LITMIR.BIZ

Some of the most important writers of the twentieth century, including Borges, Cortázar, Rulfo, and García Márquez, have explored ambiguous sites of a disquieting nature. Their characters face merging perspectives, deferral, darkness, or emptiness. Such a space is neither a site of projection (as utopia or dystopia) nor a neutral setting (as the topos). For the characters, it is real and active, at once elusive and transforming. Despite the challenges of visualizing such slippery spaces, filmic experimentations in Spanish American cinema since the 1960s have sought to adapt these texts to the screen. Ilka Kressner's Sites of Disquiet examines these representations of alternative dimensions in Spanish American short narratives and their transformations to the cinematic screen. The study is informed by contemporary critical approaches to spatiality, especially the concepts of atopos (non-space), spaces of mobility, sites of différance, of a self-effacing presence, and sonic spaces. Kressner's comparative study of textual and cinematic constructions of non-spaces highlights the potential and limits of inter-arts adaptation. Film not only portrays the sites in ways that are intrinsic to the medium, but during the cinematic translation, it further develops the textual presentations of space. Text and film illuminate each other in their renderings of echoes, gaps, absences, and radical openness. The shared focus of the two media on precarious spaces highlights their awareness of the physical and situational conditions in the works. Therefore, it vindicates the import of space and dwelling, and the often underestimated impact of surroundings on the human body and mind. Despite their heterogeneity, the artistic elaborations of these ambivalent atopoi all share a liberating impulse: they assert creative and open-ended interactions with space where volatility ceases to be a negative term.

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Severo Sarduy never enjoyed the same level of notoriety as did other Latin American writers like García Márquez and Vargas-Llosa, and his compatriot, Cabrera-Infante. On the other hand, he never lacked for excellent critical interpretations of his work from critics like Roberto González Echevarría, René Prieto, Gustavo Guerrero, and other reputable scholars. Missing, however, from what is otherwise an impressive body of critical commentary, is a study of the importance of painting and architecture, firstly, to his theory, and secondly, to his creative work. In order to fill this lacuna in Sarduy studies, Rolando Pérez's book undertakes a critical approach to Sarduy's essays-Barroco, Escrito sobre un cuerpo, «Barroco y neobarroco,» and La simulación-from the stand point of art history. Often overlooked in Sarduy studies is the fact that the twenty-three-year-old Sarduy left Cuba for Paris in 1961 to study not literature but art history, earning the equivalent of a Master's Degree from the École du Louvre with a thesis on Roman art. And yet it was the art of the Italian Renaissance (e.g., the paintings as well as the brilliant and numerous treatises on linear perspective produced from the 15th to the 16th century) and what Sarduy called the Italian, Spanish, and colonial Baroque or «neo-baroque» visually based aesthetic that interested him and to which he dedicated so many pages. In short, no book on Sarduy until now has traced the multifaceted art historical background that informed the work of this challenging and exciting writer. And though Severo Sarduy and the Neo-Baroque Image of Thought in the Visual Arts is far from being an introduction, it will be a book that many a critic of Sarduy and the Latin American «baroque» will consult in years to come.

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In recent years, Italian cinema has experienced a quiet revolution: the proliferation of films by women. But their thought-provoking work has not yet received the attention it deserves. Reframing Italy fills this gap. The book introduces readers to films and documentaries by recognized women directors such as Cristina Comencini, Wilma Labate, Alina Marazzi, Antonietta De Lillo, Marina Spada, and Francesca Comencini, as well as to filmmakers whose work has so far been undeservedly ignored. Through a thematically based analysis supported by case studies, Luciano and Scarparo argue that Italian women filmmakers, while not overtly feminist, are producing work that increasingly foregrounds female subjectivity from a variety of social, political, and cultural positions. This book, with its accompanying video interviews, explores the filmmakers' challenging relationship with a highly patriarchal cinema industry. The incisive readings of individual films demonstrate how women's rich cinematic production reframes the aesthetic of their cinematic fathers, re-positions relationships between mothers and daughters, functions as a space for remembering women's (hi)stories, and highlights pressing social issues such as immigration and workplace discrimination. This original and timely study makes an invaluable contribution to film studies and to the study of gender and culture in the early twenty-first century.

