MARÍA LUZ GONZÁLEZ-RODRÍGUEZ | Universidad de La Laguna (original) (raw)

Papers by MARÍA LUZ GONZÁLEZ-RODRÍGUEZ

Philologica Canariensia , 2024

The Earthspinner (2021) is a multi-layered work in which the dog Chinna acts as an emotional link... more The Earthspinner (2021) is a multi-layered work in which the dog Chinna acts as an emotional link between all the characters. This paper aims to examine the novel through the lens of affective ecocriticism, focusing on how Roy relates imagery of fire, water and earth to emotions of loss, longing and hatred in the novel. Following a polyhedral analysis, I have chosen to focus on the lives, vicissitudes and misadventures of the novel's three main characters, paying attention to the affections that move and guide their lives and to the different axes around which Anuradha Roy has constructed this novel. Finally, and given the symbolic richness of The Earthspinner, I will offer a global hermeneutic analysis along with the final conclusions.

Beyond Human: Decentring the Anthropocene in Spanish Ecocriticism, 2023

El Hierro, also called the Meridian Isle or the Island of One Thousand Volcanoes, is the youngest... more El Hierro, also called the Meridian Isle or the Island of One Thousand Volcanoes, is the youngest and most south-westerly Spanish land mass forming part of the Canary Islands archipelago. El Hierro is uniquely positioned in the Atlantic Ocean, which lends the location its distinctive character. The island sits just off the shores of Africa, and no other land mass stands between it and the American continents. This means that until the arrival of Columbus in the Americas, this location was considered by Europeans to be the last territory of the known world. According to José de Viera y Clavijo, the isle’s distal position from Europe, Africa, and the rest of the Canarian archipelago induced Claudius Ptolemy to locate there the prime meridian. Thus, unfurling from this point westwards, the Atlantic Ocean, also known historically as Mare Tenebrarum or the Dark Sea, has been considered a horizon of uncertainty. The television series Hierro demonstrates that just as the material world is not secondary to the human, so too the human cannot be considered a separate island estranged from a supposedly external world. In tune with this re-categorization of matter, we analyse the series' ecocritical representation of El Hierro as an assemblage of earth, air, and maritime elements that together defy the conception of an island as a separate piece of land.

Philologica Canariensia, 2023

Cracking India (1991), considered the most remarkable novel by the Pakistani American ... more Cracking India (1991), considered the most remarkable novel by the Pakistani American writer of Parsi descent Bapsi Sidhwa, focuses on the historical event of the Partition that took place in 1947, which divided the Indian subcontinent into the countries of India and Pakistan. The plot is substantially gynocentric and recounts the horrors of this territorial, political and social conflict and depicts how women were objectified not only from a sexual perspective, but also as trophies of power and humiliation on the enemy side. The aim of this article is to explore the concepts of shame and guilt in power relations, by applying the affect theory from a gender perspective.
KEYWORDS: Partition, bodies, affect theory, shame, guilt

Cracking India (1991), considerada como la novela más destacable de la escritora pakistaní-estadounidense de ascendencia parsi Bapsi Sidhwa, se centra en el acontecimiento histórico de la Partición que tuvo lugar en 1947, que dividió el subcontinente indio en los países de India y Pakistán. La trama es sustancialmente ginocéntrica y relata los horrores de este conflicto territorial, político y social y de cómo las mujeres fueron cosificadas no solo desde una perspectiva sexual, sino también como trofeos de poder y humillación ante el enemigo. El objetivo de este artículo es explorar los conceptos de vergüenza y culpa en las relaciones de poder aplicando la teoría de los afectos desde una perspectiva de género.

