Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at the image of the loyal black slave in the novel As tardes de um pintor, ou as intrigas de um jesuíta, by the relatively unknown nineteeth-century Brazilian writer Antônio Gonçalves Teixeira e Sousa

Paper long abstract:

This paper looks at the image of the loyal black slave in the novel As tardes de um pintor, ou as intrigas de um jesuíta (1847), by the 19th century Brazilian Romantic writer Antônio Gonçalves Teixeira e Sousa. Teixeira e Sousa is recognised as the author of Brazil's first novel, O filho do pescador (1843). However, repeated criticism of Teixeira e Sousa's poor writing style within later (mainly twentieth-century) literary criticism has detracted significant value from Teixeira e Sousa's novels. Subsequently, little extensive research has been undertaken into Teixeira e Sousa's writings.

In contrast to twentieth-century criticism, recent studies suggest that Teixeira e Sousa's writings achieved a significant level of popularity among the literate members of Brazilian society during the nineteenth century, and even among more eminent Brazilian writers of the time, such as José de Alencar. In light of these studies, this paper proposes a more in-depth study of Teixeira e Sousa's novels. In particular, it focuses on Teixeira e Sousa's representation of the loyal black slave in his 1847 novel, which offers an alternative to the more popular Indianist element of Brazilian Romanticism. Looking into Teixeira e Sousa's own life history, and drawing on comparative cultural and literary occurrences, this paper discusses why the Brazilian Romantic chose to write so explicitly, and positively, about slavery at a time when Brazil was coming under increasing pressure to end the slave trade and abolish slavery. Key to this discussion are the concepts of education, race, and miscegenation.

Paper short abstract:

In this comparative study of Las batallas en el desierto and Vidas perpendiculares I look at the changes in the relationship between Mexican writers and history by contrasting two bildungsromans set in the 1940s and their approaches to memory and identity, particularly their ideas of nostalgia.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I explore identity and memory through a comparative reading of José Emilio Pacheco's Las batallas en el desierto (1981) and Álvaro Enrigue's Vidas perpendiculares (2008). Through the operation of recollection, these bildungsromans underscore their historical setting in 1940s Mexico as a conflictive stage for the development of the characters' self-definition. However, while Pacheco engages with the relationship between history, memory and the self through an uncertain literary nostalgia, Enrigue subverts the process of remembering using narrative fragmentation and dislocation. These differences hint to a transformation in the relations between the writer and the past.

Las batallas is a central book for the Mexican canon. The coming-of-age tale of young Carlos is marked by the reflective exercise of memory that, from a seemingly innocent first-person narration, introduces a poignant sociopolitical criticism and it has been widely studied for its uses of history and memory. Vidas perpendiculares, on the other hand, has received little critical attention. The novel is the sardonic autobiography of a multi-reincarnated being written during the character's life as a Mexican teenager. Through formal, spatial and temporal disruptions of the narrative, Enrigue challenges memory as a source of identity and questions the possibility of nostalgia by ironically subverting the experience of the past.

This paper contributes to the debate regarding the transformations in the relationship between Mexican writers and history. It does so through the exploration of the tensions between the works of a highly praised, canonical text and a lesser-known, very recent novel.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the literature of the Peruvian writer Carlos Yushimito del Valle, whom in 2010, the British literary magazine Granta, named one of the best 22 young writers in Spanish language under the age of thirty-five. Yushimito del Valle is a writer but also a prolific literary critic and scholar.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the literature of the Peruvian writer Carlos Yushimito del Valle, whom in 2010, the British literary magazine Granta, named one of the best 22 young writers in Spanish language under the age of thirty-five. Yushimito del Valle is not only a writer but also a prolific literary critic and scholar who is part of a new generation of intellectuals that is changing the landscape of Latin American literature.

A Peruvian citizen of Japanese descent, Yushimito del Valle resides in the United States but his creative work frequently brings him to Latin America and Europe. His literature is influenced by a tradition of great Latin American narrators including Felisberto Hernandez and Guimaraes Rosa, as well as the poetic voices of Cesar Vallejo and Walt Whitman, and the thought of Walter Benjamin.

This paper examines his second book, Las Islas, a collection of eight short-stories set in Brazil, which Yushimito has never visited. Critics throughout Latin America and Spain have praised this work for its originality and hypnotizing effect in capturing the reader's attention. Additionally, this paper analyzes the influence of the author's multi-national background on his writing.

Paper short abstract:

My reading of Rayuela has revealed a Neo-Plastic figura that is formed out of resonances, tensions and intersections between opposite elements in the novel, mirroring Piet Mondrian’s use of the grid.

Paper long abstract:

The concept of the figura has fascinated critics in their study of not only Rayuela (1963) but of the entire cortazarean body of work. For many, the figura has proved to be mysterious and indecipherable. Others have successfully identified some of its constitutive parts such as 'reciprocity' and 'resonance'.

In Rayuela, the author, Julio Cortázar, explicitly extends an invitation to the reader to 'trazar imaginativamente [las líneas] que [cierran] la figura' (Cortázar 1996, 383). He suggests that in the novel there are already present 'ciertas líneas' that carry 'una incitación' for the reader to complete the figura. Cortázar stresses that 'las líneas ausentes son las más importantes' (Cortázar 1996, 386). Taking this as a basis, we can affirm that the figura is the result of a collaboration between Cortázar and the reader. Not only this, the figura is something unfinished, a 'work in progress' that depends on the creative abilities of the reader (read here as 'intentionality'). This means that the figura is an element of interpretation and therefore we can say that in Rayuela there is not one but many figuras.

This paper investigates one of the figuras of Rayuela by firstly identifying the lines that are already present, and secondly, by finding the missing ones. This is done by looking into the 'clues' of the novel and into Cortázar's ideas and beliefs about reality (what I call 'crystallization').

Paper short abstract:

This paper reexamines Julio Cortázar’s canonical short story collection _Todos los fuegos el fuego_ (1966). Whereas critics have often opposed his ‘closed’ short stories with his ‘open’ multi-media works, my contention is that his short stories are in fact intrinsically intermedial.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I shall reexamine one of Julio Cortázar's most canonical texts: the 1966 short story collection _Todos los fuegos el fuego_. It is by now a commonplace of Cortázar criticism to oppose his 'closed' short stories with his 'open' multi-media works - an opposition which Cortázar himself helped to construct in his famous 1962 lecture 'Algunos aspectos del cuento'. Against this critical trend, I shall argue that his short stories in fact enclose and preempt the logic of his experimental collage works, particularly _Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires_ (1968) and _Fantomas contra vampiros multinacionales_ (1975). Moreover, their fragmentary form will be linked with that of the different media advertised in the journals in which Cortázar published his work in the 1960s, Visión and Confirmado: notably, photography, cinema and telephony. Close readings of two short stories, 'Todos los fuegos el fuego' and 'El otro cielo', will enable me to argue that these seemingly hermetic, literary stories are in fact intrinsically outward-looking and intermedial. My contention is that it is precisely the dialectical relation between closure and openness, containment and uncontainment, that underpins the aesthetics of the short story.