RSC season and their authors. Jeffs addresses contemporary scholarship's move from purely textual exegesis to considerations of performance, which leads into a discussion of the cooperation between academic consultants and theater practitioners in the play-selection process. This section provides a fascinating view into how such interaction developed during the RSC season with lengthy citations from email correspondence between the academic consultants and Laurence Boswell, the Spanish season's artistic director charged with selecting the plays. Jeffs describes and reflects on the steps involved in this process, namely, establishing a set of criteria, proposing different works, and selecting the final five plays. As Jeffs indicates, this model can serve future collaborations working to bring the comedia to the stage. Chapter 2 describes the ways in which the Spanish play text moves onto the English-speaking stage. Anchoring her discussion in translation theory, Jeffs describes the RSC's process of using literal translations to form and inform the final performance script, following the RSC's artistic director Michael Boyd's charge "to give the audiences translations, not adaptations" (1). In the case of The Dog in the Manger, Jeffs emphasizes her role as a script consultant who aided Boswell in working Johnson's literal translation into the final performance text. Jeffs provides useful charts of this process in the form of side by side comparisons of the original, the literal translation, and the rehearsal draft within the text of the chapter and in the first two appendices. Jeffs...

The Golden Age of Spanish Drama ed. by Barbara Fuchs

Reviewed by: The Golden Age of Spanish Drama ed. by Barbara Fuchs Barbara Mujica Barbara Fuchs, editor. The Golden Age of Spanish Drama. Translated by G. J. Racz. w. vv. norton, 2018. 640 pp. programs in comparative literature and interdisciplinary studies increasingly call for readings in translation, yet few English-language anthologies of early modern Spanish theater are available. The Golden Age of Spanish Drama fills a need by providing not only a selection of plays by early modern Spanish dramatists, but also background material and criticism suitable both for the classroom and a general Anglophone audience. The volume consists of three parts: the texts of five Golden Age plays, a collection of writings on theater and culture by early modern thinkers, and fourteen essays by modern comedia scholars. In addition, the substantial introduction by Barbara Fuchs provides an overview of Golden Age Spain and the development of Spanish theater, including the rise of the corrales and the growth of new theater companies in Spain's major cities. Drawing on Melveena McKendrick's study of the corral, Fuchs examines the popular roots of Spanish drama, which remained strong even after court theaters and permanent locales began to incorporate sophisticated scenography using stage devices. Of particular interest is the discussion of the growth of theater companies, with their specialized personnel (managers, actors focusing on particular types of roles, and musicians) and the regulations that governed them. The centrality of female actors and the relationship between the growth of cities and the expansion of theater are also important topics. The introduction and critical essays reflect the current focus in comedia studies on performance. As Fuchs explains, although our principal access to early modern theater is through printed texts, today's scholars are mining historical documents for information on props, scenery, costumes, audience composition, and other information relevant to how plays were actually mounted and received. At the same time, they are exploring modern adaptations of the comedia and its relevance for today's audiences. One of the finest aspects of this anthology is the translations. Part l,"The Texts of the Plays," contains five plays: The Siege of Numantia (Numancia), by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra; Fuenteovejuna and The Dog in the Manger [End Page 273] (El perro del hortelano), by Lope de Vega; Life Is a Dream (La vida es sueño), by Pedro Calderón de la Barca; and Trials of a Noble House (Los empeños de una casa), by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Because the translations are all by the same translator, they offer a welcome uniformity of style and vision. Racz explains in his Translator's Note that he has employed meter and rhyme "to convey a greater sense of the constitutive poetic structures" of the plays, thereby restoring their "lost historicity" (xix). In order to achieve a balance between context and textual features (verse, style, tone, and so forth), he has eschewed word-for-word translations and instead provided fluid renditions, employing strategic deletions, explanatory insertions, changes in tense, and other such devices whenever necessary. Happily, he has succeeded in capturing the sense of the texts while retaining their poetic integrity. Part 2, "Backgrounds and Contexts," contains writing by Golden Age luminaries on theater and society. This part is divided into three sections. The first, "Theater New and Old," begins with Lope de Vega's much anthologized "Arte nuevo de hacer comedias" ("The New Art of Writing Plays"), which distills the playwright's views on the form and objectives of the comedia, types of roles, uses of verse, and other issues. In "Writing for the Theater," Cervantes's prologue to his published plays and entremeses, the playwright describes the evolution of theater from his youth, when "there were no stage machines, nor fights between Moors and Christians, on foot or on horseback" (387), to the elaborate productions of his older years. Cervantes had tried his hand at playwriting as a young man and returned to it after he had won acclaim as a novelist, only to realize that tastes had changed and that theater managers were not interested in his scripts. Agustín de Rojas Villandrando's long poem, El viaje entretenido (The Pleasant...

El estudio arquitectónico “lapanadería” (2003-2013) desde la filosofía de Gilles Deleuze y Félix Guattari

Between 2003 and 2013 the architectural studio lapanadería [“thebakery”] developed an important line of research and practice around a proposal for incremental housing in which it is possible to identify three consecutive levels: the more-or-less house, such thing as a more-or-less neighbourhood and a web platform for collective processes of housing called Más que una casa [“more than a house”]. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s aesthetic-political theories, especially The Three Ecologies (1989) of the latter, will enable a critical analysis of each level and a global exegesis of the initiative.

