Magazine of the Department of Spanish Literature that offers research papers belonging to the areas of philology, linguistics, literary theory and criticism or other disciplines related to discourse analysis, with special emphasis on Hispanic Literature. This does not prevent it from collecting, if the circumstances warrant it, collaborations on other literatures. Due to its scientific nature, it is aimed at members of academic life in its different aspects: research, teaching and training.
Pontificia Universidad Católica Argentina. Facultad de Filoso´fía y Letras. Departamento de Letras
Bad Taste, Stigma and Aesthetic Experience in Manuel Mujica Lainez’s La casa
The following article explores the intersection between bad taste, social stigma, and aesthetic experience in Manuel Mujica Lainez’s 1954 novel La casa. An interpretation from the point of view of these three themes will be given as pillars of the fictional world’s configuration, which indicates a hostile background, closed to the possibility of dialogue, both among the members of the family and between the members’ relationship to the house. This finally results in the family’s extinction and the demolition of the house. The ruminating racconto structure of narration, which aims to reflect upon that which narrates, offers to the reader a tragic world in which the heyday of the family (convergent with the argentine Generation of 80’) falls prey to its own incapacity of decentering and discuss with itself.
Copyright (c) 2025 Juan Maveroff https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
A Poetic Transplant: When Olga Orozco Sings in the Guaraní Language
This article analyzes Susy Delgado’s Guaraní translations of the first two poems by Olga Orozco, included in her book Orozco pytukue (2020). Drawing on comparative literature and translation studies, it examines the strategies applied to the poems “Esos pequeños seres” and “Las muertes”. The results highlight sustained use of paraphrase, neologisms, and syntactic circumlocution that enrich Guaraní’s expressive repertoire. While both domestication and foreignization coexist, foreignization clearly predominates, reinforcing the otherness of the original and confronting readers with cultural difference. The study concludes that Delgado’s work constitutes a glottopolitical act of resistance against Paraguay’s diglossic situation, legitimizing Guaraní as a language of high literature and consolidating its creative potential in poetry.
Copyright (c) 2025 Javier Viveros https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Cultural translation in Fin-de-siècle poetry from Cuba and Haiti: Modernism and the Génération de la Ronde
This paper offers a comparative view of fin-de-siècle poetry in the French- and Spanish-speaking Caribbean islands, addressing common and unique characteristics according to literary heritage and transcultural dynamics arising from the transplantation of European literature and art into different historical and cultural contexts that shaped Haitian and Cuban poetry. As a result of this process, two fin-de-siècle literary movements emerged: modernism in the Spanish-American sphere and the Génération de la Ronde in Haiti. Poems by two great representatives of these movements, Julián del Casal (1863-1893) and Edmond Laforest (1876- 1915), will be discussed in light of Homi Bhabha’s theory of cultural translation and hibridity.
Copyright (c) 2025 Elisabeth Kruse https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The Origins and Characteristics of the Poems of Mixed Forms in Garcia de Resende’s Cancioneiro Geral
One of the innovative poetic forms developed by Portuguese and Castilian courtly poets of the 15th and 16th centuries were the “poems of mixed forms”. The characteristic of this new form is to present in a single poem, containing a single theme, several other poems that complete or debate or even develop the idea planted in the first poem. In this avant-garde form, for example, the first poem may be “trovas”; after them, the poet can add a “cantiga” and even a “vilancete” —all having the same theme as that presented in the first poem—. There are many of these poems both in Garcia de Resende’s Cancioneiro Geral and in the Cancionero General by Hernando del Castillo. In this brief study, I intend to present the classical, Provençal and Troubadour-Portuguese origins of these poems of mixed forms, in addition to referencing some examples in these two songbooks.
