Spanish III: Latin American Literature A

Session Coordinator: Walli Ann Wisniewski
Shippensburg Univ.

Session A

Pedro Páramo como texto problematizador del imaginario nacional posrevolucionario

Este análisis se concentra en la problematización del discurso histórico mexicano aludido en Pedro Páramo (1955) de Juan Rulfo.  Mediante la identificación de alusiones a diversos gobiernos posrevolucionarios dentro de la novela, este trabajo identifica una alegorización de la continuidad de los viejos modelos latifundistas (estirpe de la que desciende Pedro Páramo) sobre el pueblo de México (metaforizado en Comala y la hacienda de la Media Luna).  Paralelamente, el ensayo explora la alusión a la cosmogonía indígena de la muerte.  Aunque la aparición de los personajes indígenas es muy breve en la novela, la entidad cultural mesoamericana queda aludida en la ideología mortuoria ( como lo propone Mario J. Valdés), lo que posibilita la ficcionalización de las voces de los muertos de Comala.  Este trabajo identifica y analiza la yuxtaposición de los discursos culturales presentes en la novela (discurso criollo posrevolucionario vs. discurso mortuorio náhuatl) como herramienta de escrutinio del discurso histórico oficial en México.  Lejos de proponer con esto una lectura indigenista de Pedro Páramo, se propone una lectura posmodernista del texto.  Tal interpretación posibilita una visión postcolonial del espacio ficcionalizado por Rulfo en el que México se descubre como un palimpsesto cultural.

Elisa Rizo
Westminster College  

Women, Passion, and Film:  A New Feminist Perspective in Lovesick by Ángeles Mastretta

Angeles Mastretta was born in Puebla, Mexico in 1949.  She belongs to the generation of writers who flourish under the shadow of writers like Rosario Castellanos, and Elena Poniatowska.  Like Castellanos and Poniatowska she has paid specific and sustained attention to the subjugation of women in Mexican society.

A theme that we frequently find in Mastretta’s work is the struggle that women face everyday in order to attain self-realization.  Mastretta utilizes various techniques so that these women can fulfill their desires and accomplish their objectives, always with the intention of giving her female characters a voice and place in society. 

In this paper, I am going to focus on Emilia Sauri, Lovesick’s main character, and I will analyze passion as a motivating force, a tool that will aid Emilia to achieve her freedom.  I will also compare the position of Emilia to two other fascinating characters portrayed in well-known films, both Mexican and European/American.  Through intertextuality in the creation and revision of situations from classic films, I will show a new feminist perspective in Mastretta’s work, where she presents an independent and intelligent woman, who can enjoy sexual freedom, is able to attain self-realization, and fulfill her passions, without diminishing or overshadowing the presence of men. That is, Mastretta’s character liberates herself without reverting to narratives of victimage; on the contrary, women and men work together to live in harmony.  

Olivia Yáñez
Univ. of Chicago

Profane Hagiography vs. the Revolutionary Child: The Portrayal of Pancho Villa in Nellie Campobello's Prose and Jack Conway's Viva Villa!

In the 1930s and 40s, several artists of literature and the cinema tried to reclaim Pancho Villa as a heroic figure.  Nellie Campobello's fragmented narrative, Cartucho, and her later biography, Apuntes sobre la vida militar de Francisco Villa, serve as clear examples of the attempt to recover Villa in Mexico while Jack Conway's film, Viva Villa!, demonstrates a similar
movement in the United States.  Campobello's and Conway's projects appear to have similar goals, but their final products deviate from each other to the point of complete contradiction.  This contrast is due to each artist's decision of how to deal with the complexity of Pancho Villa's character.   The mixture of tenderness, brutality, valor, and trickery that mark Villa's life makes his character difficult to portray and explain unless the artist ignores one side of the Villa binary, and thus, depicts Villa as a type
rather than a complex figure.  In Viva Villa!, Conway tries to create a complex Villa but ultimately fails and creates, instead, a caricature of the violent revolutionary.  Viva Villa! makes a common imperialist move by trying to feed Mexico an image of itself that is acceptable to the United States but not acceptable to Mexico—the image of the revolutionary as a child.  Contrastingly, Campobello's Apuntes sobre la vida militar de Francisco Villa and Cartucho depict Villa as a complex character whose strengths far outweigh his obvious weaknesses.  Even though Campobello's praise of Villa does not completely ignore his flaws, her portrayal of Villa can be read as a saint's life, as a type of profane or secular hagiography.

