Anuario de Letras Modernas

23-39

Authors: Diego Mejía Estévez

This article describes various constituent elements of the character Lucien de Rubempré (Illusions perdues and Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes): the paratexts that allow us to understand his affiliations, his facet as a literary artist, his experience as a dandy and the inter-actions he has with other characters that seal his des-tiny. Through the dialogue with theoretical proposals and specific criticisms from among the many who have commented on Illusions perdues, especially here from the Italian environment, it is shown how different as-pects of the realistic method are closely linked to the construction of this hero and its settings. Comparisons with other fictional creatures of the same system, that is, the Comédie humaine, clearly exposes the author’s obsessions and the invariants he imprinted on some characters who became spokespersons of his poetics and worldview. It concludes by emphasizing, with various examples, the complexity and versatility of a hero that serves to establish metaliterary reflections and, above all, to link the destinies and adventures of other leading characters in the universe of the Comédie.

60-73

Authors: Gabriel Linares

This paper offers a reading of the sonnet “A John Keats (1795-1821),” by Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986). This sonnet was written as an homage one hundred and fifty years after the death of the last of the major British Romantics. It was published in 1972 in the book of poems El oro de los tigres. So far, when scholars have studied the relation between Borges and Keats, they have focused obliquely on the essay “El ruiseñor de Keats” by the Latin American author. In that sense, this paper concentrates on a lesser-known text that has not gotten much attention. The present reading deals with several aspects of the sonnet. First, it considers the metrical and argumentative aspects of the poem in relation to its double source—the English and the Spanish sonnet. This perspective allows for a better understanding of the formal complexity of the text. Then, the paper explores the means through which the praise of Keats is articulated. These means concern, first, syntactical and rhetorical aspects of Borges’s composition. Nevertheless, the sonnet weaves a rich net of allusions that refer not only to Keats’s works, but to texts by John Milton, George Gordon, Lord Byron, and Matthew Arnold. In this respect, the present paper explores not only the relations between the Argentinean and Keats, but also the relations between Borges and the lyric in English, a topic that still awaits further study.

91-105

Authors: Natin Guzmán Arce, Jimmy Ramírez Acosta, Sonia Rodríguez Salazar

This article shows one specific object of study using Corpus Linguistics: adjectives from a corpus of aca-demic texts from efl students collected between 2017 and 2018 revealing a dissimilar variety compared to native speakers’ corpus in similar types of texts. This nearly half a million corpus comprises students’ academic writings from two English Teaching majors and one English BA from the School of Literature and Language Sciences in Universidad Nacional in Heredia, Costa Rica. What the lexical unit of the study displays and what it reveals is surprisingly interesting because, as efl teachers, we expected a more diverse and profound use of adjectives as they are an important device in academic prose. Written texts seem to reflect a fault in the teaching and learning of this skill, calling for immediate attention to the matter. The use of the concordancer AntConc© as the linguistic analysis software selected to manage the lexical categories that the researchers picked as a starting point was truly significant in the methodological process. A corpus-driven approach was followed in this initial attempt to illustrate word choice in academic writings developed in the composition courses during the time period: English Integrated I, English Integrated II, Composition,and Essay. This study was longitudinal as it involved the same students’ writings during the two years of the corpus collection. General findings show that lexical complexity is deficient and suggest that more didactic efforts should be made to encourage the learning and acquisition of vocabulary, being the use of native speakers’ corpus one example of such strategies.

134-136

Authors: Alma Delia Miranda Aguilar

Lino, Patrícia. (2020). O Kit de Sobrevivência do Descobridor Português no Mundo Anticolonial. Edições Macondo.

