Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature Commons^™

Every Good Heart Is A Telescope: Early Poems., Victor Rodríguez-Núñez, Katherine Hedeen

Katherine Hedeen

Visualizing A State Of Debt: Sergio Chejfec’S Art Of Landscapes And Loans, Stephen Buttes

Stephen M Buttes

This paper examines two novels by the Argentine author Sergio Chejfec: Boca de lobo (2000) and La experiencia dramática (2012). By examining their relationship to Jorge Luis Borges' short story "El Zahir," I examine the ways in which the structures and obligations of loans and debt (or contemporary forms of abstract money more generally) are materialized into understandable and interpretable aesthetic forms in the novel. I suggest that Chejfec's interest in literary form and economic form in these novels present key complications to the concept of posthegemony as it is elaborated by John Beasley-Murray.

Shantytown Vistas And Immigrant Voices: Bernardo Verbitsky, Guaraní Language And The Art Of Overcoming Peronism, Stephen Buttes

Stephen M Buttes

This was an invited presentation at a conference of Indiana professors who specialize in research on Latin America. The conference was hosted by the Minority Languages and Literature program at Indiana University, Bloomington. I gave a version of what was then a forthcoming paper on Bernardo Verbitsky's novel Villa Miseria también es América. The entire essay can be read at the following link: http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/revista_de_estudios_hispanicos/v047/47.2.buttes.html

Mass Media, “Realismo Villero” And “El Sueño Argentino”: The Return To Literature In Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’S La Virgen Cabeza (2009), Stephen Buttes

Stephen M Buttes

This paper begins by developing the concept of "de-fictionalization," which the Argentine author Roberto Arlt develops in his newspaper columns about the Paraná Delta region of Argentina. Bringing this concept to bear on Gabriela Cabezón Cámara's recent novel La virgen cabeza, which narrates the story of contemporary Delta residents living in a villa miseria or shantytown near San Isidro, I suggest that the notion of de-fictionalization is crucial to the primary critical reception of the novel, which has highlighted an interest in biopolitics. These biopolitical approaches tend to foreground what they understand as the novel's postmodernist techniques such as pastiche, …

Response To "Money Is In The Eye Of The Beholder", Stephen M. Buttes

Stephen M Buttes

Beginning with the editor's discussion of an episode of Project Runway and its relationship to contemporary theories of affect in art, my response to Todd Cronan's piece questions his application of affect theory in the particular instance of the episode he discusses and then draws it together with a discussion of the novel Baroni: A Journey, by Argentine author Sergio Chejfec, to explore critiques of the economic logic of neoliberalism through aesthetic objects.

El Pelado Y ‘La Desnudez De México:’ Reading Urban Poverty With Salvador Novo And Agustín Yáñez, Stephen Buttes

Stephen M Buttes

The paper examines the role that urban poor played in discourses of national identity in the post-revolutionary period in Mexico (1920-1950). As Mexico emphasized its indigenous, rural past while at the same time becoming increasingly urban during its process of modernization, the underpinnings of a “proper” or “autochthonous” national identity were also necessarily questioned. These tensions are perhaps best exemplified in what Guillermo Sheridan has called the “dilemma” of “formative” and “speculative” models of the “national soul” (57). While the former saw itself as prescriptive, this “speculative” model of national identity, in which “la nacionalidad se convierte … en una …

De Sombras Y Umbrales: Ansiedad Geográfica En Boca De Lobo, Stephen Buttes

Stephen M Buttes

This work examines the relationship between geography, the body, memory and aesthetics in the representation of urban poverty and the global economic processes of neoliberalism in the novel Boca de lobo (2000) by Argentine author Sergio Chejfec.

Shantytown Vistas And Immigrant Voices: Bernardo Verbitsky, Kenneth Kemble And The Art Of Overcoming Peronism, Stephen Buttes

Stephen M Buttes

Este ensayo propone leer Villa Miseria también es América (1957) de Bernardo Verbitsky como una propuesta para superar el binario político-afectivo de la revolución anti-peronista de la década del 1950. En primer lugar, se argumenta que el personaje José Rodríguez, estudiante de izquierda torturado por el régimen peronista, puede entenderse como un retrato del artista comprometido. Luego, se establecen conexiones entre los intereses estéticos de este personaje y los del movimiento de vanguardia informalista, haciendo hincapié en la serie de collages Paisajes suburbanos (1958–61) de Kenneth Kemble. Al comparar los materiales que componen los paisajes villeros que produce Kemble y …

