Luz-Mary Rincón: Usted, The Prononominal Address of Familiarity In An Urban Community.
Erik Ekman: Cuenta la estoria: Narrative and Exegesis in Alfonso X's General estoria.
Joan M. Hoffman: Ruecas into Espadas, Almohadillas into Libros: Subversion in María de Zayas'"La fuerza del amor".
Deborah Compte: Two Portraits of a Queen: Calderón and the Enigmatic Christina of Sweden.
Salvatore Poeta: Cervantes' Flight of 'Post-Modernistic' Fancy in Don Quijote de la Mancha (1605-2005): Feminist Perspective in the Marcela-Grisóstomo Episode.
Monica Massei: La figura del héroe popular en bodas que fueron famosas del Pingajo y la Fandanga de José María Rodríguez Méndez.
Kathryn Everly: Sacred Violence as Social Criticism in Carme Riera's En el último azul.
Marcela Pardes: El Bildungsroman y la literatura latinoamericana judía: El alma al diablo de Marcelo Birmajer.
Adam Lifshey: "No podemos soñar:" A Hispanophone African Literary Displacement of the Spanish-American War of 1898.
Quince Duncan: Afrorealista Manifesto.
Joseph Spieker: The Art of Humor in the Teatro Breve and the Comedias of Calderón de la Barca. Ted L. Bergman.
Joseph Spieker: El ojo en la sombra: Antología de narrative de Marco Tulio Aguilera. Peter Broad, Editor.
Joseph Spieker: The Coronado Expedition: From the Distance of 460 Years. Richard Flint and Shirley Cushing Flint.
Salvador A. Oropesa: La resistencia silenciosa. Fascismo y cultura en España. Jordi Gracia.
Joseph Spieker: Ghost Towns Alive: Trips to New Mexico's Past. Linda G. Harris.
Joseph Spieker: Women Writers of Early Modern Spain: Sophia's Daughters. Barbara Mujica.
Joseph Spieker: Antología de cuentistas guatemaltecas. Willy O. Muñoz.
Joseph Spieker: Working Women in Mexico City: Public Discourses on Material Conditions 1879-1931. Susie S. Porter.
Joseph Spieker: Rewriting the Italian Novella in Counter-Reformation Spain. Carmen R. Rabell.
Joseph Spieker: Jose's Buffalo Hunt: A Story from History. Marc Simmons.
David Arbesú Fernández: Death in Fifteenth-Century Castile: Ideologies of the Elites. Laura Vivanco.
Luz-Mary Rincon, Texas A&M University-Texarkana.
Usted , the Prononominal Address of Familiarity In an Urban Community
The study describes the use of the prononominal address by the middle class in Bucaramanga, the largest and most important city of northeastern Colombia . The analysis of the corpus obtained from the speech of 70 participants included a correlation between the use of the variable with the social factors of gender and age. Results show that tú does not carry the common meaning of familiarity and solidarity of other Hispanic dialects, and speakers of all age groups favor usted in most situations. Su merced, a pronoun which has disappeared from Hispanic varieties, is often used by speakers to denote respect and tenderness.
Cuenta la estoria: Narrative and Exegesis in Alfonso X’s General estoria
This article explores the concept of historia or its Old Spanish cognate, estoria (history) in the General estoria. In the Medieval and Classical periods historia is a much broader concept than it is in Early Modern and Modern times since it can mean the narration of the events of the past, the literal sense of a text or a miniature or painting that represents a historical event whereas beginning in the 16th century the term gradually comes to refer to the study of the past or the past itself. Though seemingly unrelated, the three areas of signification of the term are closely linked by memory and contemplative practices. The compilers of the General estoria write and read historically to present the past to a vernacular audience and to write the present into an authoritative textual tradition.
Joan Hoffman, Western Washington University.
Ruecas into Espadas , Almohadillas into Libros : Subversion in María de Zayas’ ‘La fuerza del amor’
More than any of her literary contemporaries, and quite zealously, María de Zayas writes in defense of women. She does so by subtly subverting the traditional novela cortesana model, with its inherent male bias, to better reflect the female perspective virtually ignored elsewhere in the literature of her day. As evidenced in "La fuerza de amor," her reinterpretation of the patriarchal discourse of Miguel de Cervantes' paradigmatic, "La fuerza de la sangre," María de Zayas surpasses mere inspiration to indeed revise, from a feminine perspective, a common and traditional literary form of her time.
Deborah Compte, The College of New Jersey.
