A Woman’s Loss of Imagination: Paola Masino’s Magical Realism in Nascita e morte della Massaia

Criticism on Paola Masino has flourished since the early 2000s. This increased attention has contributed towards reclaiming an author often overshadowed by the attention received by her partner, Massimo Bontempelli, the father of realismo magico. Masino experimented with a variety of styles—realismo magico was one of them—as she rejected strictly naturalistic forms of representation, preferring to co-opt myths and the supernatural. Nascita e morte della Massaia (1945) is Masino’s most renowned literary effort, both for its critique of Fascist Italy and for its sophisticated stylistic effects. Nascita, while indebted to Bontempelli’s theorizations, features all the chief characteristics listed in Faris’s analysis of magical realism as an international phenomenon, and illustrates how magical realism offers strategies for evading censorship to those writing against totalitarianism regimes. At the same time, it is an example of how magical realism can be used to denounce socially imposed gender roles. My analysis shows how this narrative mode emerges on multiple levels within Masino’s text

Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization

Lois Parkinson Zamora, in her paper Comparative Literature in an Age of \u27Globalization\u27, presents a definition of globalization and considers how its cultural and spatial displacements have, and might, change traditional disciplinary practices of comparative literature. Zamora discusses how contemporary Latin American writers dramatize and evaluate the forces of globalization in their fiction and she exemplifies her observations with texts by Carpentier, Borges, Paz, Fuentes, Puig, García Márquez, and Vargas Llosa. Further, the author proposes that the cultural specificity of fictions by contemporary Latin American writers may serve as an antidote to current processes of cultural homogenization

Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Cortázar’s Phenomen(ologic)al Fictions

This essay is about Julio Cortázar's literary that concerns shifted notably from his early concern with art and artistic expression to the strong political commitment of his later work. Despite this shift, certain basic ontological questions remained constant, questions that coincide with those of the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty and may be stated generally as follows: how do embodied human beings experience the world, and how do they know and express that experience? For Merleau-Ponty, being is being-in-the-world, for Cortázar, art is the expression of being-in-the-world in the sense that Merleau-Ponty intends