Emron Esplin
Michigan State University
esplinem@msu.edu

Brecht in the Dominican Republic

Much has been written about the reception of Brecht's work in Latin America.  But with the exception of Cuba, nothing has been done on Brecht in the Caribbean islands.  In my paper, I will analyze Maximo Aviléz Blonda's play "Yo, Bertolt Brecht", which in 1966 was performed for the first time in Santo Domingo.  In this work, Aviléz Blonda moves Brecht's famous protagonist Herrn Keuner into the context of a Caribbean island and varies the motif of the chalk cross from Brecht's play "Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches".  In addition, he creatively plays with quotations from poems of Brecht.  Composing the work, he not only applies Brecht's rules of the epic theatre, but he also has the protagonists participate in writing an ending to their play - an ending which would not force them to cease to exist.   

Gabriele Eckart
Southeast Missouri State University

Session B

Access Denied: Buenos Aires’ Virtually Inaccessible Parque de la memoria 

The Parque de la memoria, a public space in homage of the desaparecidos, remains controversial.  While many laud the opportunity for public debate and reflection, others adamantly oppose the memorial. Ironically, the organization’s website, which theoretically provides a space for global participation, remains inaccessible.  To enter www.parquedelamemoria.org.ar requires a user ID and password; the international community is denied access. This paper studies the debates surrounding the Parque, analyzes the symbolic space, and discusses the significance of the virtually inaccessible component of the memorial park in cyberspace.

Janis Breckenridge
Hiram College

Truth in Fiction: Rereading Latin American Dictatorships

Originality is not a hallmark of Latin American dictatorships. Power structures framing the fundamental cornerstones upon which they are built may be derived from fictional works as pedigreed as those from classical mythology. While it may seem funny to imagine Latin American dictators reading The Legends of King Arthur or Mary Shelley’s, Frankenstein, or even the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges and then going out and defining their regime, it is easily argued that elements of each aforementioned work seem prevalent in the underlying premise of a dictatorship like Argentina during the Dirty War. Concepts such as manifest destiny, divine rights of kings, absolute authority, and the warrior as leader all play important roles defining Latin American dictatorships. This paper examines the archetype of the Latin American dictatorship based on a select group of classic fictional works and will show that the Latin American dictatorship is merely a plagiarized version of literature through the ages.

Walli Ann Wisniewski and Madeleine Townsend
Shippensburg University and Lansing Community College

The Skylark and the Scorpion: Giovanni Quessep and the Politics of Poetry in Colombia

The Colombian poet Giovanni Quessep, while quite popular in Colombia and widely read there, has only a tiny international audience (mostly in Italy).  I will argue that Quessep’s anachronistic aesthetic has been the chief reason for this lack of international interest in his work.  As anyone familiar with Quessep’s work knows, his chief poetic mode is highly formal, strongly allied to myth and legend, and romance, and wedded to a distant past that seems to have little do with the Colombia he inhabits (his poetry is especially indebted to Dante and to The Thousand and One Nights).  His work in this mode and has contributed a stately voice to Colombia’s contemporary poetry; but because Quessep fails to engage an essentialized Colombianity, by which I mean that he fails explicitly to engage the political—in fact, blatantly refuses to do so—, his work has been more or less ignored in North America and elsewhere.  I will present some excellent material on poetry and politics from an interview I conducted with Quessep in 1999 in order to demonstrate the dangers of a narrow reading of Colombian culture through the insistence that poetry must, especially in Colombia, embrace the political if it is to speak for its national identity.  While I question Quessep’s insistence that his poetry has no national identity, I hope that focusing attention on this seemingly detached literary figure will help us broaden our understanding of Colombian literary culture.

Rose Shapiro
Fontbonne University
rshapiro@fontbonne.edu

The Subordinating of Science in the Poetry of Ernesto Cardenal

In 1989 Ernesto Cardenal published a long poem entitled, Cántico cósmico (Cosmic Canticle), a 581-page work that is in part a collage of revolutionary poems, but in greater part is an apocalyptic myth structured to incorporate evolutionary scientific processes. This volume, a culmination of Cardenal’s poetry, challenges us to a reevaluation of Cardenal’s entire opus in light of Cántico cósmico. Ernesto Cardenal, the largely influential Nicaraguan poet, is widely admired for his dedication to the struggle of the Nicaraguan people for social justice and economic dignity. As poet, Liberation Theology priest, and Marxist revolutionary, Cardenal attracted much attention to the social relevance of his poetry. In the shadow of this predominant socio-political concern, a parallel development in Cardenal’s poetry, rooted in the empirical sciences, has received little attention. Furthermore, we should not consider the science poetry of the Cántico as a late development among Cardenal’s other poetic themes. As early as the Epigramas, published in 1961, but written in the early fifties when Cardenal and Colonel José Urtecho were formulating the poetic ideals of their well-known exteriorismo, he was writing explicit science poetry. The best example may be Ileana:la Galaxia de Andrómeda. Such explicit and detailed use of astronomical data, Relativity Theory, and Big Bang theory at such an early date leads one to conclude that an interest in science was among the earlier influences, and that it had an important role in shaping later developments in Cardenal’s thinking. 

Thomas Boerigter
Wartburg College
thomas.boerigter@wartburg.edu