Bücher der Reihe Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures

The analysis of the three authors' proverbs through comparisons with classical, medieval, and early modern collections of maxims and sententiae provides insights on the fluidity of such expressions, and illustrates the tight relationship between proverbs and sociocultural factors.

On Emerging from Hyper-Nation represents Ronald W. Sousa's attempt to answer the question, "e;Why do I smile on reading one of Saramago's 'historical' novels?"e; Why that reaction of emotional release? To answer the "e;smile question"e; the book engages in a critical mode that could be described as "e;discourse analysis."e; It combines several critical strains and relies on basic concepts from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, Adlerian psychology, and contemporary cognitive psychology for their discourse-analytical value rather than as entrees into psychoanalytical reading per se. The introductory chapter presents some of the concepts that underlie that compound analytical modality and sets out an overview of twentieth-century Portuguese social and economic history. Then, with an eye to answering the "e;smile question,"e; the book reads Nobel Laureate Jose Saramago's three novels, Baltasar and Blimunda (1982), The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984), and The History of the Siege of Lisbon (1989). Or, better, it seeks to read Sousa's own reading of the three works, since focus falls on how each novel seeks to construct both its own reading and also Sousa as its reader. The discussion brings to light a number of textual phenomena that bear upon the "e;smile question."e; Among them are that the novels invoke, often subtly, the fascist hermeneutical heritage remaining from before the revolution of 1974 as a constituent part of their communication with the reader; that they summon up historical trauma; that they function as Freudian-style "e;tendentious jokes"e;; and that, through these various invocations, they seek to constitute a postrevolutionary Portuguese subject. The reading of Sousa's reading, then, ends up being a reading of some of the cultural forces at work in postrevolutionary Portugal.

Regardant les questions de tmoignage, de confession, detraumatisme, de sexualit et de violence dans les A uvres (semi-)autobiographiques,ce livre explore la co-construction d'identits personnelles et collectives pardes femmes crivains l're des mdias et de l'autoreprsentation. unepoque o la littrature franaise est souvent accuse d'tre gocentrique ettrop narcissique, Mercds Baillargeon avance que l'autofiction des femmes at reue avec controverse depuis le tournant du millnaire parce qu'elleperturbe les ides reues propos des identits nationale, de genre et de race,et parce qu'elle questionne la distinction entre fiction et autobiographie. Eneffet, ces crivaines se distinguent du reste de la production franaiseactuelle, car elles cultivent une relation particulirement tumultueuse avecleur public, cause de la nature trs personnelle, mais galement politique deleurs textes semi-autobiographiques et cause de leurs performances comme personnalit publique dans les mdias. On y examine donc simultanment lafaon dont les mdias stigmatisent ces crivaines ainsi que la manire dont cesdernires manipulent la culture mdiatique comme une extension de leur A uvrelittraire. Ce livre analyse ainsi simultanment les implications textuelles etsociopolitiques qui sous-tendent la (d)construction du sujet autofictionnel,et en particulier la faon dont ces crivains se redfinissent constamment travers la performance rendue possible par les mdias et la technologie. Deplus, ce travail soulve des questions importantes par rapport la relationcomplexe qu'entretiennent les mdias avec les femmes crivains, en particuliercelles qui discutent ouvertement de traumatisme, de sexualit et de violence,et qui remettent galement en question la distinction entre ralit et fiction. Cet ouvrage contribue une meilleure comprhension des rapports de pouvoir misen jeu dans l'autofiction, tant au niveau de la production que de la rceptiondes A uvres. Privilgiant l'autofiction comme phnomne principalement franais,cet ouvrage s'intresse la valeur politique de ce genre semi-autobiographiquepar-del sa mort annonce avec la disparition de la littrature engage del'aprs-guerre et des avant-gardes des annes 50-60, dans le contexte franaiset francophone actuel, travers par une crise des identits, lemulticulturalisme et une redfinition du nationalisme travers l'criture.The Personal Is Political: Media, Aesthetics and Politics in the Autofiction of Christine Angot, Chlo Delaume and Nelly ArcanLooking at questions of testimony, confession, trauma,sexuality, and violence in (semi-) autobiographical works, this book explores the co-construction of personal and collectiveidentities by women writers in the age of self-disclosure and mass media. In a time when literature is accused of being self-centeredand overly narcissistic, women's autofictionin France since the turn of the millennium has been received with controversybecause it disrupts readily accepted ideas about personal andnational identities, gender and race, and fiction versus autobiography. Through the study of polemical writersChristine Angot, Chlo Delaume, and Nelly Arcan, Mercds Baillargeon contendsthat, by recounting personal stories of trauma and sexuality, and thus opposing themselves in opposition to social convention, and by refusing to dispel doubtsregarding the fictional or factual nature of their texts, autofiction resists and helps redefine categories of literary genreand gender identity. This book analyzes concurrently the textual andsociopolitical implications that underlie the (de)construction of the autofictional subject, and particularlyhow these writers constantly redefine themselves through performance andself-fashioning made possible by media and technology. Moreover, this workraises important questions relating to the media's complicated relationshipwith women writers, especially those who discuss themes of trauma, sexuality,and violence, and who also question the distinction between fact and fiction. Proposing a new understanding of autofictionas a form of littrature engage, this work contributes to a broader understanding of the French publishingestablishment and of the literary field as a cultural institution, as well asnew insight on shifting notions of identity, the Self, and nationalism intoday's ever-changing and multicultural French context.