Copyright (c) 2025 Geraldo Augusto Fernandes https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The Evocation Situated in Latin America as the Identitarian Basis in Los pasos perdidos
In Los pasos perdidos (1953) by Alejo Carpentier, memory does not emerge in isolation, but rather as an experience connected to the territory. This article proposes a reading centered around the way in which the protagonist’s memory, through remembrances both deliberate and involuntary, is engaged by contact with space, and how this process allows rebuilding the link between past, desire, and identity. This study approaches the context in which every remembrance occurs and recognizes the decisive role of Latin America’s territory as their trigger. From this perspective, it proposes a reading of this work, one which places memory as a central axis of the narrative, and key to understanding the process of identity for the character.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ana Faggiani https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Traces and Phantom Gestures: Loss Embodied in Como si existiese el perdón, by Mariana Travacio
This article examines how Como si existiese el perdón, by Mariana Travacio, embodies different forms of loss through two mechanisms: the trace and the phantom gesture. Loss is inscribed on the body through the plasticity of flesh, producing marks that conjure absence without explicitly naming it. The analysis focuses on the images surrounding bodies that carry these marks, drawing on concepts of body, perception, conjuration, trace, and phantom gesture developed by Jacques Derrida, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Georges Didi-Huberman, and Meri Torras. The study argues, first, that the novel presents three forms of loss: relational, material, and somatic. Second, that scars and traces not only imply the rupture of corporeal wholeness but also signal the void left by such losses. Third, that a particular bodily expression —the phantom gesture— emerges as a way of outlining, through the body, the contour of what is absent, thereby conjuring loss. This analysis is relevant both because there exists a notable gap in the critical literature on Travacio’s fiction and because it highlights how literature can be read through the textuality and plasticity of bodies, as well as the affective dimensions of their representation.
Copyright (c) 2025 Karla Gabriela Balcázar Ruiz https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
de Cabo, Mariana, Del otro lado del charco. Baudelaire, Mansilla y la celebridad
Copyright (c) 2025 María Agustina Costa https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Beltrán, Vicenç, Inés de Castro, Leonor de Guzmán e Isabel de Liar. Del romance al mito
In memoriam Graciela Maturo (1928-2024). The legacy of a humanist intellectual
Copyright (c) 2025 José Alberto Barisone https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Copyright (c) 2025 Mariana de Cabo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Copyright (c) 2025 Magdalena Cámpora https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Variations of the Lyrical Subject: Intersections between Authorial Subjectivity and Biographical Material in Silvina Ocampo’s Invenciones del recuerdo
This article examines Silvina Ocampo’s Invenciones del recuerdo as a work located at the intersection of autobiography and poetic fiction. Drawing on Agamben’s concept of a “zone of indifference,” it argues that the text does not transmit lived experience directly but reshapes it through memory as a creative procedure. The lyrical “I” distances itself from the biographical self, transforming it into a poetic figure. Forgotten names, distorted spaces, and the notion of a “prenatal autobiography” reveal how Ocampo turns the personal into myth and creative potential. Memory here functions less as testimony than as aesthetic invention. Within this framework, the poetic self emerges as paradoxically more “real” than the biographical one, as it illuminates aspects of experience that confession alone could not capture. The book thus constructs a hybrid space in which autobiographical traces and fictional procedures are inseparable, making memory itself a site of invention.
Copyright (c) 2025 Cristian Ton https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Latin American Autobiographers, Cosmopolitan Writers: The Textual Ethos of the Exilein Reinaldo Arenas and Sergio Pitol
The lives of Cuban Reinaldo Arenas and Mexican Sergio Pitol, represented literarily in their respective autobiographies Antes que anochezca and Una autobiografía soterrada, project two cosmopolitan Latin American identities whose constitution was determined by exile in large cities (New York, Moscow, Barcelona, etc.). The experiences narrated took place during the Cold War, when the Western/Eastern dichotomy held significant sway due to diverse political and cultural configurations. Within this framework, the historical idea of the “city” and the figure of the “cosmopolitan writer” operate as a mechanism that defines the authors in relation to what Philippe Lejeune called autobiographical identity, that is, the staging of a lyrical self characteristic of the autobiographical genre: the constitution of a textual ethos. In both cases, these are writers who project themselves beyond the borders of their countries of origin. Thus, the objective of this work will be to show how this cosmopolitan identity reflected in the texts of Arenas and Pitol corresponds decisively with the life experiences that both authors had in their exiles, despite the divergent reasons that brought them about: in the first case, exile, in the other, diplomatic functions.