10-27

Authors: Rocío Saucedo Dimas

This article proposes that prose and, more specifically, novelistic prose as a modern literary form and its affordances bear a connection with the notion of prosaism understood as a range of experiences determined by the conditions of modernity in Western societies. Withis this range, the tensions between the individual and the collectivity, especially in the form of the urban anonymous multitude, are of particular interest. Thus, the article first deals with the notion of the prosaism of modernity in its relationship with literary prose. Next, it discusses a number of theoretical and critical perspectives related to the affordances of the novel that have allowed it to dramatize the contradictory position of the individual, as posited by liberalism, and to evoke the form of his/her subjectivity through devices like characterization, free indirect style, focalization, among others. Finally, the article presents a reading of the character Sydney Carton from A Tale of Two Cities and his notional connections with the model of the individual.

44-57

Authors: Julia Isabel Eissa Osorio

The aim of this work is to analyze the vindication of the female role in the novel Los recuerdos del porvenir (1963) by Elena Garro (1916-1998), since the writer reviews the place that women have occupied in Mexican history and society, showing the numerous conflicts related to their social position, education received, stereotypes imposed, among others. However, the author, at the same time, tries to go beyond simple criticism and proposes a new vision for the problems of her female characters, either through innovation in narrative techniques (investment of time, new spaces, use of a female narrator), or by making the roles imposed by society on women more obvious, to show the absence of a free will or the lack of free will in female characters. All of the above in order to observe the construction of the role of women in the different roles and sectors of Mexican society, whether as daughter, mother, wife, lover, prostitute, and so on; and through the different eras of our country, fostering a reflection in the reader on female stereotypes in current Mexican society.

78-89

Authors: Dionísio Vila Maior

In the contemporary civilizational scenario, which is very much based on the culture of the immediate, often to the detriment of the human and humanist dimension, it becomes essential to provide habits and readings that can somehow contribute to the preservation, clarification, dissemination, and structuring of another memory, marked by reading and writing habits, by an awareness of the book as “source of the vitality of the spirit” (as George Steiner said), even if at the expense of resorting to hypertextual multivocalism. Knowing that neither Literature nor social conduct are static phenomena—and language, as Mikhaïl Bakhtine said, “vit et évolue historiquement dans la communication verbale concrète, non dans le système linguistique abstrait des formes de la langue, non plus que dans le psychisme individuel des locuteurs” (Bakhtine, 1977: 137; emphasis in original)—I will try to address, among other at-tached issues the need to grant confidence to the Humanities (and, in the specific case, to literature); the (absolute) necessity of the habit of writing and reading the literary text, in a universe increasingly marked by the new information and communication technologies that will polyphonically chromatize a digital culture with an interface dominated by the cybercultural and hypertextual power of webwriting and weblecture.

106-109

Authors: Claudia Ruiz García

BLANCHARD, Pascal; BANCEL, Nicolas; BOËTSCH, Guilles, TARAUD, Christelle; THOMAS, Dominic (Eds.). (2018). Sexe, race et colonies. La domination des corps du XVe siècle à nos jours. La Découverte.

11-29

Authors: Julieta Flores Jurado

This paper draws a comparison between two contemporary readings of the mythical character Eurydice: the poem “Eurydice”, from Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife, and the film Portrait of a Lady on Fire, directed by Céline Sciamma. Far from merely narrating the myth from a female point of view, the works by Duffy and Sciamma involve a rethinking of the story’s current resonances—particularly, the need for women to represent themselves under their own terms both in literature and film. To support this argument, both works center on the gaze and the creation of images as acts of power. By giving voice to those who have frequently been silenced, Duffy and Sciamma argue that representations that do not consider the creative contribution of women who pose will ultimately fail. Besides looking at the links and contrasts between Duffy’s poetry and Sciamma’s film, this paper follows Sciamma’s understanding of filmmaking as collab-oration, her rejection of the figure of the muse, and her desire to narrate a love story based on consent and equality. To conclude, I argue that Duffy’s later poems, specifically the love sonnets from her collection Rapture, continue this endeavor of enabling the representation of love between equals in the lyric.