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Propuestas para (re)construir una nación explores how Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851–1921) imagines and engenders the Spanish nation in her theatrical production staged and/or published between 1898 and 1909. In the aftermath of Spain’s colonial losses, when Spain’s male authors, in a growing mood of collective introspection, directed their attention to the homeland, Pardo Bazán generated a series of theatrical proposals to revitalize the nation. In her plays, she manifests her ideas about Spain’s fin de siècle crisis, reflects on Spain’s place in the international arena (emphasizing the nation’s civilizing mission), critiques the intoxicating power of the so-called golden legend (Spain’s glorious past), and sees the origin of the nation’s hardship in the lack of education of its inhabitants and in the inequality between men and women. Pardo Bazán’s vision of Spain is forward looking, and she imagines a future in which new social configurations will be possible. Instead of locating her plays in an ancestral Castile, she situates several of her works in her native Galicia. For the author, Spain’s regional issues are inseparable from the country’s national issues and these can all be traced back to the woman question. The playwright appeals to the spectators/readers’ reason and emotions in order to let them think and feel that the problems the nation faces can all be attributed to the Spanish men. For Pardo Bazán, Spain’s potential for national regeneration resides in the inner strength of women. In cross-fire with the main male players in the literary field of her time, Pardo Bazán offers her critique of national decadence in plays that cleverly subvert a broad range of by then outdated theatrical conventions, and that introduce the public to new currents of theatrical innovation (Ibsen, Maeterlinck, d’Annunzio). Propuestas offers a new perspective on the participation of female authors in the contentious debate about the Spanish nation. Pardo Bazán’s theater is an overlooked area in the author’s extensive creative production, and Propuestas challenges the so often repeated topic of the backwardness of the Spanish stage and the alleged lack of innovation during the fin de siècle. Propuestas para (re)construir una nación explora cómo Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851–1921) imagina y engendra la nación española en su producción teatral finisecular que vio la luz entre 1898 y 1909. A la zaga de la debacle de 1898, cuando la introspección colectiva dirige la mirada de los autores hacia la patria, Pardo Bazán genera una serie de propuestas teatrales para revitalizar la nación. En sus obras, expone sus ideas sobre la crisis finisecular, reflexiona sobre el lugar de España en la arena internacional (enfatizando su misión civilizadora), critica el poder embriagador de lo que llama la leyenda dorada (el glorioso pasado español) y ve la causa de los males de la patria en la falta de educación de sus habitantes y en la desigualdad entre hombres y mujeres. En vez de enfocarse en el ayer, Pardo se imagina un futuro en el que nuevas configuraciones sociales sean posibles. En lugar de ubicar sus obras en una Castilla ancestral, sitúa varias de sus piezas teatrales en su Galicia natal. Para la autora los problemas regionales son inseparables de los nacionales y los problemas nacionales son inseparables de la cuestión de la mujer. La dramaturga apela tanto al raciocinio como a las emociones de sus espectadores/lectores para hacerles pensar y sentir que son los hombres los que constituyen el problema nacional. Para Pardo Bazán la clave de la regeneración de España se encuentra en la mujer. En fuego cruzado con los jugadores más importantes del campo de producción cultural de su tiempo, Pardo Bazán ofrece su crítica de la decadencia nacional en unas obras que reciclan una serie heterogénea de materiales por aquel entonces anticuados que la autora combina de manera inteligente con formas inesperadas que introducen al público a nuevas corrientes de innovación teatral (Ibsen, Maeterlinck, D’Annunzio). Propuestas ofrece una nueva perspectiva de la participación de las autoras femeninas en el contencioso debate sobre la nación española. Dentro de la extensa producción creadora de la autora, su teatro es un terreno frecuentemente pasado por alto y Propuestas desafía el tan trillado tópico del retraso de la escena española y la supuesta falta de innovación durante el fin de siglo.