Rooted in Nature, Branching into Justice: Exploring Ecofeminism in India 6th-7th November 2023 Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria Deadline: 1 June 2023 Notification of acceptance: 1 July 2023, 2023

Coined in 1974 by French feminist Françoise d’Eaubonne in her book Le Féminisme ou la Mort (Femin... more Coined in 1974 by French feminist Françoise d’Eaubonne in her book Le
Féminisme ou la Mort (Feminism or Death), the term ecofeminism has undergone important changes throughout history, expanding its focus beyond its initial emphasis on the interconnectedness of gender and ecology to include race, class, caste, indigeneity, and other forms of social oppression. In India, the origins of ecofeminism can be traced back to various movements that emerged in the 1960s and 70s, such as
the Chipko Movement, the Save Silent Valley Movement or the Forest Rights Movements, among others. It combines feminist and ecological principles to address the interconnected issues of gender inequality and ecological degradation and has been significantly led by tribal and other oppressed communities. Vandana Shiva’s work Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development (1988) has been instrumental in shaping ecofeminism in India. Other significant names include Maria Mies, who
collaborated with Shiva in the writing of Ecofeminism (1993) or Sunita Narain, Madhu Sarin and Bina Agarwal who have written extensively on and contributed to the frame of ecofeminism in the Indian context.
The conference is intended to be interdisciplinary, so papers from ecologists, historians, anthropologists, philosophers, economists, artists and environmental and cultural studies scholars are welcome. All topics should be related to India and its diaspora.

Prólogo a La cacería, escrito por Julio Ángel Olivares Merino, 2022

Tras escribir más de una veintena de obras de ficción, incluyendo novela, relato, fábula y teatro... more Tras escribir más de una veintena de obras de ficción, incluyendo novela, relato, fábula y teatro, el escritor Julio Ángel Olivares Merino nos presenta su primer poemario "La cacería". En él hallamos una poesía profunda y de naturaleza depurada, con menos tintes barrocos, quizás, que en obras anteriores. El poeta jienense posee un dominio absoluto del lenguaje, expresa lo que quiere y como quiere, aun cuando el tema que trate pertenezca al terreno de lo inefable y a esa "insoportable levedad del ser", como cantara Milan Kundera. que nos apresa. En manos de Olivares Merino, el lenguaje se convierte en telar de diseños propios, genuinos, con matices absolutamente precisos y definitorios sobre la cartografía del terror. Podemos, por tanto, situar "La cacería" dentro de los enclaves de la poesía de terror, cuyos protagonistas son la muerte y el reino de la Umbría. La muerte, personaje neutro en la mayoría de las culturas, adquiere aquí entidad antropomórfica en forma de anciana. Es la parca Morta en forma de vieja que acecha la vida, que mata la belleza; es Lilith hambrienta, que devora el pulso, que cual "hiedra enferma" cubre el verdor tiñéndolo de sombras; es Pesta, que avanza por los pueblos y se cuela por las ventanas abiertas en la noche con el propósito de cortar el hilo de la vida, sin perdir permiso, destruyendo el sentido del hogar y los recuerdos.

Nerter , 2022

Decía Gaston Bachelard en su célebre obra L’Eau et les rêves, essai sur l’imagination de la matié... more Decía Gaston Bachelard en su célebre obra L’Eau et les rêves, essai sur
l’imagination de la matiére [El agua y los sueños: ensayo sobre la imaginación de la materia,
1942], “que no nos bañamos dos veces en el mismo río, porque ya en su profundidad, el ser
humano tiene el destino del agua que corre”(15). El agua, ciertamente, y de forma particular, el agua en movimiento, evoca el transcurso de la vida y su continuo e imprevisible devenir. El más receptivo de los elementos, la naturaleza del agua es transitoria, íntima, femenina, maternal y metafórica. La simbólica de este elemento, además, engloba una gran multitud de matices, que, como apuntan Jean Chevalier y Alain Gheerbrant, pueden, a grandes rasgos, reducirse a tres temas dominantes, perceptibles en las culturas del mundo. Estos son el agua “como fuente de vida, medio de purificación y centro de regeneración” (52). Sin embargo, como todo símbolo, el agua posee también un carácter ambivalente. Es cuna y sepulcro simultáneamente, nacimiento y muerte, alfa y omega, principio y fin.

Indi@logs, 2022

In this article, Anita Rau Badami's second novel, The Hero’s Walk (2000), is analysed through the... more In this article, Anita Rau Badami's second novel, The Hero’s Walk (2000), is analysed through the perspective of the field of affects. This analysis examines how the author, through the imagery of water, presents the non-physical reality of feelings and emotions. Water is the most receptive of the elements, a source of continuous, intimate and transitory metamorphoses. In the form of storms, floods, and other types of natural phenomena related to this element, it is possible to observe how Badami makes use of a metaphorical conceptualisation of intense emotional states related to the psychological trauma that arises from the loss of a loved one. For the purpose of analysis, several important sources in the field of affect theory and water symbolism will be considered. Special emphasis will also be placed on the body (and the house as an integral extension of it) as a receptacle for contained emotions in the processing of pain.

