Testimony and chronicle in Elena Poniatowska's Las mil y una... La herida de Paulina (original) (raw)
Related papers
In this paper, we analyze the five strongest works of Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska: Hasta no verte, Jesús mío, La noche de Tlatelolco, Fuerte es el silencio, and Nada, nadie. This Polish-descendant journalism has played a major role in the development and maturing of literary journalism in Mexico and had, in her books, conveyed an Oral History of the poor people of Mexico, among earthquakes, political repression and the nefarious consequences of the misuse of science and technology.
Victims and perpetrators of feminicide in the language of the Mexican written press
Comunicar. Media Education Research Journal, 2020
This study investigates the language used by national newspapers in Mexico: "El Universal", "La Jornada", "Milenio", and "Reforma", when addressing the issue of feminicide regarding victims and perpetrators, as well as their relationship with the gender of the reporter and with each newspaper. The research is based on the analysis of qualitative content and the theoretical framework of framing. Categories were built on the type of language in cases of feminicide of 360 journalistic texts published during 2017: 1) Narrative of feminicide; 2) Justification of the perpetrator or alleged perpetrator; 3) Social issues; 4) Blaming the victim. The analysis yielded cases of victim blaming to a lesser extent than those of the perpetrator's justification. Aspects of the narration of feminicide stood out both by the gender of the reporter and by the media in the four newspapers, from two perspectives: 1) The fact, the follow-up, or the context; 2) The fact, legal aspects, and statistics. Reporters, men and women, tend to justify the perpetrator; male reporters blame the victim more than female reporters; and female reporters contextualize feminicide through social issues: social violence, impunity, and failures in legal processes. "La Jornada" is inclined towards social issues, while "El Universal" tends to justify the perpetrator.
Cristina Devereaux Ramírez's study of the historical writings of Mexican women is an important contribution to rhetorical studies, as well as to other fields. By delving into Mexican archives, she has rescued the ignored writings of women throughout the history of Mexico, focusing on writers from the late 19th and early 20th century. This work shows that women always have participated in important social movements in Mexico, even while having to adapt to varying patriarchal social constraints. Her analysis of the writings themselves stands as a significant contribution to feminist and rhetorical studies in both the U.S. and Mexico. This review first explains Devereaux Ramírez's mestiza rhetoric theoretical framework, including its history, then provides brief descriptions of the women and their writings that are analyzed in this book, and finally discusses concerns about the theoretical frame of mestiza rhetoric that is stretched to cover all these Mexican women.
Journal of Romance Studies, 2015
This article examines a text by the nineteenth-century Peruvian writer Margarita Práxedes Muñoz to explore how she plays with the boundaries of the emerging form of the novel to bring together scientific knowledge and experiences that do not fit normative social models of womanhood. Through an analysis of the text as autobiographical fiction and its portrayal of the figure of the ángel del hogar (angel of the house), this article argues that we need to find new ways of reading this type of text that consider how the conditions of production both create and limit the spaces that nineteenth-century women writers have for expressing their lived realities.
Alicia Partnoy’s literary testimony, "The Little School. Tales of Disappearance and Survival in Argentina," was first published in English translation in 1986. The focus of this study is the original Spanish manuscript revised by the author and published twenty years later in Argentina under the title "La Escuelita. Relatos testimoniales." I address two aspects of said work that have not yet received due critical attention: the reinforcement of the testimonial function of the Spanish literary text due to its acceptance as legal evidence in the truth trials of 1999, and the role that the visual representations made by Raquel Partnoy, the author’s mother, play within the testimonial narrative. Departing from these images, I analyze the original ways in which La Escuelita attests to the transgressive use of fiction made by victims during captivity. I argue that rather than be opposed to referential testimony, fiction becomes here the lens through which victims relate to and make sense of the world. In a final reflection, I examine the distancing and identification effects that mark testimonial narrative, inserting that narrative in a broader discourse of solidarity and social justice which opens La Escuelita to the real. ** El testimonio literario de Alicia Partnoy, "The Little School. Tales of Disappearance and Survival in Argentina", apareció originalmente en traducción inglesa. El centro de este estudio es el manuscrito original español que la autora revisó y publicó en Argentina dos décadas después, bajo el título La Escuelita. Relatos testimoniales. Exploro dos aspectos que aún no han recibido la debida atención crítica: el refuerzo de la función testimonial del texto literario español después de que fuera aceptado como evidencia en los juicios de la verdad de 1999, y el papel que las representaciones visuales hechas por Raquel Partnoy, la madre de la autora, desempeñan dentro de esta narrativa testimonial. Partiendo de dichas imágenes, analizo los modos originales en que "La Escuelita" representa el uso transgresivo de la ficción hecho por las víctimas durante su cautiverio. Propongo que lejos de ser contraria al testimonio referencial, la ficción deviene aquí el prisma a través del cual las víctimas se relacionan con la realidad que buscan comprender. En una reflexión final, examino los efectos de distanciamiento e identificación que constituyen la narrativa testimonial, insertándola en un discurso más amplio de solidaridad y justicia social que abre La Escuelita a lo real.
