Depurar la poesía de la poesía misma: poesía, política y muerte en Estrella distante de Roberto Bolaño

Ángeles Donoso
Washington University in Saint Louis
Esta es mi última transmisión desde el planeta de los monstruos.
No me sumergiré nunca más en el mar de mierda de la literatura.
En adelante escribiré mis poemas con humildad y trabajaré para
no morirme de hambre y no intentaré publicar.
(Belano en Estrella distante)
Los que tienen el poder (aunque sea por poco [...]

Erasing the Invisible Cities: Italo Calvino and the Violence of Representation

John Welsh, University of Virginia
The unabashed “literariness” of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities makes it an easy target for critics who claim that “wholly literary” worlds cannot be moral ones. Alessia Ricciardi believes that Calvino’s late career represents an abandonment of his earlier sense of duty as an intellectual: “Sadly,” she explains “Calvino the mature postmodernist [...]

El discurso cinematográfico contemporáneo como metáfora política en tres muestras de cine rural violento español.

Pablo Martínez Diente
Vanderbilt University
Si los hombres del campo tuviéramos las tragaderas de los de las poblaciones, los presidios estarían desabitados como islas.
—Camilo José Cela, La familia de Pascual Duarte.

Apenas treinta años separan Pascual Duarte (1976) Los santos inocentes (1984) y El 7° día (2004), películas que sirven tanto de ejemplo de representación artística de la [...]

“Cuando el mundo se vuelve mundo”: La prueba de César Aira y caminos del acto

César Barros
Washington University in Saint Louis
San Agustín dijo que sólo Dios conoce el mundo, porque él lo hizo. Nosotros no, porque no lo hicimos. El arte entonces sería el intento de llegar al conocimiento a través de la construcción del objeto a conocer; ese objeto no es otro que el mundo. El mundo entendido como [...]

Roundtable – Rated R(epresentation): Violence in Romance Literatures and Cultures

Welcome to our second Working Papers roundtable discussion. In this issue our papers explore representations of violence and the violence of representation in literary media. The questions these papers propose, and the answers they venture, involve a complex nexus of issues. To what extent are textual practices violent acts? How are violent images deployed to undermine some identities and create others? What role does violence play in the proliferation of national, historical, ethnic, sexual and philosophical discourses? These are just a few of the problems under consideration in this issue.

In the space below, we have asked Emily Butterworth, Andrea Goulet, Crystal Hall and Craig Epplin a number of questions that address the problematic and suggestive relationship between violence and representation(s). Their varied responses indicates that there are numerous ways to approach the topic; in fact, when considered together, violence and representation are irreducible to one, singular interpretation or a stable interpretive model.

Roundtable: Wikidemia? Scholarly publishing on the World Wide Web

Welcome to the first Working Papers roundtable discussion. Our field of inquiry in the inaugural issue of our graduate journal is online publishing. A number of questions spring to mind when one considers the role of online publishing in academia. First, is it a relevant vehicle for academic writing? How will it affect [...]

When Last Words Become First Words: Transgressive Literacies and the Birth of Romance Textuality

Anthony P. Espòsito
University of Pennsylvania
I. Last words Balkan style: Philology and the Bosnia Syndrome (1898).
Last words, the theme for this series of articles that comes out of last spring’s graduate conference of the same name, are somewhat disconcerting for a philologist. Philology’s traditional obsession has usually been with first words — those first and [...]

La Huella Psicológica del Franquismo en el Cine Español de los Noventa

Joaquin Florido Berrocal
The Johns Hopkins University
El cine español ha sufrido durante las últimas décadas cambios generacionales que se han dejado notar en el producto final de muchos directores. Estos directores a los que aludo son un grupo bastante nutrido al cual haré referencia más adelante que han trabajado en la elaboración de un cine que, [...]

The story never ends: Rachid Mimouni’s Le Printemps n’en sera que plus beau and the production of counter-discourse in Algerian state-sponsored literature

Alexandra Gueydan-Turek
Yale University
In the process of post-colonial nation-building, the State often attempts to impose its own discourse as the sole source of national identity in order to homogenize the nation. In his influential work Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson notes the discrepancy between [...]

Memories in Orbit: Loss in Sergio Chejfec’s Los planetas

Noble Novitzki
University of Pennsylvania
The protagonist of Sergio Chejfec’s 1999 novel Los Planetas (known only by the initial S.), claims to have made the decision to become a writer only because of the disappearance of his friend from adolescence (known by the initial M.) who he declares was much more apt than he at telling stories. [...]