Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature Commons^™

Diasporic Reparations: Repairing The Social Imaginaries Of Central America In The Twenty-First Century, Ana Patricia Rodríguez

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Contemporary Central American diasporic writers like Horacio Castellanos Moya, Francisco Goldman, Héctor Tobar, and Marcos McPeek Villatoro, in Senselessness (2008), The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? (2007), The Tattooed Soldier (1998), and the Romilia Chacón detective series, write in response to various forms of violence. They grapple with the image of Central America as a site of unsustainable violence, inhospitable material conditions, and unresolved historical issues that extend into the lives of Central Americans in the United States. The past is not easily dismissed, but lies at the core of transnational Central American subject formation. This essay …

Reviews Of Recent Publications

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Kathyrn Everly. History, Violence, and the Hyperreal: Representing Culture in the Contemporary Spanish Novel by Nina L. Molinaro

Jill Robbins. Crossing Through the Chueca: Lesbian Literary Culture in Queer Madrid by Salvador A. Oropesa

Juan Pablo Dabove. Nightmares of the Lettered City: Banditry and Literature in Latin America 1816-1929 by María Zalduondo

Federico Bonaddio. Federico García Lorca. The Poetics of Self-Consciousness by Carlos Jerez-Farrán

Aníbal González. Love and Politics in the Contemporary Spanish American Novel by Mónica Adriana Agrest

Dangerous Spaces, Dangerous Liaisons: Performance Arts On And Of The U.S./Mexico Border, Kirsten F. Nigro

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay will consider the performative arts on the border, ranging from script-based plays to performance pieces in urban spaces and public installation pieces. These will be analyzed according to their focus on 1) the plight of the illegal immigrant; 2) the violence that has become a daily factor in the lives of border citizens; and 3) the symbolic efforts to make a sacred space out of one as seemingly unsacred as the border; and if not a sacred space, one that is more transparent and hopefully, less dangerous and threatening.

Corpses And Capital: Narratives Of Gendered Violence In Two Costa Rican Novels , Laura Barbas Rhoden

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In a region prone to violence and political corruption, Costa Rica has been touted as an ecological paradise, a stable democracy, and an egalitarian society. However, Costa Rican fiction from the late twentieth century contests this idyllic image and presents instead a world of intrigue, violence, and criminality. El año del laberinto (2000) by Tatiana Lobo and Cruz de olvido (1999) by Carlos Cortés are two novels that serve as an excellent introduction to developments in postwar fiction and scholarship from Central America. In my analysis, I first situate the novels in the context of Central American cultural and political …

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 …

The New Novel / A New Novel: Spider's Webs And Detectives In Luisa Valenzuela's Black Novel (With Argentines), Sharon Magnarelli

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The article analyzes Valenzuela's novel in relation to Shaw's summary of projections about the directions the new novel will or should take. Specifically, it examines the novel in terms of the detective novel to which the title alludes and demonstrates that Valenzuela departs from the traditional detective novel with its quest for knowledge. In Valenzuela's novel there are no definitive answers, only obscurely intuited connections, which we would perhaps prefer not to make, for Valenzuela eschews both a master narrative and a narrative of mastery. Nonetheless, as the article demonstrates, the protagonists' search for motives, their quest to understand the …