Two Portraits of a Queen: Calderón and the Enigmatic Christina of Sweden
Queen Christina of Sweden was one of the most fascinating, yet often reviled figures of seventeenth century Europe. As the object of great interest and controversy, she become the inspiration of two of Calderón’s plays, an auto sacramental and a comedia, in which she appears as an exemplary monarch in her conversion from Lutheranism to Catholicism and as a largely burlesque figure with strong feminist leanings. This study examines Calderón’s strikingly divergent characterizations of Christina and ties the varying depictions to contemporary news sources and the deteriorating political relations between the Swedish and Spanish thrones in the mid 1650s.
Salvatore Poeta, Villanova University.
Cervantes' Flight of 'Post-Modernistic' Fancy in Don Quijote de la Mancha (1605-2005): Feminist Perspective in the Marcela-Grisóstomo Episode
The attention the Marcela-Grisóstomo episode has received to date may be classified according to the particular critical approach or perspective, with each one provoking a whole new set of questions and implications and on which these same critics more often than not diverge. Moreover, the differing viewpoints are not limited to specific textual implications they also extend to speculation on Cervantes´ supposed personal ideology and artistic motivation behind the text.
This study argues three principle points regarding what several critics presume to be Cervantes´ conscious “feminist” agenda in the Marcela-Grisóstomo episode of Don Quijote I (1605). Firstly that Cervantes’ core artistic purpose throughout the Marcela-Grisóstomo episode is to force a debate between pagan and Christian ideals within the socio-cultural and ideological framework of Counter-Reformation Spain. Secondly, that this debate, introduced implicitly or sub-textually in the beginning of the episode, and which catches momentum in its application to the circumstances of the episode´s three principle protagonists, makes its way to the narrative surface in terms of the direct exchange between don Quijote and Vivaldo on the protocols and ideals governing the practice of knight errantry versus those of Christian faith. Thirdly, that for Cervantes Grisóstomo (physical love), Marcela (neo-Platonic love) and don Quijote (Christian love) represent three ascending and not necessarily mutually exclusive rungs on the “ladder” of love toward ultimate spiritual transcendence.
La figura del héroe popular en Bodas que fueron famosas del Pingajo y la Fandango de José María Rodríguez Méndez
En este ensayo se analiza una de las obras de quien es catalogado por sus coetáneos como poeta dramático, José María Rodríguez Méndez. El dramaturgo español no expone su visión sobre la historia humana, muchas veces olvidada o desconocida en la historia oficial de un pueblo. A través de una mirada retrospectiva a la “Época del desastre” Rodríguez Méndez cuestiona la noción canónica del héroe y con esta acción, el concepto mismo de nación construida bajo ciertos presupuestos anclados en la articulación del poder.
Kathryn Everly, Syracuse University.
Sacred Violence as Social Criticism in Carme Riera’s En el último azul.
In En el último azul, Carme Riera takes issue with the nature of ritualistic violence. She writes about the plight of a group of criptojudíos persecuted by the authorities of the Inquisition in seventeenth-century Spain. The author posits that the ceremonial violence of capturing, torturing, and burning Jews becomes more complex when women are the victims. Expanding on René Girard’s theories of sacred violence, the article analyzes the violence in the novel as two-fold: Jews are sacrificed to maintain economic and religious order while women are sacrificed to maintain a gender hierarchy.
Marcela J. Pardes, Temple University.
El Bildungsroman y la literatura latinoamericana judía: El alma al diablo de Marcelo Birmajer
El Bildungsroman constituye un género de suma importancia para los escritores latinoamericanos judíos. Mediante el examen de las definiciones tradicionales de los siglos XVIII y XIX, y de los conceptos más contemporáneos del género, muestro que El alma al diablo (1994) del argentino Marcelo Birmajer (1966) es una novela de formación o Bildungsroman que recupera algunos de los elementos clásicos del género, aplicándolos a un protagonista marginado de la sociedad mayoritaria que lo rodea, para examinar la problemática existencial que preocupa a este tipo de protagonista: la definición de la identidad, y el conflicto y/o la acomodación entre la tradición familiar y la cultura hegemónica.
No podemos soñar’: A Hispanophone African Literary Displacement of the Spanish- American War of 1898
Cuando los combes luchaban , the first novel written by an African in Spanish, reads at first glance as a paean to Spanish imperialism: the novel allegorizes an illusionary inversion of the War of 1898 in which the conflict is moved from Cuba to Equatorial Guinea and the United States cedes power to Spain and not vice versa. The body of the text, however, spectacularly undermines its own pro-imperial climax, so much so that the novel turns out to be not a collaborationist text from the most marginal of colonized spaces but rather a sweeping indictment of a planetary struggle between rising and falling world powers.
Afrorealista Manifesto
Abstract forthcoming