Revolving Around India (s): Alternative Images, Emerging Perspectives, 2020

Writers from former colonies represent themselves through their works by telling their stories, d... more Writers from former colonies represent themselves through their works by telling their stories, dilemmas, and concerns, which often allude to the invasion of the empire and its tremendous consequences. One of these consequences is learning how to live with "a double consciousness" (Du Bois) and the "ability", as Innes states, "to live within and between two cultures and two perspectives" (1994: 5). Nonetheless, "everyone's exile is different," as Aciman states, "and every writer has his or her own way of groping in the dark" (1997a: 9). This paper aims to analyse the different problems that the shared experience of colonisation provokes in the immigrant psyche.

Aftermath. The Fall and the Rise after the Event , 2019

Roy's concern with environmentalism in this work is made evident from the very beginning. The nov... more Roy's concern with environmentalism in this work is made evident from the very beginning. The novel opens with a preface which makes direct reference to the disappareance, owing to diclofenac poisoning, of vultures and sparrows in New Delhi. This substance, given to cattle as a muscle relaxant to increase milk production, works as "nerve gas" (Roy 2017) on these birds which "for more than a hundred million years (ibid.) have fed on the carcasses of dead cows or buffaloes. In a good example of what material ecocriticism terms "trans-corporeality" (Alaimo 2008: 238), Roy expounds the relationship between the increase in dairy product consumption and the diminishing of the birds population. In this way, the author introduces what will be some important leitmotifs in the novel, namely, how to understand the innumerable chains of causes and effects which regulate human existence, how to establish who are responsible for them, and how to live or survive in their aftermath. Yet the text does not stop at the mere denunciation of ecological crime. Roy's sharp eye is intent on disclosing the economic, religious or political actualities leading to the unbalanced universe depicted in the novel. Through a material ecocritical approach, this paper intends to analyse Roy's deployment of these vectors as spider-like networks that corrupt the soil and the soul, provoking not only displacement and dispossession but also terrible ecological damage.

Exchanges between Literature and Science from the 1800s to the 2000s. Converging Realms, 2017

Mostly studied within the mythical and mystical traditions, MacEwen’s use of scientific themes in... more Mostly studied within the mythical and mystical traditions, MacEwen’s use of scientific themes in her work has been overlooked, but what role does science play in her never-ending mystical quest? The misapplication of nuclear physics and radioactivity, neutrons, protons, atoms, cosmic space, “magnetic seas,” or even the mystery enclosed in the universe, recurrently appear in her work. Cosmology and theoretical physics often fuse in her poems together with her insistence that uncontrolled consumerism and technology should be bounded by some measure of ethics. The aim of this essay is to elucidate the links between her humanist and scientific interests, and to explain how, through the image of dance, as a symbol of synthesis, the author attempts to construct a myth. Other symbols such as time, consumerism and appetite, and the pattern of the inward-outward (or spatial) journey are also be studied.

RCEI Ediciones, 2004

Nature was and still is the primary source of inspiration of many Canadian writers and artists. H... more Nature was and still is the primary source of inspiration of many Canadian writers and artists. However, they do not present intimate detail of natural forms but an underlying organic structure with its varied rhythms and tensions. In order words, nature is instead evoked as a depository of symbols. As Margaret Atwood argues, "Nature poetry is seldom just about nature; it is usually about the poet's attitude towards the external natural universe (49). The identification with nature is such that it becomes an inner vision, a region of the soul, where both natural landscapes and mindscapes, worlds of sense and metaphors coexist. Memories, feelings, romances, pains also form the colours of their palette. My aim in this paper is to show and discuss how these Canadian writers interpret the landscape elements that have touched them emotionally and how the image acts as a catalyst to trigger those emotions in others. They are interior landscapes, landscapes of the mind, evocations that invite the reader to travel with the artist on a quest towards an inner world that may shock and disturb, delight and depress.

