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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Almost The Same, But Not Quite: Re-Orienting The Story Of The Subject In Christina Fernández Cubas's El Año De Gracia , Jessica A. Folkart
Almost The Same, But Not Quite: Re-Orienting The Story Of The Subject In Christina Fernández Cubas's El Año De Gracia , Jessica A. Folkart
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Cristina Fernández Cubas's novel El año de Gracia (1985), about a young Spaniard who is shipwrecked on a deserted island with only a mangy shepherd for company, evokes the political dialectics of self/other found in the European's discovery and conquest of an unknown island in Robinson Crusoe. In Fernández Cubas's literary depiction of the European subject, however, she situates him on the margins of power in order to view the dynamic from a different perspective. The postcolonial theorizations of Edward Said and Homi Bhabha inform this analysis of how Fernández Cubas's castaway is at first overpowered by the other …
(Ef)Facing The Face Of Nationalism: Wrestling Masks In Chicano And Mexican Performance Art , Robert Neustadt
(Ef)Facing The Face Of Nationalism: Wrestling Masks In Chicano And Mexican Performance Art , Robert Neustadt
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Masks serve as particularly effective props in contemporary Mexican and Chicano performance art because of a number of deeply rooted traditions in Mexican culture. This essay explores the mask as code of honor in Mexican culture, and foregrounds the manner in which a number of contemporary Mexican and Chicano artists and performers strategically employ wrestling masks to (ef)face the mask-like image of Mexican or U.S. nationalism. I apply the label "performance artist" broadly, to include musicians and political figures that integrate an exaggerated sense of theatricality into their performances. Following the early work of Roland Barthes, I read performances as …
Hegemony And Identity: The Chicano Hybrid In Francisco X. Alarcón's Snake Poems , George Hartley
Hegemony And Identity: The Chicano Hybrid In Francisco X. Alarcón's Snake Poems , George Hartley
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Snake Poems renegotiates power relations between the discourse of Spanish imperialism and Aztec poetic practice. Alarcón's extended poem enacts a process of ethnic, cultural, and spiritual identification through a confrontation between texts—Alarcón's original poems, passages of commentary from the Spanish Inquisitor Hernando Ruíz de Alarcón's treatise on Aztec spells and invocations, and the Aztec spells themselves in the original Náhuatl, the Aztec language. Each of these three layers of text represents a unique and competing people, ideology, and culture, and it is the clash and the hybrid fusion of these distinct discourses that Alarcón the poet stages in Snake Poems …
Maria Vargas Llosa's El Hablador As A Discourse Of Conquest , José Castro Urioste
Maria Vargas Llosa's El Hablador As A Discourse Of Conquest , José Castro Urioste
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
In this article I study how Mario Vargas Llosa's El hablador proposes to deconstruct indigenist narrative and promotes the assimilation of Indian cultures under the model of modernity. In this sense, the novel El hablador is written as a discourse of conquest in which the construction of the self—through the evocation of various oppositions—represents an allegory of modern nation. I begin my article with the analysis of the notion of discourse of conquest, as well as one of its most reiterated images of power, the "civilization-barbarism" dichotomy. I follow this with an analysis of the oppositions through which the representation …
Between L'Irréparable And L'Irrepérable: Subject To The Past, Downing Thomas, Steven Ungar
Between L'Irréparable And L'Irrepérable: Subject To The Past, Downing Thomas, Steven Ungar
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
This issue of STCL grew from papers presented at a conference, "Memory in Context: Occupation and Empire in France and the Francophone World," held at the University of Iowa in April, 1996...
