Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

In The Hero with a Thousand Faces Joseph Campbell begins his thesis of the Monomyth with a recounting of the story of the Minotaur. His purpose is straightforward: the initiation and cycling of the hero’s journey is predicated on an origin of evil narrative which the story of the Minotaur quintessentially is. It is interesting to note, however, that differently gendered expressions of narrative evil give rise to distinct and gendered vectors of protagonist action. In Sleeping Beauty, for example, Maleficent, a female/mother variant of the tyrant-monster, gives rise to a protagonist, Princess Aurora, who is never the conscious agent of the action she takes. On the other hand, in Mad Max: Fury Road, Furiosa literally drives the narrative action which is initiated by the tyrant-father, Immortan Joe. Though it’s clear that Furiosa’s journey adheres to a more manifest expression of empowered action than Princess Aurora’s, this paper will argue that neither protagonist nor the implied origin of evil story setting each character’s journey in motion suffices to define the heroine’s journey. Rather, the fairytale princess and the female action-hero require a new interpretive model in order to describe both their conflicting and, surprisingly, common relationship to personal agency. Drawing on the methodology of Vladimir Propp, I intend to offer an alternative framework for understanding the attributes of the heroine’s journey which circumvents completely the essentializing gesture that is necessarily made in positing an expression of the hero-task which would be unique to a female protagonist. Rather, I offer the Multimyth, an interpretive framework which 1) applies the model of the hero’s journey to Sleeping Beauty and Mad Max: Fury Road in order to define, reveal, and interrogate the functioning of each film’s narrative structure foregrounding the roles of Princess Aurora and Furiosa, respectively; and, then 2) uses the aggregate conclusions of the application of Campbell’s model to each text to counter-interrogate the model itself. In doing so, I intend to expose the assumptions, omissions and limitations of the Monomyth as a narrative heuristic and at the same time elucidate the Multimyth as an interpretive model which honors Campbell’s conception of the hero-task and proffers new methods for the application of the hero’s journey which will result in a richer and more complex understanding of narrative structure.

As a heroine in the novel of her own story, the Venezuelan author Teresa de la Parra (1889-1936), was an acknowledged noted novelist and gifted public speaker in her lifetime when she was invited to deliver three lectures in Bogotá and Barranquilla, Colombia, in 1930, and later in Cuba. The lectures were not published until 1961 in Caracas by the Venezuelan critic Arturo Uslar Pietri and I translated the lectures for the book, Teresa de la Parra: A Literary Life (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012). The Tres Conferencias: Influencia de las mujeres en la formación del alma americana or Three Lectures: Women’s Influence in the Formation of the American Soul, described the important roles women played during the Conquest, Colonial, and Independence eras in Latin America. The Colombian Lectures represent her last work. In the 1970’s, when critics began to value women’s writing for its valuable contribution to literature, they began to read and value this author’s work that addressed female heroines. In these lectures de la Parra declared herself a “moderate feminist” as she highlighted the important roles the founding mothers played in Latin American history and in the formation of its ethos and culture. She wanted to uncover the hardships that had been imposed on women starting with the conquest of México. As Spain conquered more of the Latin American continent, women played important roles, but de la Parra pointed out that the stories of half the human race had been ignored by Latin American historians, who tended to write about battles and victories rather than the sacrifices and the heroic contributions of women. By recuperating the voices of the “founding mothers,” Queen Isabela, Ňusta Doña Isabela (el Inca Garcilaso’s mother) Doña Marina, Madre Castillo, Policarpa Salavarrieta, Manuela Sáenz and her contemporaries Delmira Augustini and Gabriela Mistral, de la Parra created a community of heroines.

This communication shows some of the main debates that on the artistic conception of photography arose in the photographic press and in some illustrated magazines in Spain. The chronological scope begins in 1886, the year in which the first articles appear in a photographic magazine, and ends in 1905 in which Antonio Cánovas publishes his work the Transformation of photography. This text evidences as in that year, the postulates pictorialist were already fully known in Spain through the specialized press.

In the past few years, there has been a proliferation of films and television series around the world that are set in forests. These stories’ structures often differ depending on the gender of the protagonist: If the protagonists are men, the forest is usually a site of horror, but when the protagonists are women, the forests become sites of transformation. Looking at Maureen Murdock’s The Heroine’s Journey, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey, and Catherine Addison’s model for how the forest is represented in classical literature, this paper considers how the internal journey of female characters is reflected in or resonates with the woods. Films discussed range across multiple genres (drama, survival, crime, horror, science fiction) and include Leave No Trace, Deliverance, The Grey, Destroyer, Zone Blanche, The Ritual, The Hallow, Without Name, Dans la foret, The Blair Witch Project, The Forest, Mad Max: Fury Road, Annihilation, and Aeon Flux. The temptation to talk about these films in dichotomies, such as Hero/Heroine, Masculine/Feminine, illustrates our need for new terminology to reflect even newer ways of thinking about the complexity of gendered protagonists in stories.

