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.     

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.     

Jerusalén celestial en los Andes: apropiación iconográfica y autorrepresentación en la pintura mural tardo-colonial

Este artículo estudia la pintura mural de finales del período colonial como fenómeno de un cristianismo andino transcultural y agente. La investigación rastrea y analiza la representación de iglesias locales (en tanto autorrepresentadas en sus propios muros), observando en el motivo iconográfico la apropiación comunitaria del arte de la evangelización y la configuración de identidades locales en nuevas formas visuales. Se destacan las redes de referencia visual de estas imágenes con representaciones coetáneas, así como también su contraste con las técnicas del control doctrinario y con los registros documentales, con el objetivo de comprender la epistemología del espacio religioso forjada en los poblados indígenas de los siglos XVIII y XIX.     

El rey que fue animal: sobre la invención del otro en Calderón,Dostoievski y Coetzee

The aim of this article carries a comparison between Calderón and Dostoevsky, their semblances and differences. First, I study a relationship toward otherness which is, in both cases, problematic and modern. Departing from Segismundo's complaints when he is imprisoned (saying that he is living a life “worse than animals live”) I analyze two kinds of misunderstandings: a white blindness that respects the Other's difference, and the evil inside its unconcealment. Finally, I discuss Coetzee's Dostoevsky (in The Master of Petersburg) in relation to some of the thesis outlined previously: the necessity of respect when dealing with the space of the other, either in its human form or in a non-human presentation.     

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.     

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.     

Conciencia nacional y devoción jacobea en el Poema de Fernán González

Jacobean devotion and national awareness are closely related in the Poema de Fernán González (PFG). The great advance of the Reconquest in the thirteenth century and the reevaluation of the past that it caused enabled the broad Hispanic perspective of the PFG. Spain is not only a distant and longed-for reality (“regnum Gothorum”) but a current political concept. This is the frame of the PFG's intense Castilian sentiment. Castile is the bastion of the Visigothic monarchy, which did not yield to the Muslims and was the foundation for the recovery of Spain. The territorial diversity becomes the outstanding feature of this country, in which the “Montaña” takes an important role. Confronting the proposal of the cult of Saint Millán by the Monastery of San Millán de la Cogolla, the author of the PFG, aware of the damages that such a cult was causing to his monastery, clings to the Jacobean devotion that achieved a broad Hispanic scope.     

Literatura y realidad histórica en Las conversiones de Martín Recuerda

Abstract

Kathleen M. Glenn and Mercedes Mazquiarán de Rodríguez, eds. Spanish Women Writers and the Essay. Gender, Politics, and the Self. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998. 294 pp. $34.95.

Watson, Janell. Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust. The Collection and Consumption of Curiosities. Cambridge University Press, 1999. x + 227 pp.

Anne J. Cruz. Discourses of Poverty: Social Reform and the Picaresque Novel in Early Modern Spain. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. 320 pp.