Topoiesis de la recepción literaria

ABSTRACT

This article proposes a particular notion about “topoiesis,” focusing on the text reception point of view. Initially, it establishes a theoretical framework using useful concepts from hermeneutics and post-structuralism, to later discuss the real existence of a dialogue or a “fusion of horizons” in which a “sense of space” of a text would be blended in the meeting point between textuality and the reader. Finally, through this space we propose a categorization of the different types of “topoiesis” of literary reception, establishing correspondences with the concept of “enunciative instances” in the text space, detailed in another article.     

Estimating the Number of Combatants during the Mixtón War in the Peñol de Nochistlán

Abstract

The objective of this article is to determine the number of combatants in the Mixtón War (1541–42), one of the most important military confrontations of the early years of the vice-royalty in Western Mexico, by analysing the Peñol de Nochistlán. To this end, information provided by historians has been compared with the population estimates established from the density of settlements known from archaeological evidence in order to define the area occupied by the armies involved in the conflict. This exercise resulted in a shifting array of spaces that could have been used by the combatants during confrontations. However, it will enable more intense archaeological prospecting in the area around the site of El Tuiche — the place identified as the Peñol of Nochistlán — revealing new evidence of the events that occurred on this battlefield.     

La destrucción y la creación en Los siameses y Flores de papel

Many Hispanic American plays of the twentieth century, such as Flores de papel and Los siameses, among others, depict the social-economic imbalance visible among the different social classes. This inequality is seen as inevitable, forcing the working class first to destroy elements of the status quo, in order then to construct a new reality. Thus it attempts to produce radical changes, including the alteration or reconstruction of the class system itself, through destruction-construction of the surrounding reality. Hence, the dramatists, considering the role of the theater and of the writer, present these struggles and class discrepancies in an attempt to find a solution to the problems of their characters' social environment.     

Francisco Faleiro and Scientific Methodology at the Casa de la Contratación in the Sixteenth Century

Henricus Martellus's four world maps of c.1489 show a non‐existent Asian peninsula east of the Aurea Chersonesus (the Malay peninsula). For some decades a group of scholars in Latin America has been claiming that this so‐called ‘Dragon's Tail’ peninsula is really a pre‐Columbian map of South America. In this paper, the cartographical and place‐name evidence is examined, showing that the identification has not been proved, and that perceived similarities between the river and coastal outlines on this ‘Dragon's Tail’ peninsula and those of South America are fortuitous. Ptolemy's depiction of an enclosed Indian Ocean was invalidated when Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope. Consequently, a year or two later, Martellus adapted the east Asian section of Ptolemy's world map, providing China with an east coast and turning the southward extension of Asia into a peninsula. The non‐Ptolemaic place‐names on these maps were derived from Marco Polo's writings.     

Las estrategias del juego áulico en las comedias mitológicas de Calderón de la Barca

This article studies the particular case of the mythological plays of Calderón that form a cohesive and recognizable set of works in certain circumstances. This kind of comedy is modulated by specific issues of reception, under the dominant global principle of playfulness, through the mechanisms of admiratio, and different strategies of courtly game that can be summarized in four basic areas: conventional comicity, the writing of a theater full of sensorismo, the importance of the intellect games, and finally, the strategies to point identity marks of a particular social group.     

Espacios locales y espacios trascendentales de la conversión: las Postrimerías de Carabuco y la producción performativa de epistemologías transculturales

The monumental paintings of the Postrimerías [Four Last Things] from the church of Carabuco (1684) serve as objects to study the complex dynamics of the visual and performative production of religious knowledge in a colonial contact zone. The article presents different ‘readings’ of the series that focus on possible uses and receptions of the paintings by local actors. These readings are based, on the one hand, on the idea of conceiving the series as a ‘cycle of meditation’ and product of the influences of Christian mysticism that played an important role in the ‘eschatological politics of conversion’ of the southern Andean Highlands. On the other hand, the paintings relate the eschatological message with the local hagiographic narratives of a pre-Hispanic apostle associated simultaneously with the Christian apostle Bartholomew and the Andean deity Tunupa—the most important figure of Aymara mythology. These works therefore represent objects of memory that participate in the local construction of time and space and that refer not only to Christian eschatological concepts but also to local Andean ontologies.     

La exportación de la Ilustración Peruana. De Alejandro Malaspina a José Ignacio de Lecuanda (1794–1799)

Este artículo analiza la desconocida divulgación de la ilustración peruana en Madrid a partir del discurso que sobre la ‘idea del Perú’ impulsó la Sociedad de Amantes del País en el Mercurio Peruano a fines del siglo XVIII. Este proyecto utilitario de los mercuristas se hizo manifiesto durante tres momentos: primero, en la confección del informe político sobre el Perú que redactó el marino ilustrado Alejandro Malaspina en 1795; segundo, en la divulgación que impulso el ilustrado vasco José Ignacio de Lecuanda en las páginas del periódico titulado Viajero Universal en 1798; tercero, en el diseño que patrocinó el propio Lecuanda en el Cuadro de historia civil, natural y geográfica del Perú pintado por Luis Thiebaut (1799). El estudio discute las razones por las cuales Malaspina y Lecuanda creyeron que la exportación de este proyecto ilustrado iba a convertir al Perú en un reino utilitario para la Monarquía hispánica.     

Donald Bán and the Bócan

Although ATU 510A, ‘Cinderella’, is known to have ancient origins, it was widely thought that the ash-name did not become a feature of the tale type until Giambattista Basile’s ‘La Gatta cenerentola’ (The Ashy Cat) in the seventeenth century. However, it is preceded in this regard by a little-known fourteenth-century Icelandic romance, Vilmundar saga viðutan (The Saga of Vilmundr the Outsider). Using this saga as a starting point, this article traces the literary transmission of ATU 510A through the extant corpus of Old Norse literature, with particular reference to the development of three key aspects of ‘Cinderella’: the persecuted heroine; the lost-and-found shoe; and the cinder-name.     

La ejecución de Atahuallpa: Símbolo andino de colapso y resistencia

This article studies Los dramas de Atahuallpa (Atahuallpa's Dramas) as an oral and ritual memory of the Andean natives. In those texts are traces of the resistance of the European domination initiated during the middle of the sixteenth century. They also recall the destruction of the Inca empire. The discussion points out the work done by the panaca, a Tahuantisuyo institution dedicated to preserving the memory of each Incan emperor's public life. During the twentieth century and the present years of the twenty-first, the tradition of representing Atahuallpa's death has been an expression of the political projects built by the native Andean as well as a symbol of the resistance against the conquest and its results.