Copyright (c) 2025 Alejandro Martín Galay https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Elseworlds and Uchronias: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? A Decolonial Study
A comparative analysis is proposed about the DC comics representations (hereinafter, DC), although emphasizing the Superman’s figure. At this point of convergence of readings, the objective is to shed light on the practices of power from the decolonial studies. The main sources are the comicbook Superman Red Son by Mark Millar and the novel Kryptonita by the Argentinian writer Leonardo Oyola. The main question is whatever happened to the Man of the Tomorrow? Different representations of this Mass culture myth are contrasted from different points of view: from the Susan Buck-Morss’ perspective of failed utopias or from the Group Modernidad/Colonialidad, and the approach of epistemologías del Sur.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ramiro Devoto https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Geographies and traditions of enunciation in modern and contemporary Latin American texts
The introduction presents the content of this comparative dossier dedicated to a corpus of Latin American texts from the 19th to the 21st centuries.
Copyright (c) 2025 Alejandro Casais https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
“We felt that something was not right”. Neoliberalism, Collateral Damage, and Discontent in Three of Diego Zúñiga’s Short Stories
This article offers a reading of three short stories from Diego Zúñiga’s Niños héroes (2016) —“La ciudad de los niños,” “Un mundo de cosas frías,” and “Cabezas negras”— based on the hypothesis that their protagonists embody subjectivities shaped as “collateral victims” of the Chilean neoliberal model. The analysis is structured around three levels: the individual level, where precarious lives are portrayed; the institutional and spatial level, which exposes educational and urban inequality; and the relational-affective level, where bonds appear fractured or commodified. Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman, the stories reveal the liquid fragility of life horizons reduced to mere survival, while with Rita Laura Segato they illustrate how pedagogies of cruelty operate by turning exclusion into destiny. In this way, Zúñiga constructs a critical literary representation that reflects the social and cultural unrest that would culminate in Chile’s 2019 uprising.
Copyright (c) 2025 René Araya Alarcón https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
WILSON, Jason, Vivir en el sonido del viento. Una biografía de Guillermo E. Hudson, naturalista y escritor del Río de la Plata, Buenos Aires, El Ateneo, 2022, 431 pp.
Copyright (c) 2023 Agustín Tamai https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
In this article we postulate the existence of what we call Hudson Region. For this we choose the name of region (Molina y Varela; Heredia), but we enrich the concept with what regionality (Arendt) and bioregion (McGinnis et alii) have to contribute. In turn, our perspective on this region is eco, according to some of the theorists of the broad spectrum of ecocriticism, especially Mathews, Naess and Fukuoka. This choice seems to be the natural course when considering an author like William Henry Hudson, who has been concerned with natural conservation since the 19th century. Thus, we seek for notes of what we will consider region. We will use for the Hudson Region the cognitive elements indicated for it by Mariana N. Saua and finally we will test this region is specified. It is not an abstract proposal but is born from verifying that in Río de la Plata area exist many productions that, in different ways, are located in Hudson‘s wake, in terms of: love for nature, its perception as an intimate experience and, later, setting it in discursive means. Here, in addition to considering his Far Away and Long Ago (1918), we add the works Allá en lo verde Hudson (2012), by Arnaldo Calveyra; Libro de horas (2015), by Laura Forchetti; and Ornitología para principiantes (2018), by Daniel Dellazuana.
Copyright (c) 2023 María Amelia Arancet Ruda https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Argentine literature and foreigners: Piglia variations on Hudson
The links built by Ricardo Piglia´s poetics with the figure, career and work of William Hudson go through different stages, different variations. Regarding Hudson, the assessment that Ezequiel Martínez Estrada makes of Hudson´s work and career is decisive for Piglia. This has been detected since the formative years of the young writer Piglia, during the 1950s. Later, during the 1960s and 1970s, Piglia´s gradual and radical theoretical and political-literary position let him consider, at some point, Hudson´s figure as that of a foreigner of remarkable work, but definitely exotic and that remains in a colonized look with respect to Argentine culture. Finally, Piglia revalues the reader and writer Hudson, key to Argentine and Anglo-Saxon literatures and cultures, who is also a radical critic of capitalism. This essay interrogates the nuances of those different moments.