44-60

Authors: Karen Elizabeth Flores Bonilla

The article aims to analyze the narrative strategies present in Alejo Carpentier’s The Harp and the Shadow (El arpa y la sombra,1979) that comprise what current literary theory has identified as the Latin American ‘new historical novel’. First, a brief description of the traditional historical novel and its context of appearance during the European romanticism of the 19th century is provided, based on Georg Lukács’s (1966) contributions, to differentiate its model from that of the subsequent production in this genre. The following is a general characterization of the historical novel written in Latin America from the last decades of the 20th century, to recognize the historical-social circumstances that led to its renewal and the features that determine it, together with the proposals of Menton (1993) and Aínsa (1991) on the fundamental role of Carpentier in its constitution. Finally, the study of each indicated feature—conscious distortion of histor-ical events, the fictionalization of significant historical figures, use of the first person in the narration, dialogism, and polyphony—is carried out to demonstrate the belonging of The Harp and the Shadow to this recent type of texts.

74-86

Authors: Emoé De la Parra

Is it possible that a movement so corrosive and evanescent as the one contrived by Beckett could have become a canon? What does it mean? Is it something to be desired? If it is a canon, what sort of fidelity does it entreat? To which paradigm or value does it owe its strength? What constitutes its betrayal and from what perspective can it be considered as such? And as a necessary inference, to what extent can or should the translation of a dramatic text into a stagingbecome a betrayal? The possibility that the transmutation to stage language of a text could or should be considered a betrayal of its original source has, in Beckett’s work, a particular interest due to the great tension that this topic has brought about both in the theoretical and in the dramatic aspects because of the exaggerated zeal of the holders of its legal rights. Through the careful analysis of Beckett’s stylistic uniqueness and his philosophical thesis, I ponder about the legitimacy of said zeal, and I question its relevance using the example of a particular staging of the short story “First Love”. This paper tries to show the distortions that take place when following an aesthetic canon unrestrictedly. It is also a thorough description of some of the processes required in a staging.

104-107

Authors: Rául Ariza Barile

TURNER, Marion. (2019). Chaucer: A European Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

11-28

Authors: Ana Elena González Treviño

The practice of including authorial portraits along with literary works may be found already in the marble busts of classical Antiquity. With the advent of the printed book, the use of this authorial marker acquired greater importance to he extent that it is sometimes an indispensable paratext for literary interpretation. Authorial portraits are based on processes of ethopoiesis, or the construction of character, circumscribed by prevailing values. A few typical models for the construction of the authorial persona are the following: the poet laureate, the romantic genius, the erudite nun, the courtesan, the exotic author; one of the most common poses is the melancholic pose. This article surveys a few meaningful examples.

46-64

Authors: Cynthia Lerma Hernández

Pantun is a fixed form of poetry(forme fixe) that came from Malaysia and which was introduced into French poetry in a peculiar way in the 19th century. The pantun began to spread through a translation from a note at the end of Victor Hugo’s "Les Orientales" and by other Arabic and Persian translations provided by a renowned orientalist of the time, Ernest Fouinet. Together, these series of translations participate in the justification of romantic aesthetics. After this first appearance, the pantun became subject of exploration throughout the 19th century. Some of its images are evoked insistently in various texts of some poets and their form encourages them to explore the effects of the alternate and organized repetition of the lines. Over time, “Harmonie du soir” by Beaudelaire has become the most immediate reference model of this poetic structure. The structure of the pantun developed in France possesses a unique mechanism of repetition of lines (the second and fourth lines of each stanza are taken up again in the first and third lines of the following) that creates an analogy that accurately distinguishes nature and experience. As well as observing the characteristics and conditions of its first insertion in Victor Hugo’s work, the purpose of this article is to reflect on the functions performed by a fixed form imported from another culture and the circumstances that allow its assimilation in French literary history.