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Is Brazil part of Latin America, or an island unto itself? As Nossa and Nuestra América: Inter-American Dialogues demonstrates, this question has been debated by Brazilian and Spanish American intellectuals alike since the early nineteenth century, though it has received limited scholarly attention and its answer is less obvious than you might think.This book charts Brazil's evolving and often conflicted relationship with the idea of Latin America through a detailed comparative investigation of four crucial Latin American essayists: Uruguayan critic José Enrique Rodó, Brazilian writer-diplomat Joaquim Nabuco, Mexican humanist Alfonso Reyes, and Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, one of Brazil's preeminent historians. While these writers are canonical figures in their respective national literary traditions, their thoughts on Brazilian-Spanish American relations are seldom investigated, and they are rarely approached from a comparative perspective. In Nossa and Nuestra América, Newcomb traces the development of two parallel essayistic traditions: Spanish American continentalist discourse and Brazil's solidly national exegetic tradition. With these essayistic traditions in mind, he argues that Brazil plays a necessary-and necessarily problematic-role in the intellectual construction of «Latin America.» Further, in traversing the Luso-Hispanic frontier and bringing four of Latin America's preeminent thinkers into critical dialogue, Newcomb calls for a truly comparative approach to Luso-Brazilian and Spanish American literary and cultural studies. Nossa and Nuestra América will be of interest to scholars and students of Latin American and Luso-Brazilian literature and ideas, and to anyone interested in rethinking comparative approaches to literary texts written in Portuguese and Spanish.

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Historically a source of emigrants to Northern Europe and the New World, Italy has rapidly become a preferred destination for immigrants from the global South. Life in the land of la dolce vita has not seemed so sweet recently, as Italy struggles with the cultural challenges caused by this surge in immigration. Marvelous Bodies by Vetri Nathan explores thirteen key full-length Italian films released between 1990 and 2010 that treat this remarkable moment of cultural role reversal through a plurality of styles. In it, Nathan argues that Italy sees itself as the quintessential internal Other of Western Europe, and that this subalternity directly influences its cinematic response to immigrants, Europe's external Others. In framing his case to understand Italy's cinematic response to immigrants, Nathan first explores some basic questions: Who exactly is the Other in Italy? Does Italy's own past partial alterity affect its present response to its newest subalterns? Drawing on Homi Bhabha's writings and Italian cinematic history, Nathan then posits the existence of marvelous bodies that are momentarily neither completely Italian nor completely immigrant. This ambivalence of forms extends to the films themselves, which tend to be generic hybrids. The persistent curious presence of marvelous bodies and a pervasive generic hybridity enact Italy's own chronic ambivalence that results from its presence at the cultural crossroads of the Mediterranean.

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La pasión esclava aborda la discursividad masoquista en La Regenta (1884-1885) de Leopoldo Alas, Clarín, como una estrategia subversiva de dominio y sumisión mediante la cual se rebaten los fundamentos del pensamiento liberal sobre la educación, la agencia y la libertad del sujeto moderno. Frente a las investigaciones que priman el enfoque psicoanalítico de tradición freudiana y vinculan el masoquismo a conductas perversas y pasivas, este estudio brinda una aproximación pluralista -donde destaca la perspectiva cultural, histórica-clínica y literaria- gracias a la cual es posible reubicar el masoquismo en el amplio terreno de las pasiones y subrayar la agencia y creatividad sobre las que se conforma el sentido discursivo del masoquismo transgresor en la narrativa finisecular. Nuria Godón muestra cómo la novela cumbre de Alas problematiza las propuestas de compañerismo en la sociedad moderna presentando una reformulación del contrato masoquista que parodia el contrato matrimonial, satiriza el contrato social rousseriano y cuestiona el engranaje del sistema educativo krausista. Asimismo, explora el impacto del catolicismo en la dinámica masoquista en otros textos de autores contemporáneos entre los cuales figuran Emilia Pardo Bazán y Armando Palacio Valdés, sin olvidar a Leopold von Sacher-Masoch-autor sobre el que se acuña el término de masoquismo-para explicar posteriormente cómo la influencia religiosa da forma al despliegue de la dialéctica del masoquismo femenino y filial en el contexto español trazado en La Regenta. En este sentido, La pasión esclava invita a una reconsideración del masoquismo como herramienta que hace saltar los mecanismos de sujeción genérica, susceptibles de ser observados no solo en el ámbito literario español que el libro presenta sino también dentro de otras producciones culturales.
La pasión esclava addresses the masochist discursivity of La Regenta (1884-1885) by Leopoldo Alas, Clarín, as a subversive strategy of dominance and submission through which the foundations of liberal thinking on education, agency, and freedom of the modern subject are refuted. Differing from studies that prioritize the Freudian psychoanalytic focus and link masochism with perverse and passive behaviors, this book offers a pluralist approach, where cultural, clinical-historical, and literary perspectives are essential to relocate masochism to the area of passions, while emphasizing the agency and creativity upon which the discursive meaning of transgressive masochism in fin-de-siècle narrative is articulated. Nuria Godón shows how La Regenta challenges the models of partnership in modern society by displaying a reformulation of the masochist contract that parodies the marital contract, satirizes Rousseau's social contract, and places the wheels of Krause's educational machine under scrutiny. Likewise, she explores Catholicism's impact on the masochist dynamic in other contemporary texts by authors such as Emilia Pardo Bazán and Armando Palacio Valdés, without excluding Leopold von Sacher-Masoch-the Austrian writer from whom the term masochism was coined-to further disclose how religion's influence shapes the dialectic of female and filial masochism in the Spanish context represented in Alas's masterpiece. In this sense, La pasión esclava invites one to reconsider masochism as a tool that tears apart the mechanisms of gender subjection, which are observable not only in the Spanish literary texts analyzed in this book, but also in other cultural productions.