Este libro intenta mostrar la representacin textual de las islas Galpagos desde su descubrimiento hasta nuestros das. El argumento principal sugiere que la descripcin de este espacio crucial para la modernidad, dada la retrica de los escritores de viajes y ficcin, transforma el rea insular para concebir formas alternativas del proyecto de construccin nacional en Amrica Latina. Como resultado de las empresas coloniales, excursiones cientficas, crnicas periodsticas o expediciones, la escritura de viaje de las Galpagos condiciona la formacin del estado y su imaginario nacional. Esto ocurre por el capital simblico que posee archipilago y por el deseo de los intelectuales latinoamericanos de pertenecer a un territorio cosmopolita.El espacio insular funciona como un significante vaco donde los viajeros pueden comunicar su propio significado al narrar las experiencias de sus viajes. Este fenmeno crea una divisin conceptual y poltica entre la identidad de las islas y la nacin ecuatoriana. Dichas ambigedades narrativas crearon una ruptura que condujo a variaciones fundamentales en la forma en que los habitantes locales y entidades extranjeras interpretan las Galpagos hoy en da, ya que su literatura refleja una tensin particular de cara a las tendencias migratorias en las islas, as como los intereses globales que prevalecen en la apropiacin del espacio. This book, written in Spanish, takes a literary and cultural studies model to explain the textual representation of the Galpagos Islands since their discovery until present day. The main argument suggests that the depiction of this crucial space for modernity in Western thought, given the rhetoric of travel and fiction writers, transforms the insular area with the intention of conceiving disparate forms of political displacement. Specifically, these depictions show several conflicts that arose from the seeking of identity in Ecuador during the nation-building project that took place at the time. As a result of colonial enterprises (scientific excursions, exile, tourism, journalistic pieces, expeditions, etc.), travel writings of the Galpagos condition the formation of the state and its national imagery because of the extreme symbolic capital of the archipelago and the desire of Latin American intellectuals to belong to a cosmopolitan territory.

Don Quixote continues to inspire and to challenge its readers. The universal appeal of the novel, however, has distanced its hero from its author and its author from his own life. This discussion of the novel's Catholic identity, therefore, returns Cervantes's hero to Cervantes's text and Cervantes to the events that shaped his life.

Examines the connections between artistic production and political action. This book focuses on the politics of the black movement and the literary production of a Sao Paulo-based group of Afro-Brazilian writers, the Quilombhoje.

Traces the history of utopian representations of the Americas, first on the part of the colonizers, who idealized the New World as an earthly paradise, and later by Latin American modernizing elites, who imagined Western industrialization, cosmopolitanism and consumption as a utopian dream for their independent societies.