Revista canaria de …, 2007

... | Ayuda. Identity and Literature. Autores: Juan Ignacio Oliva Cruz ( ed. lit. ), María Luz Go... more ... | Ayuda. Identity and Literature. Autores: Juan Ignacio Oliva Cruz ( ed. lit. ), María Luz González Rodríguez ( ed. lit. ), Jesús López-Peláez Casellas ( ed. lit. ); Localización: Revista canaria de estudios ingleses, ISSN 0211-5913, Nº 54, 2007 , pags. 9-12. ...

TRADITIONS AND INNOVATIONS. Commemorating Forty Years of English Studies at ULL (1963-2003), 2004

Ex-Centric Narratives: Journal of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Media, 2018

Rohinton Mistry's work mainly focuses on the life of the marginalized and their struggle to survi... more Rohinton Mistry's work mainly focuses on the life of the marginalized and their struggle to survive against human ambition and political corruption, and Mumbai is frequently the meeting point of many of his characters. In this paper, I analyze the writer's conception of the urban landscape from an ecocritical perspective, applying material ecocriticism's theories and exploring the city as a porous body. Cities are compounds of matter and energy in mutual transformation with human and non-human beings, living and non-living matter (Alaimo 2008, Tuana 2008, Iovino 2014). Through the application of the concept of porosity, I show how Mistry's characters are directly affected by what happens in the city. The city, on the other side, is also deeply transformed by human ambition, the tyranny of those in power, and the dirtiness and chaos resulting from social abuse.

Visiones ecocríticas del mar en la literatura, 2016

Bajo el agua existe un silencioso y magnificado mundo de luz ondulante y plantas ondeantes con te... more Bajo el agua existe un silencioso y magnificado mundo de luz ondulante y plantas ondeantes con tentáculos de plumas…En una ocasión me sumergí más de lo que debía; las rocas se desvanecieron y ante mí apareció un abismo de un aterrador azul eléctrico…se trataba de otro tipo de muerte. Un absoluto misterio, intemporal, insondable como el alma. (MacEwen 1974: 70) 1 La presencia de las fuerzas de la naturaleza en la poesía anglocanadiense ha sido constante desde sus orígenes, especialmente entre los poetas de la Confederación. Sin embargo, si en un principio los/las poetas se referían a ella como una presencia hostil y ajena al ser humano, existen numerosos ejemplos en la poesía contemporánea en los que se tiende a una relación mucho más conciliadora y una actitud holística hacia el medio ambiente. El objetivo de este artículo es observar cómo en una serie de poemas el ser humano se mezcla y funde con el paisaje, y más concretamente con el mar, con el fin de conocerse a sí mismo/misma. En dicho proceso, la naturaleza exterior se transforma en paisaje onírico y representa a menudo un espacio que debe ser colmado. Se estudiará la simbología del agua del mar como masa potencial indiferenciada donde las transformaciones tienen lugar y su relación con la psicología analítica junguiana desde una perspectiva ecocrítica. El mito, la alquimia y los arquetipos, su relevancia en el desarrollo de la psique humana, y su vinculación con la naturaleza serán asimismo partes fundamentales de este artículo.

Sense of Place: Transatlantic Perspectives, 2016

The aim of this chapter is to show how Carr’s body and emotions spoke through the depiction of th... more The aim of this chapter is to show how Carr’s body and emotions spoke through the depiction of the land, as female earth. Taking Yi-Fu Tuan’s definition of topophilia as “the affective bond between people and place or setting” (1974: 4), I will concentrate on how Emily Carr, as an artist, writer and woman of her time, developed an emotional bond towards place and landscape. In doing so, her relationship and communication with nature proved to be essential; a communication that frequently possessed a spiritual and mystical quality, which she made every effort to convey, no matter how ungraspable it often was. Drawing on theories of Tuan, Thomashow, Spirn, Plumwood and Mathews, among others, together with the artist’s own accounts of her relationship to nature, I show how Carr’s bond with the landscape was filial. Whereas her life in the city was always hard and difficult, in the forest, she felt she belonged and found a proper voice. For Mitchell Thomashow sense of place “is a search for ecological roots […]; it’s the foundation of our deepest connection to the natural world; the way the spirit of the land permeates our lives” (193-194). As will be explained, Emily Carr’s sense of place supports this definition.

Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 70, 2015

Over twenty million Indians live outside their country of origin. The Indian diaspora virtually c... more Over twenty million Indians live outside their country of origin. The Indian diaspora virtually covers every part of the world and undoubtedly constitutes a unique source of cultural wealth. In fact, India comprises the second largest diaspora in the world after China. This special issue of RCEI is dedicated to the modern India diaspora which emerges as a result of the British occupation. In the nineteenth century, thousands of Indians were carried off as cheap labour to work in tea and sugar plantations of different British colonies, such as South Africa, Trinidad, Guyana, Malaysia, and many other places, or they were employed in railway construction, as it happened, for instance, in East Africa, specifically in Uganda. Today the Indian diaspora is, in many cases, a consequence of this past circumstance. Nonetheless, it is impossible to speak about a unified Indian diaspora. The world Indian community is the result of multiple factors that have contributed to form its eclectic nature.
Indianness, female subjectivities, the domestic space and the keeping of traditions, hierarchical relationships between race, class and gender, South-Asian Muslim identity, Women movements in India, and life writing are all subjects that the reader of this special issue will find in this volume.
In the first essay, Felicity Hand offers an ample study of the representation of the female in East African Asian literature through the eyes of writers such as M. S. Vassanji, Peter Nazareth and Jameela Siddiqui. Hand also exposes how, in spite of the social privilege they enjoy as Asians in East Africa, Indian women have to struggle to find their own spaces at home, becoming active agents in the construction of new social positions. Hand laments, however, that the East African Asian woman and her subaltern condition have not been sufficiently treated in fiction. In the following essay, Maurice O’Connor examines South Asian Muslims’ identity in the United Kingdom, highlighting the fact that authentic and essential Islamism should be distinguished from more radical postures that act as deformations or misrepresentations of their faith. O’Connor also explains how the South Asian Muslims living in Great Britain face a double dilemma: on the one hand, they are considered a minority and are excluded from any kind of national discourse, on the other, they must struggle against the propagation of the most radical Islamic groups. In order to illustrate all these ideas, the author offers a cultural analysis of different novels by Pakistani writers, such as Hanif Kureishi, Mohsin Hamid, Nadeem Aslam, among others.
Antonia Navarro’s essay, in turn, provides a historical overview of women movements in India till the present to demonstrate that the national front supporting Hindu nationalism, Hindutva, is currently giving a simplistic and reduced notion of Indianness, instead of its heterogeneous and complex true character. Hindutva ideology defends the idea that the essence of India must be found in the keeping of its traditions. So any activist movement concerned with gender equality is considered to be anti-Indian by the radical nationalists. Nonetheless, Navarro argues that women movements in India had existed long before its independence from the British Empire, in fact, from pre-colonial times, so their argument, she concludes, is not well-founded. Finally, the last essay deals with Salman Rusdhie’s novel Joseph Anton: A Memoir. Celia Wallhead especially focuses on the hybrid nature and the different genres and subgenres in which this novel may be classified: mainly as a pseudo-autobiography, a detective story or a literary novel. Similarities and differences with Coetzee’s autre-biography and Barthes’ autobiography “against itself” are also discussed in this study.

Philologica Canariensia , 2024

Beyond Human: Decentring the Anthropocene in Spanish Ecocriticism, 2023

Philologica Canariensia, 2023

Prólogo a La cacería, escrito por Julio Ángel Olivares Merino, 2022

Nerter , 2022

Indi@logs, 2022

Revolving Around India (s): Alternative Images, Emerging Perspectives, 2020

Aftermath. The Fall and the Rise after the Event , 2019

Exchanges between Literature and Science from the 1800s to the 2000s. Converging Realms, 2017

RCEI Ediciones, 2004

Revista canaria de …, 2007

TRADITIONS AND INNOVATIONS. Commemorating Forty Years of English Studies at ULL (1963-2003), 2004

Ex-Centric Narratives: Journal of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Media, 2018

Visiones ecocríticas del mar en la literatura, 2016

Sense of Place: Transatlantic Perspectives, 2016

Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 70, 2015

Nerter 36-37: El agua como símbolo polisémico en la literatura y en el cine , 2022