Copyright (c) 2023 Jorge Bracamonte https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Zones of critical interventions in Green Mansions (1904) by William Henry Hudson
On the ocassion of the centenary of the Argentine-British writer W. H. Hudson (1841-1922), I will review the multiple spheres or areas in which a particular literary text, which managed to achieve the privilege of having been one of the most internationally disseminated of its production, Green Mansions, was intervened by the industry and by the interpretive community. Among the interventions that were given to the base text, we can distinguish the translations, the adaptations and the production of a film script, and the consequent film production. Among the critical texts, several dimensions can be recovered: the historical one, which treats the text as a representative of late romanticism; the rhetorical interpretation, which interprets the characters of Abel and Rima as allegorical; thematic criticism in various manifestations (nature, barbarism and civilization); colonial, postcolonial readings and cultural imperialism; ecocriticism, etc. Finally, I will highlight some narratological aspects, such as the game of “reality” and fiction, levels of strangeness in the literary text, and the game of voices.
Copyright (c) 2023 Daniel Altamiranda https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
William Henry Hudson gets together in Rima his admiration for girls due to their spontaneity and original intelligence; and his love for ornithology, which studied birds in their native habitats. From the juxtaposition of these two passions emerges Rima, the birdgirl-woman, main character of Green Mansions. There are multiple reasons to admire Rima. The main thesis of this article is that she embodies the role of an ecoheroine. The birdgirl is a vegetarian because killing animals makes her suffer, she dresses herself with the silk of a spider that lives on her shoulder, she is able to catch the arrows of the natives before they hurt their prey and return them to the hunters, she moves in the air like a bird and she communicates with nature. These fabulous characteristics and her duty in defense of the rainforest seduced American comic creators, who metamorphosed her into “The jungle girl” and put her side by side with Batman and Robin fighting against evil.
Copyright (c) 2023 Felipe Arocena, Marissa Iriarte https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Hudson Birds Adventures The article examines the notion of “adventure” in Hudson’s work in relation to birds. It distinguishes his experience in Argentina as a child and in his youth, with species dazzling due to their size and colouring, from his experience with the more modest species he came across, as an adult, in an English countryside which was victim to the relentless persecution by collectors and by landowners and gamekeepers’ intent on freeing their hunting grounds from predators. The experiences in rural England were adventures just as intense for Hudson, a field naturalist with exceptional powers of observation, the subtlest of ears for birdsong and an unusual ability to experience wonder. In its principal section, the article centres on the passion with which Hudson speaks in his books of warblers, the most anodine of bird families in their aspect and extremely difficult to spot, to examine his strategies as nature essayist and conservationist.
Copyright (c) 2023 Niall Binns https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Ralph Herne, by William Hudson, in the Argentine narrative system (1870-1880)
The objective of this work is to relate the novelistic of William H. Hudson with the Argentine narrative system in force around 1870-1880. In particular, we will analyze the novel Ralph Herne, published in 1888, in London, and inspired by the oil painting An episode of yellow fever in Buenos Aires, by Juan Manuel Blanes. From the perspective of historical poetics, we will show that Ralph Herne is a romantic-realistic product, thanks to some autobiographical inputs, with which a credible narrator is built, and thanks to passion as the engine of dramatic action.
Copyright (c) 2023 Hebe Beatriz Molina https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Fan (1892) by W.H. Hudson: reading keys for a failed novel
Based on a reading of Fan, the Story of a Young Girl's Life (1892) that aims to fill a gap in specialized criticism, we intend to explore lines of inquiry that examine the reasons for the supposed failure of the work and W.H. Hudson's abandonment of the three-volume novel format, the Hudsonian identity projections in the novel, the literary representation of urban space, and finally, the author's relationship with the poetics of George Gissing and Thomas Hardy and his repositioning of the tradition of Dickensian realism.
Copyright (c) 2023 Eva Lencina https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
This essay is in three parts. The first looks at Hudson’s puritanical family past in many details because Hudson never elaborated on this side of his double identity. I try to assess the influence of reading the Bible in English as his schooling, his mother's hate for the English, how he wrote his fiction against her Puritan values etc. The second part deals with Hudson's enormous admiration for Thoreau as example of his Yankee identity. I underline how Hudson followed Thoreau, the North American Indians, becoming a field naturalist, provocations etc. The third part explores his late North American fame through Epstein's Rima and the US film of Green Mansions and Rima's destiny following Hollywood guidelines and not Hudson's novel.
