Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature Commons^™

Ethnos Meets Eros On The River Plate: Marcelo Birmajer, Sylvia Molloy, Anna Kazumi Stahl , Edna Aizenberg

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article deals with three contemporary novelists, Marcelo Birmajer, Anna Kazumi Stahl and Sylvia Molly in the context of a new understanding of ethnicity, sexuality and literature in Argentina. In contrast to previous eras when writing reflected a melting pot philosophy which saw Eros as a means of fusing ethnicities and eliminating particularities, today's fiction often celebrates these differences, uncovering layers of secrecy and demanding a place for various languages, sexualities and geographies.

Parodie Musings On Futurism And Amore In Oliverio Girondo's Espantapájaros (Al Alcance De Todos). , Patricia Montilla

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The Argentine poet Oliverio Girondo (1891-1967) was one of the leading figures of the Spanish American avant-garde. Appearing in 1932 approximately two decades after the rise of Futurism, Girondo's third collection of poetry, Espantapájaros (al alcance de todos), mocks the already clichéd literary conventions promulgated by the avant-garde. Many of the book's poems parody the principles outlined in the founding "Manifesto of Futurism" (1909) and in F. T. Marinetti's subsequent writings.

This study closely examines the poems in Espantapájaros that play on Futurism's assault on amore and sentimentality, its scorn for woman, its promotion of sex as a sole …

Where Am I? Who Am I? The Problem Of Location And Recognition In Helena Parente Cunha's Woman Between Mirrors , Joanne Gass

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Helena Parente Cunha's novel, Woman Between Mirrors explores the many ways in which a dominant and domineering patriarchy can and does impose itself upon its subjects through what Louis Althusser calls interpellation. Parente Cunha's woman, a true twentieth-century heroine, faces her divided self—a self determined by ideology—and begins a quest which will end when she becomes an "I" before her shattered mirrors. But before that can happen, she must author herself, and, in the process of writing herself, she must overcome the demons of location and recognition. In the material sense, the woman must locate herself geographically, historically, socially, and …

A Clear-Sighted Witness: Trauma And Memory In Maryse Condé'S Desirada, Dawn Fulton

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Maryse Condé's 1997 novel recounts a young Guadeloupean woman's frustrating search for the identity of her father. Because the information she seeks is initially guarded by her mother and later contradicted by friends and family, this heroine confronts an epistemological impasse, a potentially traumatic event to which she will never have direct access. Informed by Toni Morrison's reflections on memory and invention and by recent studies in trauma theory, this essay examines the ways in which Condé negotiates this impasse in her novel, creating a narrative field of knowledge that allows for its own lacunae and maintains multiple registers of …

Women, Subalternity, And The Historical Novel Of María Rosa Lojo , Kathryn Lehman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

María Rosa Lojo (1954) has received critical recognition as a poet, short-story writer, and novelist. Her poetic work Visiones (1984) and Forma oculta del mundo (1991), first book of short-stories Marginales (1986), and two novels Canción perdida en Buenos Aires al Oeste (1987) and La pasión de los nómades (1994), have received prestigious awards. Lojo's most recent work, informed and inspired by archival sources, has been acclaimed by both critics and the general public for having radically altered the established representation of canonical historical figures. The novels La princesa federal (1998), and Una mujer de fin de siglo (1999), and …

Modernity, Postmodernity, And Transgression In Sábato's Esthetics: Poetic Dissemination, Defeat Of Utopias, Returning Bodies , María Rosa Lojo

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

After defining the problematic term "Postmodernity" and its possible application to Latin America, the position of Ernesto Sábato as an essayist and narrator is discussed in light of Modernity (questioned by him as the rationalist and enlightened canon, but applauded as romantic and surrealistic rebellion), and Postmodernity with which it connects from diverse axis: the poetic of desire and that of transgression (vanguard movements related to Foucault, Bataille and Derrida), the theory of reality as "fragment" and "simulacrum" and the suppression of oppositions in the paroxysm of "symbolic exchange." Sábato would transcend from the central proposition of his writing, the …