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Current Issue Article Abstracts Spring 2010 Vol. 78.2 • • • • • • • • Ser social y poética material en la obra de Antón de Montoro, mediano converso Ana M. Gómez-Bravo Converso poet Antón de Montoro creates a material poetics based on a subtle positioning that reveals his contact with urban oligarchies, a middle class of artisans and merchants, and courtly bureaucrats. Through an intense poetic activity, Montoro negotiates his converso identity and middle status with several interlocutors that return to him a stigmatized image that disqualifies him for poetic practice. The result is an affirmation of the self as social being that sustains and justifies the material quality of poetry. Alexander and the Geographer's Eye: Allegories of Knowledge in Martín Fernández de Enciso's Suma de geographía Andrés Prieto Martín Fernández de Enciso's Suma de geographia (1519) is one of the cornerstones of Spanish cartographic and navigational literature in the first half of the sixteenth century. Although the book is known today mainly for containing the first printed description of America in Spanish, the Suma was in fact a synthesis of the geographic knowledge of all the known world. At the center of the book, Fernández de Enciso records the medieval story of Alexander the Great's journey to the Earthly Paradise. In this paper, I argue that Enciso's reworking of this story within the context of the new cartographic developments of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries encapsulates the new observational and reprsentational techniques derived from the early modern reading of Ptolomy, while at the same time situating the production of geographic knowledge at the center of the Spanish imperial program. Pituso en blackface: una mascarada racial en Fortunata y Jacinta Lisa Surwillo This article analyzes the function of blackface in the "falso Pituso" episode of Benito Pérez Galdós' Fortunata y Jacinta. The representation of the false heir of Spain's new dominant class serves as a point of departure for this paper's analysis of how the novel explores the significance of race at the end of the nineteenth century, on the eve of the loss of Spain's colonies, while also addressing its characterization of the bourgeoisie as white and European, its racilization of the working class and the poor (the Fourth Estate) and the problem of conceptualizing an ambiguous Spanish race. Macunaíma: entre a crítica e o elogio à transculturação Alfredo Cesar Melo A fascinating contradiction lies in the center of Macunaíma. The hero of Mário de Andrade's novel has an incredible ability to refashion himself, to mingle with other cultures and to wear different social masks in order to achieve his goals. Such transcultural skills, however, don't seem to work in Macunaíma's favor, since the hero fails miserably to forge his self. In this article, I discuss what kind of consequences can be drawn from this paradox. It is my contention that the novel is comprised of an appraisal and a critique of Antropofagia. The novel exhibits features that both laud Brazilian hybridity and examine critically the ends of that transcultural process. I also contend that the novel envisions another kind of hybridity for Brazilian culture-a subaltern hybridity, which valorizes the cultural exchanges among countries within the Southern Hemisphere. The novel thereby lays out a critical theory of hybridity in which actual configurations of hybridity can be criticized from the standpoint of an imaginative and alternative hybridity. A Portrait of the Present: Sergio Chejfec's Photographic Realism Luz Horne This paper reads Sergio Chejfec's narrative as a particular type of realism in the context of a return to this aesthetic in recent Argentinean and Brazilian literature. It argues that one of Chejfec's narrative peculiarities lies in the appropriation and use of avant-garde techniques to generate a reality effect. In this process, the use of photography and the passage from classic realist "representation" to an "indexical" mode of signification is crucial. By incorporating the logic of the image within the text, his narrative creates an impression of discontinuity similar to that used in avant-gardist writing, but instead of producing discontinuity to emphasize the artificiality of representation or the impossibility of mimesis, it is used in a positive manner to create a representation of the contemporary. Discontinuity becomes in Chejfec a constructive medium to produce a portrait of the present time, of cityscapes marked by growing marginality, degraded and soiled spaces. Kafka en Argentina Julieta Yelin This article deals with the initial critical reception of the work of Franz Kafka in Argentina by focusing on articles and reviews published in Sur and on essays by Jorge Luis Borges and Ezequiel Martinez Estrada that appeared in other publications. By looking at a significant emergence of animal imaginaries and a search for a new mode of appropriation of the fable and the bestiary traditions, the analysis traces the literary effects that such readings had on Argentine short-story writing in the 1950s. The texts analyzed in this article belong to Bestiario by Julio Cortázr, Mundo animal by Antonio Di Benedetto, and La furia and Las invitadas by Silvina Ocampo. |
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