Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature Commons^™

Emily Johansen. Beyond Safety: Risk, Cosmopolitanism, And Contemporary Neoliberal Life. Bloomsbury, 2021., Irene Gammel, Jason Wang

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Emily Johansen. Beyond Safety: Risk, Cosmopolitanism, and Contemporary Neoliberal Life. Bloomsbury, 2021. xiii + 171 pp.

Jo Labanyi. Spanish Culture From Romanticism To The Present: Structures Of Feeling. Legenda, 2019., Wadda C. Rios-Font

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Jo Labanyi. Spanish Culture from Romanticism to the Present: Structures of Feeling. Legenda, 2019. 349 pp.

Storytelling Through Movement: An Analysis Of The Connections Between Dance & Literature, Zoe Hester

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Movement and storytelling are the links between past and present; both dance and literature have the same artistic and primal origins. We began to dance to express and communicate, to worship and feel. We tell stories for the same reasons: to learn from the past and to be able to communicate in the present.

This work explores the many connections between literature and dance through examinations of six dance forms: Native American, Bharatanatyam, West African, Ballet, Modern, and Post-Modern dance.

Poetic Illiteracy And Cultural Insularity: The Crisis Of Cultural Nationalism In Virgilio Piñera's La Isla En Peso, Stephen A. Cruikshank

The Quiet Corner Interdisciplinary Journal

The twentieth-century Cuban poet Virgilio Piñera was both a radical and rebellious writer who wrote against the national discourses of his time. In his acclaimed poem La isla en peso Piñera challenges the Neobaroque discourse of Cuban identity by describing Cuba as 'insular' rather than innovative. The following article argues that La isla en peso, like a prophetic letter, seems to have foreseen seventy years earlier what the modern literary critic Abraham Acosta has recently described as a "threshold of illiteracy," that is, a disruption or illiterate interference of one's critical reading by exposing the contradictions of cultural nationalism. …

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

(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 …

Hybridity And The Space Of The Border In The Writing Of Norma Elia Cantú, Ellen Mccracken

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The creative and scholarly writing of Norma Elia Cantú focuses centrally on the tensions of borders that are eroding yet firmly in place. Cantú's border pivots on the geographic space in which Mexico and the United States physically intersect, yet she probes at the same time several of the other tenuous cultural borders that postmodernity has brought into focus. Transcending distinctions between genres, languages, and cultures, Cantú undertakes innovative genre hybridity, visual-verbal hybridity, and the recombination of distinct cultural codes. Whether writing cultural criticism, autobioethnography, creative fiction, or poetry, Cantú locates herself at the intersection of the geographical and epistemological …

Dismantling Romantic Utopias: María Beneyto's Poetry Between Tradition And Protest , Candelas S. Gala

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Despite the fact that Vicente Aleixandre considered her one of the best young authors of the generation of social poets of the 1950s, María Beneyto's writings have been disregarded by critics. While sharing the social concerns of the other poets of her generation, Beneyto's poetry also reveals the dilemma of the woman author facing a cultural tradition that espouses pre-established models for her conduct and identity patterned mostly in accordance with tenets of Romanticism. Beneyto resorts to those models as projections of herself as she seeks to articulate her own identity as woman and author. The objective of this essay …

Snares: Pere Gimferrer's Los Espejos/ Els Miralls, Margaret Persin

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

With the publication of Els miralls, Pere Gimferrer effected a major shift in philosophical and linguistic perspective. It is the first collection to be published in Catalan, and thus represents for the well-known writer a change in direction for him as a poet and spokesperson of his culture and his generation. But the change is more than one of mere language coding. For in this collection, the Catalan poet confronts all the snares of language which he views as limiting of creativity and originality. He adopts a variety of poetic strategies and voices in an attempt to come to …

A Reconsideration Of Two Spanish Women Poets: Angela Figuera And Francisca Aguirre, John C. Wilcox

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In the last decade, poetry written by women in Spain experienced a "boom," as one close observer of the scene has noted, with the result that young women poets on the Peninsula have begun to receive the attention they merit. It is therefore an opportune moment to turn our critical attention toward the poetry written by women earlier in the twentieth century.

Angela Figuera (1902-1984) and Francisca Aguirre (b. 1930), two "uncanonized" mid-twentieth century Spanish poets, are presented here as challenging the androcentric culture of their time. Figuera critiques the male-dominated poetic canon as she develops a gynocentric poetics; poems …

Postmodernity And Fin De Siècle In Uruguay, Hugo Achugar

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Since the end of the military regime, Uruguay has been culturally and politically divided. During the period of repression, the opposition was united against the dictatorship. Yet economic decline and the military dictatorship have profoundly divided Uruguayan culture. On the positive side, new cultural actors have emerged—women, younger poets and writers and the marginalized—on the negative side, there is a sense of malaise that has neither been adequately discussed nor theoretized.