El secreto, esencia de la comedia lopesca-calderoniana, y su intensificación en Sor Juana

Secrets, the essence of drama as a genre since its classical origins, characterize Medieval popular theatre and tipify Lope's comedia which Calderon perfects. Reworking their theatrical heritage, Sor Juana carries this genre beyond the horizon of expectation, as she intensifies the techniques that generate the complication of secrets from the first act of both of her comedies, Los empenos de una casa («Pawns of a House») and Amor es mas laberinto («Love is a Greater Labyrinth»).

Teatro breve, regalo de Sor Juana a los años de los condes de Galve

De entre la vasta producción para la escena de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, las loas cortesanas de su teatro breve han sido las menos estudiadas, a excepción, quizá, de la loa a la comedia Los empeños de una casa y la atribuida a Amor es más laberinto. En el presente trabajo se revisan dos de estas loas, las compuestas para los cumpleaños del virrey conde de Galve y de su esposa Elvira de Toledo. Me permito integrar información sobre las loas que se encuentra dispersa en varios textos, hacer algunas observaciones sobre la edición de estas loas en la Obra completa de Sor Juana a cargo de Alfonso Méndez Plancarte y Alberto G. Salceda, y anotar ciertas particularidades de su representación teatral.

Atrapados sin salida: de nuevo con Sor Juana en Los empeños de una casa

Es tal la seducción de Los empeños de una casa de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, que una vez más volvemos a la lectura del texto y queremos saber más acerca de su primera representación. ¿Cuándo y cómo sería ésta? Las referencias al contexto histórico mencionadas en la comedia dieron pie a que se propusiera una fecha de representación; lo mismo su alusión en la propia obra a autores y personajes de otras comedias, que dio lugar a una fecha distinta. ¿Se ha resuelto lo relativo a la primera vez que se representó la comedia? Y debido a su larga extensión, ¿se representaría completa la primera vez que se llevó a cabo? Las piezas menores que acompañan a las tres jornadas de la comedia –una loa, tres canciones, dos sainetes y un sarao– ofrecen claves para situar la comedia en el contexto de la cartelera teatral de la época. Si bien no se resuelve plenamente lo relativo a la fecha de representación de la comedia, sí resulta clara su relación con otras dos comedias novohispanas puestas en escena en años cercanos. El tríptico teatral tiene en el centro Los empeños de una casa, y sus piezas menores son imprescindibles en el conjunto del festejo, espectacular y barroco.

The Heritage of Displacement: Forced Migration in the Mediterranean through History

The Heritage of Displacement: Forced Migration in the Mediterranean through History

Imitation and Adaptation: A Meeting of Minds

The focus of this collaborative paper is a form of creative collaboration: translations and adaptations across distinct historical periods and cultural contexts. The paper draws upon Edward H. Friedman's experience as an adaptor and translator, and both participants' research and scholarly work. The paper focuses on the choices made by adaptors in considering the time, place and contexts of the original while bearing in mind the exigencies and the sensibilities of the present. There is no doubt that the practice of imitatio in the Early Modern period and current practices of spin-offs and remakes differ significantly; however, this project reflects upon what Early Modernists can learn from the contemporary adaptations and stagings of the texts we study and teach. This question was central to Emilie Bergmann’s recent cross-cultural seminar on Renaissance and Baroque imitatio and centuries of translations and adaptations into French prose and theatre (Lesage and Molière) and Italian opera (Don Giovanni) in the eighteenth century, and recent English and Spanish spin-offs. The participants' specific focus is on Friedman's own adaptations of Lope de Vega's La dama boba, Unamuno's Niebla and Cervantes' Don Quijote and El laberinto de amor, in dialogue with other recent adaptations of Spanish comedia: the Royal Shakespeare Company's version of Sor Juana's Los empeños de una casa, Octavio Solís' Dreamlandia and Man of the Flesh (versions, respectively, of La vida es sueño and El burlador de Sevilla).

Una casa entre-pinos de Francisco Sáenz de Oíza: trabajar con el entorno

The study of the invited pavilion to the house of Juan Huarte in Formentor by the architect Francisco Sáenz de Oíza in 1968, through his drawings during your stay in Mallorca, discovers a way of addressing the addition of buildings. The project is approached from the analysis of the environment, including the two existing pavilions, designed by Carvajal y García de Paredes architects, to work with parties and the idea of addition and juxtaposition to solve the all. The proposal to work with parts ( fragments) allows him to make an inventory of stocks and naming them to take value improving the final solution. This architectural project is not more than the interlocking of all these parts on a " board" that is own, the topography and environment as Sáenz de Oíza demonstrates us enriching existences and qualifying them. Analyzing this pavilion gives us insight into the personality of Sáenz de Oíza and his approach to the architectural project, its development, and the role that architecture takes in relation to its surroundings and aspirations of the user.

‘Io non so se questi miei poveri appunti […] cadranno mai sotto gli occhi di qualcuno’: Fictional Diaries in Nineteenth-Century Italian Women’s Writing

This article examines the literary form of the fictional diary in Italian women’s writing from the nineteenth century, focusing especially on the post-Unification period. Following an introduction to the fictional diary, which outlines historical and social considerations pertaining to the situation of Italian women in the Ottocento, touching also upon questions of genre, the article analyses the presence and functions of the fictional diary in two works: Ida Baccini’s Il romanzo d’una maestra (1901) and Tommasina Guidi’s Ho una casa mia! Ricordi di una giovane sposa (1879). The readings of these two texts demonstrate that the fictional diary has an invaluable contribution to make to our understanding of nineteenth-century Italian women’s writing, thanks to its thematic and formal points of convergence with other genres (most notably, with the novel and conduct literature). In particular, the hybrid genre of the fictional diary reveals the extent to which even ‘creative’ forms of writing may be coloured by an underlying prescriptive agenda.