Artificial Life in Horacio Quiroga. Commercial Advertisements, Cinema, and the Prompted Suspension of Disbelief

The fictional works of the Uruguayan-Argentinian writer Horacio Quiroga allow for a case study on how media shape the image of artificial life. While “El hombre artificial”, one of his early novellas, follows a nineteenth-century scheme of electromagnetic transmission of consciousness, later texts choose “N-rays” (“El vampiro”) or cinematographic projection (“El espectro”) as grounds for spectral life. This is not, however, the only difference between his early and later fiction. On the one hand, the models of literary invention follow the history of technology and the author’s own passion for science and cinema; on the other hand, they can be related to forms of publication, such as the serialized novellas of the illustrated magazine, and the way illustrations and commercial advertisements pervade literary creation. The approach to artificial life in Quiroga’s work sheds light on his own constitution as an author: behind the making of the artificial being stands the making of the artist

Immersive Media in Quiroga, Borges, and Cortázar: What Allegories Tell about Transportation Experience

In the short stories of Horacio Quiroga, Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, immersive media are frequently staged as allegories of immersion. They are as-sociated with a specific type of plot which is about the access to diegetic worlds or exit from them, and which provides more information about historical contracts on fiction than do the frozen metaphors of being “lost in a text”. Media frames that are represented as fictional frames come with a variety of functions, including not only re-centring, but also disorientation (Quiroga); they refer to existing discourse rather than to existing technology and raise the question how experience can be narrated (Borges); and they tend to cross the line between allegoric representation and intermedial enactment of immersion (Cortázar). The methodological conclusion from this corpus would be to reconsider what fiction says about immersive media. As this would help understand how fictional frames change throughout history, it would also allow discussion of the cultural horizons of interview-based studies on immersive experience

Soledad y Exilio en María Zambrano

A reading of some of María Zambrano's texts written in Spain and in exile reveals a way of thinking about solitude through a series of oxymoronic formulations, from "communicable isolation" to "prophetic solitude". The paradox of the loneliness that is necessary to communicate truth can be read as a theory of literary reception or as a re ection on the social limits of authorship. The two dimensions can be contrasted with earlier and contemporary visions of solitude to highlight Zambrano's own ideas: the attention to the other and the transcendental care that differentiate her from egocentric eulogies or sociological analyses of solitude. The experience of exile is interpreted on the basis of these ideas, not from the author's own biography, but as a tragic exacerbation of this paradox of solitude.A través de una lectura de algunos textos de María Zambrano escritos en España y en el exilio se perfila un pensamiento de la soledad por una serie de formulaciones antitéticas, desde el "aislamiento comunicable" hasta la "soledad profética". La paradoja de la incomunicación necesaria para comunicar la verdad puede ser leída como una teoría de la recepción literaria o como una reflexión sobre los límites sociales de la autoría. Las dos dimensiones se pueden contrastar con visiones de la soledad anteriores y contemporáneas, para poner de relieve lo propio de Zambrano: la atención al otro y el cuidado transcendental que la diferencian de los elogios egocentricos o los análisis sociológicos de la soledad. La experiencia del exilio es interpretada a partir de este pensamiento, no desde la propia biografía de la autora, sino como exacerbación trágica de esta paradoja de la soledad

La promesa de felicidad en Proust y Miró

The works of Marcel Proust and Gabriel Miro have often been compared. The two contemporary authors share aesthetic ideals that are grounded in their common readings of Nineteenth-Century classics. Among those, Stendhal deserves particular attention. His statement about beauty being a «promise of happiness» that changes with the type of happiness expected in different times and places, appears in several parts of À la recherche du temps perdu and El obispo leproso. The narrative use of the aphorism on aesthetics adds new contexts to it: while Proust interprets it in the light of impressionism and under the shadow of moralist anthropology, Miró contrasts the «promise of happiness» with the Christian promise of salvation.A menudo se han comparado las obras de Marcel Proust y de Gabriel Miró. Las afinidades estéticas de los dos autores contemporáneos se pueden entender a partir de sus modelos comunes decimonónicos. Entre ellos, Stendhal ocupa un lugar especial. Su sentencia sobre la belleza como una «promesa de felicidad» que cambia según el tipo de felicidad esperado en diferentes épocas y lugares, aparece en varios pasajes de À la recherche du temps perdu y de El obispo leproso. El uso narrativo del aforismo estético le añade nuevos contextos: mientras que Proust lo interpreta a la luz del impresionismo y a la sombra de la antropología moralista, Miró contrasta la «promesa de felicidad» con la promesa de salvación cristiana

Roma o Cartago : Itinerarios renacentistas por ciudades derrotadas

El presente trabajo hace un recorrido por las imágenes de ruina, derrota y destrucción en la poesía de Garcilaso, la recepción del modelo italiano y las proyecciones en la percepción renacentista del Siglo de Oro español.The present work goes through the images of ruin, defeat and destruction in Garcilaso de la Vega's poetry, the reception of the Italian model, and the projections in the Renaissance perception of Spanish Golden Age.Centro de Estudios de Teoría y Crítica Literari

Introductions to Narratology: Theory, Practice and the Afterlife of Structuralism