This is a monograph on water as a polysemic symbol in literature and film, published in the journ... more This is a monograph on water as a polysemic symbol in literature and film, published in the journal Nerter, in which I have participated as guest editor. Renowned academics and writers from the Spanish university scene such as Antonio Ballesteros González, Gerardo Rodríguez, Salas, Carmen Escobedo de Tapia, Julio Ángel Olivares Merino, among others have participated in this volume. This issue offers a series of analyses on the imaginary of water in its multiple expressions such as lakes, rivers, wetlands, seas and oceans in the literature and/or cinema of varios countries including Great Britain, India, Spain, the Caribbean and Singapore.

Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses no. 54. Special Issue , 2007

This collection of essays about identity in literature covers a wide variety of contents, from di... more This collection of essays about identity in literature covers a wide variety of contents, from diachronic history to contemporary cultural studies.

Esta tesis doctoral se basa fundamentalmente en el estudio arquetípico de la obra poética (11 obr... more Esta tesis doctoral se basa fundamentalmente en el estudio arquetípico de la obra poética (11 obras) de Gwendolyn MacEWEN (1941-1987) y también de algunos de sus relatos. Se ha aplicado la crítica literaria junguiana de orientación antropológica, dando especial relevancia al concepto de arquetipo y a la reescritura o reinterpretación de los mitos por esta autora. El análisis se basa en la evocación por parte de la escritora de los cuatro elementos: fuego, agua, aire y tierra en su intento de aprehender la conciencia divina y de revelar, el misterio de la existencia a través del lenguaje. En este contexto de búsqueda espiritual la poesía es una herramienta de autoexploración y conocimiento del cual la autora obtiene un aprendizaje personal que surge del proceso poético y no del poema en sí mismo. MacEwen es una escritora que se caracteriza por el uso constante de fuentes secundarias que actúan como medios de inspiración y también como focos de conocimiento para la realización de sus objetivos. Estas fuentes pertenecen al terreno de lo esotérico, lo místico y lo psicológico: la cábala, la numerología, los arquetipos del tarot, la mística de Jacob Böhme, el gnosticismo, la Biblia, la psicología de Carl Gustav Jung y, especialmente, la alquimia. La explicación de estas fuentes queda insertada en el análisis de los textos pues actúan como catalizadores de creatividad en esta escritoria. Una musa masculina de naturaleza mercuriana actúa como mediadora del proceso alquímico en el que se halla la escritora en su búsqueda espiritual; un proceso de lucha tanto por unir las polaridades de la existencia como por reconocer, aceptar e integrar la dicotomía del ser.

Este curso tendrá lugar los días 14 y 15 de marzo de 2024 en la Sala de Audiovisuales del Edifici... more Este curso tendrá lugar los días 14 y 15 de marzo de 2024 en la Sala de Audiovisuales del Edificio Departamental de Filología de la Universidad de La Laguna. Las personas interesadas deberán pre-inscribirse. Encontrarán toda la información en el código QR del póster. Como profesor invitado, tendremos el honor de contar con la participación de Antonio Ballesteros González, Catedrático de Filología Inglesa, de la UNED de Madrid, que impartirá una charla titulada "Narciso en la literatura y el arte y su tradición posterior".

Revisiting the Concept of Empire in Contemporary Literatures in English-ULL-Agenda, 2022

10 y 11 de noviembre de 2022. "Revisiting the Concept of Empire in Contemporary Literatures in E... more 10 y 11 de noviembre de 2022. "Revisiting the Concept of Empire in Contemporary Literatures in English" se presenta como un seminario de especialización en lengua inglesa. El profesorado ponente expondrá los resultados de sus investigaciones más recientes en la línea del título de las jornadas. El curso pretende acercar al alumnado obras literarias recientes en lengua inglesa, en las que se redefine el concepto de imperio. Si bien la mayoría de los textos presentan una perspectiva poscolonial, se abordarán igualmente trabajos que cuestionan y contestan el canon desde dentro. El seminario está orientado principalmente al alumnado de tercer y cuarto curso del Grado de Estudios Ingleses de la Universidad de La Laguna.