Argues that the portrayal in poetry of the modern city as a disintegrated, ruined space is part of a critique of the visions of progress and the historical process of modernization that developed during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century.

Explores the processes and works that laid the foundations of a new literary modernity in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. This book focuses on a period that goes from the signing of the Constitution in 1917 to the death of Alfonso Reyes in 1959.

Rojas' Celestina (1499) and Delicado's La Lozana andaluza (1530) were written during the height of the Spanish Inquisition. This book shows through textual evidence that these two authors used superficial bawdiness and claims regarding the morality of their respective works as cover to encode attacks against the central dogmas of Christianity.

Although the boom in historical fiction and historiography about Spain's recent past has found an eager readership, these texts are rarely studied as two halves of the same story. With Genre Fusion: A New Approach to History, Fiction, and Memory in Contemporary Spain, Sara J. Brenneis argues that fiction and nonfiction written by a single author and focused on the same historical moment deserve to be read side-by-side. By proposing a literary model that examines these genres together, Genre Fusion gives equal importance to fiction and historiography in Spain. In her book, Brenneis develops a new theory of "e;genre fusion"e; to show how authors who write both historiography and fiction produce a more accurate representation of the lived experience of Spanish history than would be possible in a single genre. Genre Fusionopens with a straightforward overview of the relationships among history, fiction, and memory in contemporary culture. While providing an up-to-date context for scholarly debates about Spain's historical memory, Genre Fusion also expands the contours of the discussion beyond the specialized territory of Hispanic studies. To demonstrate the theoretical necessity of genre fusion, Brenneis analyzes pairs of interconnected texts (one a work of literature, the other a work of historiography) written by a single author. She explores how fictional and nonfictional works by Montserrat Roig, Carmen Martin Gaite, Carlos Blanco Aguinaga, and Javier Marias unearth the collective memories of Spain's past. Through these four authors, Genre Fusion traces the transformation of a country once enveloped in a postwar silence to one currently consumed by its own history and memory. Brenneis demonstrates that, when read through the lens of genre fusion, these Spanish authors shelve the country's stagnant official record of its past and unlock the collective and personal accounts of the people who constitute Spanish history.

Grounded in his disciplinary experience in both literary and mathematical studies, Vargas attempts to unearth the overlaps and connections between science and art, thus offering a new critical apparatus with which scholars can study Jose Lezama Lima's works.

Examines the practice of philanthropy in modern Spain. Through detailed studies of popular music, collective readings, dramas, working-class manuals, and fiction, Vialette reveals how depictions of urban philanthropic activities can inform our understanding of interactions in the economic, cultural, religious,and educational spheres, class power dynamics, and gender roles in urban Spanish society.

Examines the aesthetic history and relations between Cuban film production and Italian Neorealism. The historical framework begins in 1951 before the triumph of the Cuban Revolution and ends in 1962, a year that marks a rupture between Cuban filmmakers and the Italian neorealist aesthetic.

Whereas all texts produced in Iberia during the early modern period reflect the distinct social, political, and cultural realities sweeping across the peninsula to some degree, Portuguese literature written in Spanish offers a unique vantage point from which to see these converging landscapes.

Artesana de sí misma reevalua el lugar de Gabriela Mistral, premio Nobel de literatura, en la historia literaria e intelectual de America Latina. Cabello Hutt acerca a los lectores a la amplia, pero escasamente estudiada, prosa periodistica de Mistral ademas de un conjuncto de manuscritos, cartas e imagenes provenientes de archivas norteamericanos y chilenos así como del recientemente abierto archivo de su albacea y companera, Doris Dana. Artesana de sí misma explora mas alla de la ampliamente estudiada poesia de Mistral y demuestra que su prosa, representacion visual y performatividad de genero son claves para comprender la auto-construccion de esta figura como una intelectual latinoamericana y una escritora de reconocimiento internacional.Artesana de sí misma by Claudia Cabello-Hutt reevaluates the place of Nobel laureateGabriela Mistral in the literary and intellectual history of Latin America, illuminating andfilling a number of lingering voids in the study of this canonical figure. Cabello-Hutt introduces readers to Mistral¿s vast but scarcely studied journalisticprose as well as her unpublished manuscripts, letters, and images held in theUnited States and in newly openedChilean archives. Moving beyond her amply discussed poetry, Cabello-Hutt demonstrates that Mistral¿s essays,visual representations, and gender performance are key to understanding Mistral¿sself-construction as a Latin American female intellectual and internationallyrecognized writer.