This survey seeks to describe the main characteristics, as well as diversity, of extant introductions to narratology: the fact that most of them contain original contributions to scholarship, their special relationship to “soft” structuralism, the shift from “classical” to “postclassical” theory, and the changes that have af-fected academic teaching in the last decade, leading to further differentiation within academia. While some introductions target the student who has to do casual work on narratology, others lead to the heart of disciplinary scholarship, and a third group engages in meta-theoretical discussion that is as interesting for experts as it is for beginners. With its capacity to adapt to various audiences and to an ever more differentiated field of study, the introduction has become an important genre in narratological scholarship

Le centre commercial dans le cinéma d’Argentine et du Chili

Three films from the last twenty-five years, Buenos Aires viceversa (1996), El abrazo partido (2004), and Ilusiones ópticas (2004), use the shopping centre as the setting for a cinematic fiction. The ways they stage this place allows us to draw a dividing line between a tradition of the arcade of European origin, an essentially horizontal space, characterized by passage, and the shopping mall of US origin, which establishes vertical relations epitomized by the device of the escalator. Based on literary texts and critical essays from Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, we show how these films relate the opposition between horizontality and verticality to the representation of society and historical memory. The model of the shopping mall, a place of multicultural sociability that favors a search for one’s origins, looks indeed opposed to the shopping malls, whose globalized and stratified environment becomes the place of a palimpsest of memory, structured by erasures and resurgences of the past.Trois films du dernier quart de siècle, Buenos Aires viceversa (1996), El abrazo partido (2004) et Ilusiones ópticas (2004) mettent en scène le centre commercial comme décor d’une fiction cinématographique. Leur mise en scène permet de tracer une ligne de partage entre une tradition de la galerie marchande d’origine européenne, espace essentiellement horizontal, caractérisé par le passage, et le shopping mall d’origine US, qui établit des relations verticales, concentrées dans le dispositif de l’escalator. En prenant appui sur des textes littéraires et des essais critiques d’Argentine, du Chili et de l’Uruguay, nous nous proposons de montrer comment ces films rapportent l’opposition entre horizontalité et verticalité, notamment dans la représentation de la société et de la mémoire historique. Au modèle de la galerie marchande, lieu d’une sociabilité multiculturelle qui favorise une recherche des origines, s’opposent alors les shopping malls, dont l’environnement globalisé et stratifié devient le lieu d’une mémoire en palimpseste, structuré par des effacements et des résurgences du passé

Sinaloa in der ZEIT.: Computergestützte Analyse von Ereignishaftigkeit und Erzählwürdigkeit in einem Korpus journalistischer Erzählungen

Annotation in CATMA helps measure the eventfulness and tellability of narrative within a given corpus. To analyze the narrations that mention the name of Sinaloa, Mexico, across 25 years’ issues of a German newspaper, DIE ZEIT, I follow the annotation protocol established by Vauth et al. (2021). The protocol yields a numeric index of eventfulness that can be used for the comparison of narrative texts within the corpus. The distribution of event types throughout the texts can also be used in order to represent styles of narration as a graph. In addition to this, plot tellability qua literariness can be quantified through the kind and distribution of transtextual and plot-relevant metapoetic cues. This twofold model of assessing eventfulness and tellability may seem simplistic in comparison to state of the art artificial intelligence research on event narration and plot understanding; however, this is offset by the promising advantages of integrating hermeneutic annotation – as an adequate implementation of human reading habits – with linguistic categories that can be used in machine learning models

El “aura” benjaminiana y los símbolos del Guernica

Picasso’s “Guernica” still is an icon, despite of its countless reproductions which make it an example of what Walter Benjamin calls the loss of aura in modern art. The history of its reception is marked by religious metaphors which bestow a simbolic distinction upon its technical transports. Several narrations about the mural’s deplacement (or the travel towards it) can thus be differenciated from a narrative model which is based on replacement, as it is put forward in Luis de Castresana’s El otro árbol de Guernica, as well as from the franquist discourse, which dwells on the icons’ continuity. Finally, even theft in a movie (El robo más grande jamás contado by Daniel Monzón) and in reality (concerning Richard Serra’s sculpture) can be considered as illegitimate transfers which reveal the dialectics of aura as described by Benjamín.El “Guernica” de Picasso ganó su estatuto de icono, es decir, de objeto aurático, gracias a una reproducción industrial que, de acuerdo con Walter Benjamin, debería quebrar el aura del arte moderno. En la historia de su recepción un sistema de metáforas religiosas cubre precisamente los traslados mecánicos para conferirles una carga simbólica. Los relatos respectivos acerca del desplazamiento del mural (o hacia el mural) se distinguen claramente de un modelo narrativo basado en el reemplazo, como propone El otro árbol de Guernica de Luis de Castresana, y también de un discurso franquista centrado en la continuidad de los iconos. Finalmente, incluso un robo de cine (en la película El robo más grande jamás contado de Daniel Monzón) y un robo real (la escultura desaparecida de Richard Serra) en tanto que traslados ilegítimos, intervienen como para revelar la dialéctica del aura descrita por Benjamin

El texto como máquina: matices de una alegoría

The metaphor that links texts and machines has become a complex and differentiated allegory in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As an introduction to the dossier on literature and technology, the following article traces the various traditions, elements, and functions of this allegory in modern poetics, and more specifically in Spanish and Hispano-american literature.La metáfora que relaciona textos y máquinas se ha convertido en una alegoría compleja y diferenciada en los siglos xx y xxi. A modo de introducción al dossier sobre la literatura y la tecnología, el siguiente artículo traza las diferentes tradiciones, elementos y funciones de la alegoría del “texto como máquina” en la poética moderna, y más concretamente en la literatura española e hispanoamericana