Are You Really Going To Eat That? Water, Power, And Bugs A La Tlaxcalteca, Jeanne Gillespie

JEANNE GILLESPIE

Narratives in Mesoamerica consistently used mytho-poetic data to frame their commentaries. For that reason, scholars must endeavor not only to understand the “facts” that Davies is seeking, but to also navigate the other organizing principles that frame historic narratives. It is not that these “details of fantasy” do not have significant historical value; it is that to understand these apparently fanciful components of the narrative, scholars must also understand the strategies and the rhetorical devices that the Amerindian narrators used to generate them. This study will examine an aspect of the rich and complex mytho-poetic data documenting the Battle of …

Literatura Judía Latinoamericana Contemporánea: Una Antología = Literatura Judaica Latino-Americana Contemporânea: Uma Antologia = Contemporary Jewish Latin American Literature: An Anthology, Stephen Sadow

Stephen Sadow

LITERATURA JUDÍA LATINOAMERICANA CONTEMPORÁNEA: UNA ANTOLOGÍA es un compendio de poesía y prosa escritas por judíos latinoamericanos. Viendo de comunidades judías dispersas por la inmensidad de las Américas al sur de los Estados Unidos, estos escritores proveen una riqueza de descripciones y modos de entenderá esta frecuentemente ignorada población de unas 450.000 almas. También hay obras de escritores, quienes por razones políticas, económicas o sionistas viven fuera de los países natales. Sin embargo, a pesar de las distancias geográficas entre estos escritores y las distintas culturas que los rodean, todos crean poemas y narrativas que son profundamente judías-- la liturgia, …

Thaw/Deshielos, Victor Rodríguez-Núñez, Katherine Hedeen, Victor Rodríguez-Núñez, Katherine Hedeen

Katherine Hedeen

The Paraguay Reader, Robert Andrew Nickson, Peter Lambert

Robert Andrew Nickson

Paraguay has long been seen as one of the forgotten corners of the globe, a place that slips beneath the radar of most diplomats, academics, journalists, and tourists in Latin America. Paraguay is a country defined not so much by association as by isolation. The renowned Paraguayan writer Augusto Roa Bastos famously remarked that Paraguay’s landlocked isolation made it like an island surrounded by land. Yet Paraguay is developing and globalizing fast. It is a major exporter of electricity, soy, and beef; its economy grew by 14 percent in 2010, the second fastest in the world; and it has one …

The Untiring Game, Yrene Santos, Isabel R. Espinal

Isabel R Espinal

These are translations of most, but not all, the poems in the book El incansable juego, by Yrene Santos (Santo Domingo: Editorial Letra Gráfica: 2002). The poems that have not been translated were already translated elsewhere by others, according to the poet.

Anti-Haitian Rhetoric And The Monumentalizing Of Violence In Joaquin Balaguer's Guía Emocional De La Ciudad Romántica, Medar Serrata

Medar Serrata

This essay compares four editions of the book Guía emocional de la ciudad romántica, by the Dominican author and politician Joaquin Balaguer. The book, a celebration of Santo Domingo’s monumental architecture, evokes the topos of the romantic poet who strolls down the streets of an ancient city admiring the remnants of the past. A closer examination, however, reveals a text deeply invested in the monumentalizing of violence—a text that portrays the dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo as the savior of the nation. Moreover, the metaphorical stroll that the reader is invited to take reenacts the movement of history in order to …

Thaw/Deshielos, Victor Rodríguez-Núñez, Katherine Hedeen

Victor Rodríguez-Núñez

La Vida Incesante Y Otros Poemas, Katherine Hedeen, Victor Rodríguez Núñez, Mark Strand

Katherine Hedeen

Selected Poems, Katherine Hedeen, Victor Rodríguez Núñez, José Emilio Pacheco

Katherine Hedeen

América, Katherine Hedeen, Victor Rodríguez Núñez, John Kinsella

Katherine Hedeen

Cuarto De Desahogo: Antología Poética, Victor Rodríguez-Núñez, Arturo Arango

Victor Rodríguez-Núñez

Every Good Heart Is A Telescope: Early Poems., Victor Rodríguez-Núñez, Katherine Hedeen

Victor Rodríguez-Núñez