84-97

Authors: Guillermo Badenes, Josefina Coisson

The form-content dilemma was extensively discussed by authors throughout the better part of the 20th century. Hayes (1975) relied on the translator’s common sense when approaching the art of literary translation. Taking a more descriptive approach, Ben-Ari (1992) and Shavit (1992) discussed specific features of literature in translation from German into Hebrew revising historical variables and understanding the canonical power of certain children’s books within the catalogue of the system under study. In English, as in Spanish, children’s literature lacks an important canonical pull. Nonetheless, there are certain specific examples such as the work of the great English authors of the 19th century, Lewis Carroll, Stevenson, or CS Lewis, which not only have become greatly influential in the English language but also in other languages, as is the case of Spanish. As the epitome of peripheral literary writing, translation—in this case the translation of children’s textualities—becomes a peripheral practice of a peripheral literature. If we consider that within the polysystem literary works tend to flux from central to peripheral positions and vice versa, we may conclude that it is important to open spaces for alternative cultures, a process that may rely heavily on translation. This paper aims at shedding light upon the strategies used by three different translators of three books belonging to the Dr. Seuss series. Our findings may give focus to Hayes’, Ben-Ari’s and Shavit’s ideas centering on children’s literature.

106-123

Authors: Sabina Longhitano Piazza

Traducción comentada de “Da Verga a Sciascia: la sfida dei siciliani”, conferencia de Antonio Di Grado

130-133

Authors: Claudia Ruiz García

Reseña de SCULL, Andrew. (2019). Locura y civilización. Una historia cultural de la demencia, de la Biblia a Freud, de los manicomios a la medicina moderna. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica.

10-20

Authors: Gabriela Villanueva-Noriega

This paper introduces the works of Daniel Defoe and Eliza Haywood in a com-parative manner while it examines each author’s role in the development of the English Novel during the eighteenth century and its legacy. To establish a point of contact between these two very different narrative styles, the paper focuses on the connection between body, writing, and control, and the dissimilar ways in which both authors convey bodily experience by means of narrative.

38-47

Authors: Bárbara Pérez Curiel

This paper examines the contribution of Eliza Haywood’s first work of amatory fiction, "Love in Excess; or the Fatal Enquiry", to the tradition of women’s critical writing that have questioned the hidden exclusions at the core of the European Enlightenment. "Love in Excess" addresses the dichotomy of reason versus emotion and the paradoxical expectations it imposed upon upper-class women during the European Enlightenment. Haywood’s exploration challenges this binary construction by showing the mutual interdependence of reason and passion, and by exposing the double standards on the basis of which women’s and men’s desires were regulated.

70-89

Authors: Julia Constantino Reyes

Since the 1970s translation theories have benefitted from their contact with social movements and theoretical and critical views from other disciplines. Such is the case of their links with different lines of feminist thought, gender studies, and queer theory, as well as feminist and LGBTIQ+ movements. Those links have reinvigorated the role and scope of translation in different social scenarios, and have supported self-reflection, the rise of other theoretical and critical ways of explaining the translation phenomenon in general, and its concrete outcomes. This article, as the beginning of a theoretical exploration, offers some views on translation as seen from performativity, particularly from repetition and difference—performativity taken as rising from speech acts and used in feminist and queer discussions that have provided them with immediate social, political, and theoretical meanings and uses as regards gender construction. Two elements are added to performativity—the body and emotions, which, taken from Douglas Robinson and Sara Ahmed’s work, turn out to be complementary just as they are crucial to approach gender and trans-lation. Putting these elements together points at the possibility of a more flexible theoretical view of translation, and the recognition of the active role of the reader and, more importantly, of the translator as agents in a performative process that can have an impact on social and cultural transformations. Likewise combining those terms and mechanisms allows for the resignification of traductological jargon and of concepts that define translation itself as a discipline and an activity, something that can lead to its redefinition as a field of knowledge, study, and practice.

96-99

Authors: Anaclara Castro Santana

Reseña de Rodríguez Álvarez, Argentina. (2017). The Links in the Chain: imágenes de la mujer en la literatura del siglo XVIII en Inglaterra. Ciudad de México: FFyL, UNAM.