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In Knowing Subjects, Barbara Simerka uses an emergent field of literary study-cognitive cultural studies-to delineate new ways of looking at early modern Spanish literature and to analyze cognition and social identity in Spain at the time. Simerka analyzes works by Cervantes and Gracían, as well as picaresque novels and comedias. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, she brings together several strands of cognitive theory and details the synergies among neurological, anthropological, and psychological discoveries that provide new insights into human cognition. Her analysis draws on Theory of Mind, the cognitive activity that enables humans to predict what others will do, feel, think, and believe. Theory of Mind looks at how primates, including humans, conceptualize the thoughts and rationales behind other people's actions and use those insights to negotiate social relationships. This capacity is a necessary precursor to a wide variety of human interactions-both positive and negative-from projecting and empathizing to lying and cheating. Simerka applies this theory to texts involving courtship or social advancement, activities in which deception is most prevalent-and productive. In the process, she uncovers new insights into the comedia (especially the courtship drama) and several other genres of literature (including the honor narrative, the picaresque novel, and the courtesy manual). She studies the construction of gendered identity and patriarchal norms of cognition-contrasting the perspectives of canonical male writers with those of recently recovered female authors such as María de Zayas and Ana Caro. She examines the construction of social class, intellect, and honesty, and in a chapter on Don Quixote, cultural norms for leisure reading at the time. She shows how early modern Spanish literary forms reveal the relationship between an urbanizing culture, unstable subject positions and hierarchies, and social anxieties about cognition and cultural transformation.

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What's in a nineteenth-century philanthropist? Fear of an uprising. But the frightened philanthropist has a remedy. Aware that the urban surge of the working-class masses in Spain would create a state of emergency, he or she devises a means to seduce the masses away from rebellion by taking on himself or herself the role of the seducer: the capitalist intellectual hero invested in the caretaking of the unpredictable working class. Intellectual Philanthropy examines cultural practices used by philanthropists in modern Iberia. It explains the meaning and role of intellectual philanthropy by focusing on the devices and apparatuses philanthropists devised to realize their projects. Intellectual philanthropists considered themselves activists in that they aimed to impact social structures and deployed a rhetoric of the affect to convince the workers to join their philanthropic enterprise. Philanthropy, in the nineteenth century, was not necessarily linked to money. Motivations could be moral or political; they could arise from a desire to enhance social status or to acquire influence. To explicitly designate this conceptualization of the philanthropic act, the author proposes its own name: intellectual philanthropy . Intellectual philanthropy is the use of philanthropic platforms by intellectuals to deploy cultural and educational structures in which workers could acquire a cultural capital constructed and organized by the philanthropists. Vialette argues that intellectual philanthropy appeared as a reaction to the feared political and cultural organization of the working class, rather than as a process of worker emancipation. These philanthropic processes aimed at organizing the ­workers emotionally and rationally into what she calls micro-societies. Philanthropists used the technique of seduction and expressed love to and for a targeted class. However, this seduction prevented real communication, and created a moral and symbolic indebtedness. This process was perverse in that, through its cultural and educational structures, philanthropy would give workers cultural capital that was not just emancipatory, but also a way to restrict their agency.