Copyright (c) 2023 Jason Wilson https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The Connection Between Japan and Argentina Through William Henry Hudson: Exploring Familial Ties, Translations and Reception
William Henry Hudson is a significant figure in the relationship between Japan and Argentina. There are two distinct events that connect him with Japan: his familial ties and the translations of his works into Japanese. This paper aims to explore both these aspects by introducing the history of the Hudson family and analyzing its reception in Japan. Hudson’s familial ties with Japan began when his niece, Laura, married Yoshio Shinya, who was the first immigrant from Japan to Argentina after the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries had started. Their daughter, Violeta, went on to become the first director of the William Henry Hudson Museum in Buenos Aires. With Violeta’s involvement, the museum established collaborations with Japan. Through the analysis of Hudson’s translated works, this study reveals that there were five key aspects of their reception in Japan. First, the translated works were introduced as a source of information about South America for immigrants. Second, they were recognized as a part of the English literature and the original piece work of the movie Green Mansions. Third, they were adapted for juvenile literature. Fourth, they sparked interest in the natural history of South America. And lastly, they were used as model texts for English teaching. Even after his death, the cultural exchange initiated by Hudson continued, and the Argentine writer and naturalist became a symbol of the friendly relations between Japan and Argentina.
Copyright (c) 2023 Kana Takaki https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Copyright (c) 2023 Pablo Alejo Carrasco https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
SUÁREZ, María Pilar y José Ramón TRUJILLO (coord.), 2022, La búsqueda en el universo artúrico. De Francia a la península ibérica, San Millán de la Cogolla, Cilengua (Colección Biblioteca de Bretaña, 2), 322 pp.
Esta obra singular reúne los trabajos de prestigiosos investigadores que han abordado el tema de la búsqueda en los textos que abarcaron el derrotero de los caballeros del rey Arturo y su mundo de ficción, incluyendo sus reescrituras más modernas. Este camino tiene su punto de partida en Chrétien de Troyes, luego se dirige hacia el gran ciclo artúrico en prosa del siglo xiii, la recreación de Thomas Malory, las traducciones hispánicas y portuguesas y, finalmente, las reescrituras del siglo xx, para nombrar solo algunos hitos.
GRACIA, Paloma y Alejandro CASAIS (eds.), 2020, Le roman arthurien du Pseudo-Robert de Boron en France et dans la Péninsule Ibérique, Berlin, Peter Lang (Studien zu den Romanischen Literaturen und Kulturen / Studies on Romance Literatures and Cultures, Band 10), 245 pp.
La Suite du Merlin del manuscrito Huth y la Queste del Saint Graal de los mss. fr. 112, 340 y 343 de la BibliothÁ¨que nationale de France han originado numerosos interrogantes, especialmente en torno a la posible existencia de un ciclo artúrico tardío, esto es, de la continuidad de una línea narrativa coherente posterior a la del ciclo Vulgate. Tradicionalmente la crítica ha atribuido un estado de intenso fraccionamiento a una trilogía compuesta después de la Vulgate y ha recurrido a testimonios ibéricos para reconstruir algunos tramos textuales. El objetivo general de este libro es reflexionar sobre ese ciclo artúrico, también llamado del Pseudo-Robert de Boron, y reconsiderar los materiales franceses e ibéricos desde una perspectiva revisionista, matizando algunos postulados críticos muy arraigados para ofrecer nuevas líneas de investigación. Producto de un coloquio celebrado en la Universidad de Granada en mayo de 2018, el libro empero no reproduce las ponencias leídas sino trabajos elaborados durante los meses posteriores a partir de las discusiones sostenidas en su marco y sometidos a un proceso de evaluación de pares. Posee un prefacio redactado por sus editores, en el cual se presenta someramente el objeto y el objetivo de cada estudio. Dos de ellos se encuentran en francés; cuatro, en español.
MÉNARD, Philippe, 2022, Temas y problemas de literatura artúrica, San Millán de la Cogolla, Cilengua (Colección Biblioteca de Bretaña, 1), 259 pp.
En este volumen el prestigioso medievalista francés Philippe Ménard, gran especialista en la materia artúrica y en la lengua y la literatura de la Francia medieval, presenta en versión española una serie de trabajos en los que aborda, con rigurosidad y maestría innegables, diversas problemáticas filológicas y literarias propias de un corpus narrativo al que ha consagrado décadas de invaluable estudio.
Copyright (c) 2023 ALEJANDRO GASTÓN GHIGLIONE