Augusto Roa Bastos's Trilogy As Postmodern Practice, Helene C. Weldt-Basson
Augusto Roa Bastos's Trilogy As Postmodern Practice, Helene C. Weldt-Basson
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Augusto Roa Bastos's most recent novel, El fiscal (1993), completes the author's trilogy on the "monotheism of power," which the novel constitutes in conjunction with the prior works Hijo de hombre (1960) and Yo el Supremo (1974). These novels form a larger whole by virtue of the way in which they attempt to define Paraguay's identity through the nation's history. Hijo de hombre focuses on both the Chaco War and a series of Paraguayan civil wars; Yo el Supremo concentrates on the nineteenth-century dictatorship of Dr. José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia; and El fiscal presents both Alfredo Stroessner's dictatorship (1954-1989) …
Usurping Difference In The Feminine Fantastic From The Riverplate, María B. Clark
Usurping Difference In The Feminine Fantastic From The Riverplate, María B. Clark
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
This study intended to define the concept of a feminine fantastic as a narrative mode in contemporary short fiction by women writers from Argentina and Uruguay. As a point of departure, the study examined the narrative techniques and conventions of the fantastic and their strategic use for the expression of feminine concerns. The concept of the feminine was used in the sense of referring to an interpretation of femininity as a construct of language rather than an essentially feminine narrative mode based on a biological gender division. An overview of fantastic short stories by women writers from Argentina and Uruguay …
Power, Gender, And Canon Formation In Mexico, Cynthia Steele
Power, Gender, And Canon Formation In Mexico, Cynthia Steele
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
I propose to analyze Castellanos's trajectory from marginalized ethnographer and critic of "latino" society, to presidential insider and ambassador, and the first modern Mexican woman writer to be accepted into the literary canon. I will explore the intersection of politics, gender, and the (self-) creation of a literary persona with regard to the following issues: 1) the tension between self-exposure and self-censorship in Castellanos's literary work; 2) Castellanos's intense and problematic relationship with her illegitimate, mestizo half-brother; 3) the coincidences and contradictions between Castellanos's journalistic account of her relationship with her servant Maria Escandon, and Maria's own oral history twenty …
Spanish American Women Writers: Simmering Identity Over A Low Fire, Ksenija Bilbija
Spanish American Women Writers: Simmering Identity Over A Low Fire, Ksenija Bilbija
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
After establishing the parallel between the kitchen and the alchemist's laboratory, this article shows that traditionally, the kitchen has come to symbolize the space associated with the marginalization of women. However, the recent explosion of the novels dedicated to the resemantization and reevaluation of the realm of the kitchen is the best evidence that it is also a space from which much creativity emanates. A close reading of two such cookbook/novels, Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel and Like Potatoes for Varenike by Sylvia Plager, points toward a quite parodic and critical gender perspective. Furthermore, it calls for a …
Dramatic Strategies Made Clear: The Feminist Politics In Griselda Gambaro's Puesta En Claro, Sandra Cypess
Dramatic Strategies Made Clear: The Feminist Politics In Griselda Gambaro's Puesta En Claro, Sandra Cypess
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
In this essay I explore the feminist aspects of Puesta en claro, written in 1974, when Griselda Gambaro was not yet considered a writer who paid attention to feminine issues. Yet to the extent that Gambaro always focuses on the constellation of problems relating to power relations, she is including feminine and feminist issues in her text, and continues a tradition many critics relate to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, as I shall argue in my conclusion. Seen within the trajectory of Gambaro's dramaturgy, Puesta en claro, as a play from the 1970s is also remarkable in …
Twentieth-Century Latin American Literary Studies And Cultural Autonomy, Naomi Lindstrom
Twentieth-Century Latin American Literary Studies And Cultural Autonomy, Naomi Lindstrom
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Since the 1920s, when scholars first began to specialize in Latin American writing, the subject of Latin American literary studies has grown from a small subset of Spanish and Portuguese literary research and teaching to become the largest field within Hispanism and a significant presence in comparative literature. The expansion of their place in the academic world has often prompted students of Latin American literature to wonder whether, in being swept into the mainstream, their field has not left out of account the historical situations of Latin American nations. These reflections lead critics back to a problem that has troubled …
Althusserian Theory: From Scientific Truth To Institutional History, Philip Goldstein
Althusserian Theory: From Scientific Truth To Institutional History, Philip Goldstein
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Scholars have emphasized the scientific and the rationalist features of Althusser's work, but few have noted its post-structuralist aspects, especially its Foucauldian accounts of discourse and power. In the early Pour Marx, Althusser divides ideological practices from objective science and theoretical norms from empirical facts; however, in several later essays Althusser repudiates his earlier faith in theory's normative force as well as his broad distinction between science and ideology. He argues that every discipline establishes its own relationship between its ideological history and its formal, scientific ideals. This argument, together with Althusser's earlier rejection of totalizing approaches, establishes important …
What's In A Name: Elective Genealogy In Schwarz-Bart's Early Novels, Clarisse Zimra
What's In A Name: Elective Genealogy In Schwarz-Bart's Early Novels, Clarisse Zimra
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
This essay considers the question of the textual inscription of history in Solitude, Plat de porc and Télumée, by focusing on a narrative feature present in all three: the naming scene, wherein characters claim elective descent from a real historical figure, the pregnant mulatto woman, Solitude, captured and executed after the battle of Matouba in 1802 on Guadeloupe. Every Schwarz-Bart novel to date contains at least one scene, often several, staging this retelling of specifically Guadeloupean origins: the resistance to the reinstatement of slavery, and the ensuing tragedy on Matouba. In Un Plat de porc aux bananes vertes (1967), …
The Feminization Of Female Figures In Spanish Women's Poetry Of The 1980s, Sharon Keefe Ugalde
The Feminization Of Female Figures In Spanish Women's Poetry Of The 1980s, Sharon Keefe Ugalde
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
The paper examines how women poets appropriate and transform man-made biblical and literary figures—Eve, Lot's wife, and Ophelia—in order to express female meaning. Poetry by women published since the democratization of Spain in the late 1970s serves as the basis of the study. Three strategies of feminization stand out. Enhancement reflects the predicament of poets living roles imposed by male denomination, but sensing the presence of a silenced, imprisoned self. Subversion is aimed at dismantling patriarchally defined reality, and revision corresponds to the constructive task of self-discovery. Poets, for example, embrace Ophelia, recognizing that their desperation (like hers) is rooted …