The Socio-Editorial History of the Narrative Works of María de Zayas y Sotomayor
The Socio-Editorial History of the Narrative Works of María de Zayas y Sotomayor demonstrates that her preferred title of Honesto y entretenido sarao was changed by her editor to Novelas amorosas y ejemplares. The study demonstrates the inconsistencies between the text and the paratexts and shows how the subsequent pirate editions further distorted the text. The study also demonstrates the same inconsistencies in the author’s sequel Segunda parte del sarao y entretenimiento honesto.
The question at the root of this study is why the political formation of state power in Latin America always seems to be accompanied by violence against women. Two threads run throughout: an analysis of the relation between image, violence, and subject formation; and the application of this theory to the political violence exerted upon feminine subjectivity in relation to state formation in Latin America. I trace the marginalization of women through experimental dictatorial fiction of the Southern Cone up to the crisis of femicide that has emerged alongside the so-called narco-state in Mexico in the wake of NAFTA. I argue that Latin American feminist thought has sought to articulate itself as a post-hegemonic force of interruption from within the dominant order, a project that is problematized in the face of the perverse seriality of the femicide crimes and the intolerable yet enigmatic power of which they become a forced representation. The first chapter stages a close reading of Salvador Elizondo’s Farabeuf (1965), locating in the novel’s engagement with a photograph of the Chinese Leng Tch’é execution a theory of the relation between cut, image, and the female body that understands the subtraction of the feminine as the foundation of the political. The second chapter turns to the structure of dictatorial violence in Argentina, looking at Alejandra Pizarnik’s La condesa sangrienta (1965) and Luisa Valenzuela’s “Cambio de armas” (1982) alongside the Argentine Revolution and the Dirty War, respectively. Pizarnik’s meditation on Elizabeth Bathory’s crimes highlights both the fetishization of the subversive body and the inevitable failure of sovereign power to designate itself. Valenzuela’s fragmentary story deconstructs the notion of erasure at the heart of the regime’s use of forced disappearance by staging a perverse sexual relation within an environment of domestic confinement. The third chapter examines Diamela Eltit’s critique of neoliberalism during the Pinochet regime in Chile through her cinematographic novel Lumpérica (1983) before following this economic trail northward to the femicide crisis that has ravaged the Mexican-U.S. border since 1993. I demonstrate that both oppressive power structures—official and unofficial—are founded on the fusion of economic and gender violence. A reading of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 through the notion of the exquisite corpse situates this urgent crisis in relation to globalization and the postmodern world of images, technology, efficiency, and instantaneity for which it becomes a disturbing emblem.
The Same Old Story: Journalism, Activism, and the Post-policiaco in Mexico
Sunny Places for Shady People: El post-policiaco mexicano, 2018
The slaying of Mexican journalist/photographer Rubén Espinosa on July 31, 2015 prompted a wave of popular response by civil society demanding justice for the murder and disappearance of journalists in Mexico. Ruben’s story is all too familiar; it is a story told daily in newspapers across the country. However, contemporary authors such as Jorge Zepeda Patterson, Imanol Caneyada, Martín Solares, and Juan Pablo Villalobos are turning stories like Ruben’s into literature, telling a deeper, detailed, human story. Drawing on their works I argue that the Mexican post-policiaco has become a manifestation of Mexican society’s struggles with social and political chaos by reasserting Glen Close’s position in which, “the novela negra continues to thrive as a model for narrative reflection on the new urban violence” (56). Through action, suspense, violence, and “the rejection of the private investigator in favor of a journalist protagonist” (Close 151) these writers imagine possibilities of a better world and their work thus denounces present societal conditions and critiques institutions and people that are at the service of maintaining the status quo. Where Latin American crime fiction seemed to be known for suspending the solution to the crime, Mexican authors are becoming more explicit; in step with the activists and protestors in the streets, they make it clear: FUE EL ESTADO. The increase of voices calling for an end to impunity and Berna González Harbour’s assertion that, “la novela negra es la otra cara del periodismo” perhaps gives hope that the social fabric is mending, but the future looks bleak in a country where 98% of murder cases in 2012 went unsolved.