After being an exporter of economic migrants for almost a century, Spain has seen itself on the receiving end of immigration. This title examines the anxiety over symbolic and literal boundaries permeating the Spanish reception of these immigrants through an interdisciplinary analysis of social, fictional, and performative texts.

Explores how Emilia Pardo Bazan (1851-1921) imagines and engenders the Spanish nation in her theatrical production staged and/or published between 1898 and 1909. In the aftermath of Spain's colonial losses, Pardo Bazan generated a series of theatrical proposals to revitalize the nation.

Historically a source of emigrants to Northern Europe and the New World, Italy has rapidly become a preferred destination for immigrants from the global South. Marvelous Bodies by Vetri Nathan explores thirteen key full-length Italian films released between 1990 and 2010 that treat this remarkable moment of cultural role reversal through a plurality of styles.

The importance of fashion in the construction and representation of gender and the formation of modern society in nineteenth-century Spanish narrative is the focus of Dorota Heneghan's Striking Their Modern Pose. The study moves beyond traditional interpretations that equate female passion for finery with symptoms of social ambition and the decline of the Spanish nation, and brings to light the manners in which nineteenth-century Spanish novelists drew attention to the connection between the complexities of fashionable female protagonists and the shifting limits of conventional womanhood to address the need to reformulate customary ideals of gender as a necessary condition for Spain to advance in the process of modernization. The project also sheds light on an area largely unexplored by previous studies: men's pursuit of fashion. Through the analysis of the richness of sartorial subtleties in Benito Perez Galdos's and Emilia Pardo Bazan's portraits of their male characters, this book brings forward these writers' exposure of the much-denied bourgeois men's love for self-adornment and the incoherencies and contradictions in the allegedly monolithic, stable concept of nineteenth-century Spanish masculinity. While highlighting the ways in which the art of dressing smartly provided nineteenth-century Spanish novelists with effective means to voice their critique of conventional gender order, the book also lends insight into these authors' methods of manipulating sartorial signs to explore and to envision (as in the case of Pardo Bazan and Jacinto Octavio Picon) alternative models of masculinity and femininity. Threading through all chapters of the study is the idea propagated by all three of these writers that Spain's full integration into modernity required not only the redefinition of the feminine role, but the reconfiguration of the masculine one as well.

This book is the first full-length study to examine Moliere's evolving (and at times contradictory) authorial strategies, as evidenced both by his portrayal of authors and publication within the plays and by his own interactions with the seventeenth-century Parisian publishing industry. Historians of the book have described the time period that coincides with Moliere's theatrical activity as centrally important to the development of authors' rights and to the professionalization of the literary field. A seventeenth-century author, however, was not so much born as negotiated through often acrimonious relations in a world of new and dizzying possibilities.The learning curve was at times steep and unpleasant, as Moliere discovered when his first Parisian play was stolen by a rogue publisher. Nevertheless, the dramatist proved to be a quick learner; from his first published play in 1660 until his death in 1673, Moliere changed from a reluctant and victimized author to an innovator (or, according to his enemies, even a swindler) who aggressively secured the rights to his plays, stealing them back when necessary. Through such shrewdness, he acquired for himself publication privileges and conditions relatively unknown in an era before copyright.As Moliere himself wrote, making people laugh was "e;une etrange entreprise"e; (La Critique de L'Ecole des femmes, 1663). To an even greater degree, comedic authorship for the playwright was a constant work in progress, and in this sense, "e;Moliere,"e; the stage name that became a pen name, represents the most carefully elaborated of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin's invented characters.