42 research outputs found

    Review of La novela naturalista hispanoamericana, by Manuel Prendes

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    In his study, Prendes undertakes an analysis of the naturalist movement in Spanish America. The introduction sets the literary and socio-historical context for his study by briefly discussing other literary movements in nineteenth-century Spanish America and by commenting on the ways that politics and social thought influenced novelists. Prendes then reviews the extant criticism about naturalism, focusing on criticism published in Spanish, although the bibliography includes references to several critical works written in French and English. He aptly points out that Spanish American naturalist writers have begun to receive more critical attention in the past couple of decades, although he does not connect this to the fairly recent surge of interest in nineteenth-century Latin American literature in general

    MLA Interviews From the Candidiates Point of View

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    This article is based on Lee Skinner\u27s presentation at the 1998 MLA convention in San Francisco, California

    Constructions of Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America

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    It is by now a commonplace that in nineteenth-century Spanish American literature the family serves as a metaphor for the nation and that authors express their political agendas through allegories of courtship and marriage. In such readings, potential love matches symbolize the reconciliation of contesting political or ethnic groups and point toward ways for the newly-formed Spanish American nations to negotiate difference without falling into civil war. Most notably, Doris Sommer\u27s Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America succinctly explains her project-subsequently taken up and adapted by a generation of critics-as one that wishes to locate an erotics of politics, to show how a variety of novel national ideals are all ostensibly grounded in \u27natural\u27 heterosexual love and in the marriages that provided a figure for apparently nonviolent consolidation during internecine conflicts at midcentury (6). At its core Sommer\u27s interpretations of what she identifies as the key novels in nineteenth- century Spanish America are concerned with courtship and the process of arriving-or fu.iling to arrive-at successful matches. Her analysis concentrates on erotic love and the ways by which lovers overcome obstacles to marry and thus consummate the political unions signified by their personal relationships. As she says, Erotic passion was [... an] opportunity (rhetorical and otherwise) to bind together heterodox constituencies: competing regions, economic interests, races, religions (14). Her work focuses, then, on the characters\u27 struggles to lay claim to their love objects and on the resolution of those struggles in matrimony. Foundational Fictions offers a highly convincing analysis of Latin America\u27s national novels and a rubric for further literary criticism that ties together representations of personal and political events

    Review of Building Nineteenth-Century Latin America: Re-Rooted Cultures, Identities, and Nations

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    Recent years have seen the publication of several excellent collections of essays devoted to nineteenth-century Latin American cultural studies. Works such as Beyond Imagined Communities: Reading and Writing the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Latin America, edited by Sara Castro-Klarén and John Charles Chasteen, and special numbers of journals such as Revista Iberoamericana’s issue on cultural change and periodical reading in nineteenth-century Latin America (January–March 2006), to adduce but two examples, have amplified our understanding of the complex ways in which hegemonic and nonhegemonic discourses functioned in the nineteenth century and how the divisions between elite and popular cultures were constructed and deconstructed. This collective scholarly labor has also done much to counteract and supplement the persuasive and powerful, but often totalizing, interpretations proposed by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities and Doris Sommer in Foundational Fictions. Acree and González Espitia’s anthology may now be added to the extant corpus of such volumes. Building Nineteenth-Century Latin America unites essays by historians and literary and cultural critics, all of whom examine different discursive phenomena from within rather than from without. The works have in common their desire to offer insight into movements, groups, and sociocultural manifestations that to date have not been studied from a cultural studies perspective. Thus Patricia Lapolla Swier’s essay on José Martí finds space next to González Espitia’s piece analyzing representations of syphilis in both “high” culture (poetry, fiction) and “low” culture (magazine advertisements). Indeed, the chapters here also share the refusal to privilege one form of discourse over another. It is welcome to find a collection offering essays that vary widely in terms of content, but that also maintain a similar theoretical approach

    Pandora\u27s Log: Charting the Evolving Literary Project of Rosario Ferré

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    In her essay La Cocina de la escritura, published in 1982, Rosario Ferré describes her authorial project, her literary influences and her motivations for writing fiction. As part of this short autobiographical essay, she discusses the moment she embarked upon her career as a writer and the way she selected her initial literary theme

    “Identity, Nation, and Revolution in Latin America.” Review of Feminism and the Legacy of Revolution: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas by Karen Kampwirth, Women, Creole Identity, and Intellectual Life in Early Twentieth-Century Puerto Rico by Magali Roy-Féquière, The Revolution Question: Feminisms in El Salvador, Chile and Cuba by Julie D. Shayne, and My Life as a Colombian Revolutionary: Reflections of a Former Guerrillera by María Eugenia Vásquez Perdomo, trans. Lorena Terando.

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    Women\u27s relationships to the state, to their societies, and to the construction of national discourses continue to provide topics for at-times-heated debates. On the one hand, generalizing about women in such a way as to claim that all women have a particular type of connection to political or social phenomena runs the risk of subsuming certain categories of difference—racial, ethnic, class, sexual—at the same time that it attempts to highlight gender difference. On the other hand, refusing to make any kind of statement about the issues faced by groups of women as they negotiate their relationships with the political movements, countries, and social structures surrounding them also leads to a critical dead end. Four recent books walk this tightrope in varying ways as they address the topic of gender and national construction and discourse

    Carnality in ‘El matadero\u27

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    Esteban Echeverria\u27s short story El matadero is generally acknowledged as a literary masterpiece in miniature. It is widely anthologized and has been called the inaugural work of Argentine short fiction, if not the first Latin American short story. Seymour Menton positions it as the first story in his influential anthology El cuento hispanoamericano and calls it una verdadera obra de arte (34); David William Foster refers to it as the founding text of Argentine fiction (Sexual Textualities 135). Although the story has been popularly and critically acclaimed, it also presents certain problems for its readers. Written by an avowed Romantic, El matadero with its graphic, to some readers even disgusting descriptions of the slaughter of cattle, the scrupulous reproduction of lower-class Buenos Aires speech patterns, and its scathing attacks on the chusma or underclass of Argentina, complete with racial stereotypes, does not seem to fit within the standard critical definitions of Romanticism. But given that Realism is generally considered to have arrived in Latin American literature with the publication of the Chilean Alberto Blest Gana\u27s La aritmetica en el amor in 1860, critics have resisted calling El matadero a Realist story. Indeed, the text even appears to defy generic definitions; while it is usually referred to as a short story, the lengthy description of the slaughterhouse that occupies the first half of the narrative has led some readers to see it as a costumbrista hybrid (Gutierrez, Ghiano).1 In short, El matadero presents its readers with a variety of conceptual puzzles, from literary movement to genre to date of production. Moreover, the content of the story-the brutal and graphic retelling of the slaughter of fifty head of cattle and the torture and death of a young man-· -has also created interpretive difficulties for critics. It is this aspect of the story that I will examine here

    Martyrs of Miscegenation: Racial and National Identities in Nineteenth-Century Mexico

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