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Articles 1 - 8 of 8
Full-Text Articles in Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature
Bellmer's Argentine Doll: Alejandra Pizarnik And The Dis¬Articulation Of The Self , Melanie Nicholson
Bellmer's Argentine Doll: Alejandra Pizarnik And The Dis¬Articulation Of The Self , Melanie Nicholson
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
This essay argues that Alejandra Pizarnik (Buenos Aires, 1936-72), widely recognized as one of the most important figures of twentieth-century Spanish-American poetry, constructs a poetic self that bears a remarkable resemblance to the dolls of German surrealist sculptor and photographer Hans Bellmer. Both poet and artist portray the doll as a passive and melancholy figure, an object that is often dismembered and otherwise stripped of agency. I examine the distinct implications of such a figure for a male surrealist photographer and a female post-surrealist writer. By means of this comparison—admittedly complicated by vast differences in artistic medium and historical context—I …
Texts Of Light And Shadow: Dickens And Lautréamont In Alejandra Pizarnik's Sombra Poems , Beth Zeiss
Texts Of Light And Shadow: Dickens And Lautréamont In Alejandra Pizarnik's Sombra Poems , Beth Zeiss
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
In her poetry, the Argentinean Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-72) persistently explores the transformations that the poetic subject undergoes in language. She articulates a cycle wherein the subject's desire to (re)create herself as a presence in language is followed by the desire for death, the absence of the self, when her desire becomes frustrated by language's inadequacies. As yet, the importance of the theme of the fluctuating self in language as developed by Pizarnik in a series of poems protagonized by Sombra, has not been analyzed. The character Sombra appears in six fragment-like poems published posthumously in Textos de Sombra (1982) and …
The Integration Of A Fragmented Self In The Works Of Angelina Muñiz-Huberman, Malva E. Filer
The Integration Of A Fragmented Self In The Works Of Angelina Muñiz-Huberman, Malva E. Filer
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Literary creation is always a transposition of individual and collective experiences…
The Construction Of History In The Folds Of Family History In The Novel Song Lost In West Buenos Aires By María Rosa Lojo, Zulema Moret
The Construction Of History In The Folds Of Family History In The Novel Song Lost In West Buenos Aires By María Rosa Lojo, Zulema Moret
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
The novels written by María Rosa Lojo strongly reflect a specific preoccupation with the rewriting of history from new perspectives that are related to so-called postmodernism. This is the case with Canción perdida en Buenos Aires al Oeste (1987). This work attempts to articulate a reading of the "private" at a crossroads with the history of the country and of other countries (Argentina/Spain). It is a novel of exiles, from the exile of the Neira family from the Franco dictatorship in the forties to the particular exiles of each family member during the seventies and eighties in Argentina. From the …
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 …
The Genesis Of La Desesperanza By José Donoso , Mary Lusky Friedman
The Genesis Of La Desesperanza By José Donoso , Mary Lusky Friedman
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
This study analyzes the seven hundred pages of working notes made by the Chilean writer José Donoso as he created La desesperanza, his 1986 novel about the return of a Chilean exile to his homeland. These notes, made in two sustained working sessions, one in the year beginning in December 1980 and the other in the first eight months of 1985, reveal a particular modus operandi: intent on inventing characters who were believable and complex, Donoso subordinated every other aspect of the work—plot, technical considerations like point of view and register, and even the ideas the novel would …
The Early (Feminist) Essays Of Victoria Ocampo, Doris Meyer
The Early (Feminist) Essays Of Victoria Ocampo, Doris Meyer
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
This study examines the essays written by Ocampo between 1920 and 1934, prior to the time when she publicly voiced her adhesion to feminism and the rights of women in Argentine society. In these works from her Testimonios in which Ocampo struggles to find her voice as a female writer, the maleable essay serves her need to engage in discursive dialogues from the margins of the literary culture of her time. Both as a woman and a member of the oligarchy, she questions cultural assumptions and gender-based binary structures common among the male writers of her time, many of whom …
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 …