On Identity or How Two Contemporary Spanish Novels Shape and Shake Up the Limits of the Self (original) (raw)
Related papers
Hispanic Review, 2015
The present study explores the relationship between generic ambiguity in Una vida (1914) and Manuel Aldano (1922) by the Guatemalan Rafael Arévalo Martínez, and the Darwinian/Spencerian discourse with which the narrator attempts to construct an identity that will grant him a legitimate speaking subjectivity in the face of his inability to adapt to the changes in the Spanish American letrado's role within societies at the periphery of modernization. Through an analysis of the narrator's development and the emerging relationships between sexuality, language, genre, and vision in Arévalo Martínez's short novels, the reader will note the irresolute tension between confession and realism that characterizes the narration. This tension is determined by the narrator's guilt at not being ''modern'' on the one hand, and on the other, his attempt to conform to the needs of the ciudad modernizada by constructing a ''proper'' identity and thereby justifying his right to reproduce and to speak. As a result, the works belie the inherent ambiguity of discourses on identity that produce the ambivalence that they are meant to eliminate, thus opening up the possibility of exploring less exclusionary alternatives to both generic definition and self-definition. Most of the sporadic literary criticism directed at the Guatemalan Rafael Arévalo Martínez's work has either situated it in the context of modernismo 1 1. Examples of this critical tendency are found in Manuel Antonio Arango (197), Arturo Arias (ii), Mario Alberto Carrera (46), Martin Erickson (48), Dante Liano (La palabra 88), Seymour Menton j 211
Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda: Border Crossings in Genre, Gender, Nation
Romance Studies, 2015
In the Hispanic World the nineteenth century witnessed a significant proliferation of women writers whose works were not only directed at a feminine audience. 1 These writers began to publish their work in women's and literary journals, these being the only available channels of expression at the time. Among these writers, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda stands out. As a woman writer, she had to face many obstacles when she tried to enter the literary world, then under total male domination, and had to adapt to the accepted cultural norms, expressing her subversive ideas without openly challenging the social conventions of patriarchy. Gómez de Avellaneda, whose birth bicentennial is celebrated in 2014, left Cuba bound for Spain in 1836, when she was twenty-four years old. She soon became not only a leading figure in literary salons, but also an active and prolific writer. She returned to Cuba with Colonel Domingo Verdugo, her second husband, at the end of 1859, receiving an enthusiastic welcome in her native land after twenty-three years' absence. She founded the magazine Álbum Cubano de lo Bueno y lo Bello (1860) and enjoyed unparalleled prestige as an acclaimed woman writer. Her husband served as Governor in Cuba where he died in 1863. Gómez de Avellaneda subsequently left Cuba; her own death on 1 February 1873 in Madrid went largely unnoticedsurprisingly, in view of her established literary status and reputation in cultural circles. Avellaneda's literary career spanned a period of thirty years, from the appearance of her first novel Sab in 1841 to the publication of her Obras Completas between 1869 and 1871. She was a leading woman intellectual and a prolific writer, publishing numerous collections of poetry, six novels, several plays, a collection of short stories (Leyendas), and two series of journalistic essays on women entitled 'La mujer' and 'Galería de mujeres célebres'. In addition, her literary legacy contains relevant autobiographical materials, which offer a rich source of information about her personal life-a life quite exceptional for a woman of her time-and helped establish her romantic persona.
This monograph explores a variety of iconic female literary and artistic representations of women identity within the contemporary plural and multicultural peninsular Hispanic context. The collected contributions apply different methodologies to characterise the definition and the evolution of female identity and its representations in literature (drama, poetry, novel, etc.), linguistics, art as well as media and cultural studies. Transgeneric, cross-cultural and transnational analyses, therefore, are used to stress the peculiar ways in which characterisation of women was and is produced in this specific area and time. Gender stereotyping can be considered a constant in the history of human relations, its linguistic expressions and representations of all kinds, and, consequently, also in literary and artistic ones. Women were (are?) often relegated within specific parameters (socio-cultural prejudices?) of subordination, dependence and (induced) vulnerability. These subjective and social perceptions and roles, that (men) have established and imposed from past times to the present day, have paralleled female action and selfrealisation by women writers and artists, their works and/or characters.
From Havana to Cádiz in the Imaginary of Women Writers of the Last Decades
Literature
In this essay, we intend to demonstrate how the cities of Havana and Cádiz became mutable literary subjects that accompany the female characters of the narratives of female writers of the past decades from Havana (Anna Lidia Vega Serova, Ena Lucía Portela, and Mylene Fernández Pintado) and Cádiz (Ana Rossetti and Pilar Paz Pasamar). The ironic and delusional visions of a ruined life due to the special period, economic crisis, and political xenophobia in Cádiz will be illustrated by Cuban-Spanish mapping of the analyzed authors’ works. Our hypothesis stems from the idea that there is a clear relation between the representation of the city and political, cultural, and patriarchal transgression that is quoted in these texts (Bataille), which relates to the experience of scarcity/poverty lived on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Our bibliographic search has focused on the literary expression of the experience of these cities from the point of view of female writers and protagonists. We...