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Entre los mltiples modos de acercarse a un autor tan polifactico y prolfico como el escritor peruano Mario Vargas Llosa, quien gan el premio Nobel de 2010, Guadalupe Mart-Pea ha elegido ver al novelista como ilusionista. Estudia ese mundo de fantasas y ensueos, ese campo de guerra aparentemente inofensivo donde la literatura, el teatro, y la pintura se alan con el escritor, el soador, y el ilusionista para derrocar la realidad. Centrndose en Elogio de la madrastra y Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto, as como el efecto de la ilusin en el proceso de la lectura, arguye que Vargas Llosa hace uso de patrones teatrales, pictricos y msticos para hacernos experimentar lo irreal como real, el sueo como realidad y la magia de la ficcin como un acto que nos otorga poder. Con base a los estudios interartsticos, la semitica y las teoras de la recepcin, analiza cmo estos textos producen en los lectores la triple ilusin de presenciar una obra dramtica, contemplar un cuadro o entreor una convers (ac)in mstica. El primer capitulo del libro se concentra en la teatralidad que anima ambos textos. Partiendo de las teoras sobre la recepcin y la semitica teatral, Mart-Pea investiga el modo en que el autor transforma la narracin en actuacin, la ficcin en performance, y el leer en ver, haciendo que los lectores experimenten la palabra escrita como una representacin viva ante sus ojos. En el segundo reflexiona sobre la funcin que desempea la pintura en la materializacin de los deseos e ilusiones de los personajes. Combinando esttica pictrica y narracin, y bajo el lente de las teoras sobre la relacin imagen-texto, examina las distintas funciones que desempean los cuadros dentro del sistema lingu.stico donde operan. En el ltimo captulo, compara los escritos de Rigoberto con la escritura de autoexamen que Michel Foucault describe en Lcriture de soi. Mientras que el asceta trata de transformar su vida en una obra de perfeccin moral alejando de l las ilusiones, Rigoberto trata de transformar su existencia en una obra de arte congregando fantasas erticas. Ambos textos encapsulan el principal ingrediente activo en la escritura de Vargas Llosa: la ficcin no es sumisin ante la vida sino por el contrario insurreccin contra ella. El ilusionismo verbal se convierte en la tctica ms eficaz para llevar a cabo tal rebelión.
Among the multiple approaches to be taken on an author as multifaceted and prolific as the recent Nobel Laureate Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, Guadalupe Martí-Peña has chosen to look at the novelist as an illusionist. She studies this land of fantasies and daydreams, that seemingly harmless battlefield where literature, theater, and painting contend and join together with the writer, the dreamer, and the illusionist to oust reality. Focusing on Elogio de la madrastra and Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto, and the effect of illusion on the reading process, she argues that by referring to theatrical, pictorial, and mystical patterns Vargas Llosa entices us to experience, along with his characters, the unreal as real, the dream as reality, the magic of fiction as an empowering act.The book looks first at the theatricality and theatrics that enliven both texts. In the light of reader/spectator-response theories and theater semiotics, Martí-Peña shows how the novelist turns narrating into acting, fiction into performance, and reading into seeing. She next reflects upon the role that painting plays in the materialization of the characters' desires and illusions. By funneling pictorial aesthetics through the prism of narration, and by engaging with theory concerned with issues of text-image interrelations, she examines the various functions paintings play within the linguistic system. Finally, she compares Rigoberto's writing exercises to the writings of self-examination described by Michel Foucault in «L'écriture de soi.» Both texts encapsulate the main active ingredient in all of Vargas Llosa's writings: that fiction is not a submission to life, but rather an insurrection against it. Verbal illusionism becomes the most efficient tactic to carry out such a rebellion.The text of this book is in Spanish.

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