Anuario de Letras Modernas

13-21

Authors: Ana Elena González Treviño

The manipulation of reality in the style of Calderón’s "Life is a Dream" produces a narrative structure organized in planes related to metafiction. This structure may be found as well in stories from The Arabian Nights. This essay intends to describe and typify the aforementioned manipulation by referring to the tales of “The Sleeper Awakened”, “The Story of Prince Camaralzaman” and “The Story of Nouredin Ali and Bedredin Hassan”. Whereas in contemporary metafiction it is usually the author who manipulates reality, in Calderón’s play and in these three tales it is a character endowed with power, either natural or supernatural, who interrupts the normal course of action to create a specific fantasy. The ethical dimension of this act, as well as the consequences of the three types of awakening experienced by the victims of the interference, are also dealt with.

37-50

Authors: Armando Aguilar de León

The Myth of Oedipus is a heroic tale about Destiny and power. Configurated in the Mycenaean Age, between the eighteenth and twelfth centuries b. C.., this myth is strongly imprinted in Westerns drama. Its plot is at the base of one of the greatest tragedies ever written: Sophocles’ "Oedipus Tyrannus", c.430 b. C. A paradigmatic Greek tragedy, this Sophoclean masterpiece is the reference for every play about the fateful government of the Theban hero; Destiny and politics are indeed in the center of the dramatic structure. Pierre Corneille’s "Œdipe", written in 1659,is an adaptation of the Greek plot into the French monarchical context of the seventeenth century. This paper explores Corneille’s "Œdipe" in order to analyse the most important hypertextual transformations, giving the play a completely contextual perspective. In fact, Pierre Corneille’s Œdipe is a drama where the Sophoclean plot is revalued according to the air du temps of seventeenth-century France.

63-76

Authors: Adrián Muñoz

William Blake’s imagery is strongly rooted in a religious symbolism that springs from Biblical lore. Yet this imagery is determined by Blake’s own ideology, according to which the poet is a most legitimate incarnation of the biblical prophets. For Blake, John Milton stands out as one of the main models of the poet-prophet within the English literary tradition. This paper explores the ways in which Blake incorporated the work and figure of Milton in his own poetic project, both through the echoes of the Miltonic work and Blake’s interpretation of Milton’s ideology. The paper especially focuses on Milton, a Poem in Two Books and analyses both the mental and aesthetic tensions of Blake within the poem.

95-102

Authors: Mario Murgia Elizalde

It has been stated that Geoffrey Hill is one of the most important English poets of his generation and one of the most influential in the late 20th and the early 21st centuries. Nevertheless, the echoes of his poetry have failed to reach the Spanish-speaking world —and particularly Latin America— unlike those of his fellow-countryman Ted Hughes, for instance. This essay is aimed at offering a reading, from Mexico, of one of his latest long poems, "The Triumph of Love". This will be attempted by means of the exploration of a particular rhetorical figure that Hill proposes as the very axis of his poem —epanalepsis. It is stated here that epanalepsis transcends its most basic definition —as the repetition of the initial word of a verse at the end— in order to become an extended figure of thought implying an “eternal return” to the all-encompassing vision of poetry. The possibilities of Hill’s verse as a means to analyze a chaotic and essentially self-absorbed world are also considered.

115-126

Authors: Antonio Alcalá González

The encounter with a double is a common literary device in Gothic Literature. It moves the protagonist to question and doubt the Western conception of a human being as a unified identity. The double starts as a receptacle of everything inadmissible which, consciously or not, I recognize in myself. Thus, the appearance of Gothic doubles makes it possible to justify crimes and personify the boundaries of the inadmissible; in the end, it also points out towards the risks of transgressing such limits. Such Gothic doubles allow their creators to express personal concerns related to their times. In Latin America, Jorge Luis Borges and Carlos Fuentes make use of the Gothic figure of the double to explore the presence of abject elements inside their protagonists. When the latter finally recognize themselves as abject beings, they find in their doubles the only means to escape their condition.

135-149

Authors: Graciela Estrada Vargas

This article studies the contemporary novel. Focusing on some novels by Saramago and Kundera, published between the 1970’s and the 1990’s, this study highlights how both novelists, by using parody and irony, reappraise “the truth” that influences the spirit of contemporary societies.The Bible parody is, despite stylistic particularities, a point of convergence in these writings. Our theoretical main sources are Hutcheon’s works on parody and irony.

169-177

Authors: Aurora Piñeiro Carballeda

The aim of this essay is to make a reading of the novel "The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman", by English writer Angela Carter, as a rewriting of “The Sleeping Beauty in the Forest”, among other well-known sources belonging to the European literary tradition. Such an analysis will allow readers to see the way in which the author uses rewriting in a specially postmodern way as well as a narrative strategy to denounce power relationships in a social context, as in the act of reading itself as an activity that reproduces the dynamics of the gazepower binomial.

191-208

Authors: Emma Julieta Barreiro

The musical richness of John Dowland ́s (1563-1626) work and his personality as the most famous English musician of his age in Europe are still atractive in the early 21st century. My discussion here develops along three main lines: the implications of “otherness” in his conversion to Catholicism in the Protestant late 16th and early 17th century England; the essential musical and textual rhetorical features of his song “Flow my Tears”; and the links between this song and his lute work Lachrimae (1604). My main argument is that the historical conflict that distinguished Dowland ́s age, particularly in relation to his conversion and exile, were decisive for his adoption of the Renaissance melancholic musical tradition.

227-242

Authors: Laura López Morales

In the novel "La Vie Scélérate", Maryse Condé, born in Guadeloupe Island, draws two parallel story lines: one tells the story of four generations of a family, and the other, in which the first one is inscribed, belongs to the official History. The most significant pages of the novel are encompassed in this second part. The way in which the author brings back the main themes developed in some of herprevious works is: identity conflicts, racial discrimination and the role of women...

261-273

Authors: Nair María Anaya Ferreira

In spite of the fact that it is usually metaphorically described as a (lingüistic) bridge between cultures, translation has, throughout history, played a paradoxical role not only in intercultural relations but also as part of complex processes of colonization and conquest. Consequently, far from being an “innocent” activity, translation is the result of power relations established among peoples, cultures, races and languages. It is thus necessary to study the issues which arise from the modes of representation emerging from such relationships. The aim of this essay is to reflect, from a postcolonial point of view, on the ways in which translation (as a textual and discursive element) has taken part in wider historical processes (especially in the conquest and evangelization of sixteenth-century Mexico, and nineteenth-century British imperial expansion) and on how, even in the twentyfirst century, the diffusion of foreign authors and literary translation in Mexico depends on the publication policies of foreign publishing houses.

291-298

Authors: Federico Patán López

Taking advantage of certain quotations from Friedrich, Goethe, Huetius, Pacheco, Reyes, and Schlegel, among others, this short essay intends to examine several important aspects of translation theory, such as: how can we approach the text to the reader or, otherwise, how can we approach the reader to the text? Which circumstances underlie the “life time” of a translation? How can we conciliate the confrontation of two cultures, especially those separated in time? Can we accept translations deriving from an intermediate language? Is translation a simple reac-tion of one writer to the work of another writer? The author of this essay answers mainly from his experience as a translator.

304-311

Authors: Irene María Artigas Albarelli

Reseña de Seamus Heaney. Sonetos

314-316

Authors: Claudia Ruiz García

Reseña de Anne-Gaëlle Costa Pascal. María de Zayas, une écriture féminine dans l'Espagne du Siècle d'Or. Une poétique de la séduction