Between the hegemony of the 'superhero' in Hollywood's visual language today and the United States' appropriation of the hero--the police, the fire fighter, the paramedic--since the transformative events of September 11, the notion of the hero has reached a veritable semantic saturation. But that saturation has been limited to male subjectivities. Alfonso Cuarón's latest film, Roma (2018), proposes a resemantization of the heroic subject with the two female protagonists: Cleo, a Mixtec domestic servant, and Sofía, a middle-class, urban mother. This essay attempts to examine the ways in which the film structures a potential female heroic figure within the oppressive, male social hegemony in early 1970s Mexico. What is fascinating about Roma--in addition to its stoic cinematography and a narrative arc as sparse as it is rich--is that the female heroic figure is neither extraordinary nor extravagant: it is utterly everyday. And it orbits around a reconfiguration of the maternal. The figure of the mother in Mexican cinema has a long history since the advent of sound, and Roma dialogues with and redefines motherhood--literal and putative motherhood.

The Chicago Feminist Film Festival aims to decenter and destabilize Hollywood norms, including Hollywood’s tendency to place cis-gendered white male protagonists at the center of films structured according to the hero’s journey. Thus, The Fits (2016) was a natural opener to the inaugural festival, embodying many of the festival’s values in destabilizing what constitutes “normal” ways of seeing the world. In particular, in centering black girlhood, The Fits subverts the white and male gaze. Main character Toni takes on the active gaze usually reserved for white and/or male characters, subverting the objectified status generally prescribed to female characters. The Fits also unsettles the heroine’s journey by troubling Toni’s transformative return. While it may seem that through “the fits” Toni is assimilated into normative gender relations, it is also possible to read Toni’s transformation in the film as form of insubordination, a resistance to this assimilation.

Camilo Lleras is considered a key artist in the development of conceptual photography in Colombia between the 70s and the 80s. The objective of this paper is to determine what were their influences, the main reason that caused his approach to Pop Art, what visual features have his images and why is the reason that he is considered a photographer of national importance. The results obtained try to indicate that Camilo Lleras as well as other Latin American artists, have searched their inspiration at capitals of the world with the aim of an international projection. As Andrea Giunta points out a sort of localist internationalism.

From the work of collection of data and classification of letters belonging to the archives of the Argentinean artist Edgardo Antonio Vigo, this article proposes to reconstitute a dimension of the dialog initiated with the poet and editor born in Antofagasta Eduardo Díaz Espinoza. This epistolary exchange was one of the most profuse between E. A. Vigo and Chilean artists –it is the second in density, after that held with the poet Guillermo Deisler–, during a period that crosses the bloodiest years of the Argentine and Chilean dictatorships. The text aims to examine how mail art activated various communication strategies and international solidarity networks, which subverted silencing in contexts of social suffocation, censorship and repression, while at the same time building spaces of exchange and emotional support among its members. In this sense, it raises how both artists, traversed biographically and familiarly by acts of torture, detention and enforced disappearance, achieved the implementation of a mutual postal support, which narrated, situationally and with a minimum latency, the events of the present. Through a review of calls and actions gestated in collaboration, we will address the study of the specificities of art and political networks spread on both sides of the Andes.

This paper aims to examine the practice of the writing of Pedro Lozano, a Jesuit who served as a historiographer in the Society of Jesus, in the mid-eighteenth century. The reflection was made from a letter that he sent to the Attorney General, Father Bruno Morales. It is known that the documentation produced by the Ignatians possesses a recognized historical and ethnographic value, being, therefore, explored by researchers in a recurrent way, as well as by writers alien to the academic milieu of history. An analysis of this type of documentation also allows to consider as an object the practice of the writing of those individuals, above all, from the reflection of their “place of production”, as well as that “historiographical operation” employed in it, as suggested by Michel de Certeau. Thus, not ignoring the existence of an individuality in the writing of Lozano was defined –to circumscribe the place from where he writes as well as to delimit the writing activity itself– delineate the limits imposed by the Order on writing from an examination of the Rules of the Society of Jesus, of the Constitutions and of the autobiography of Saint Ignatius of Loyola. Simultaneously with the story of real events, and making use of a representation whose constant was social tension, a discourse developed from repeated orientations on writing was organized. These, expressed in the Letters, and supposedly obeyed, by becoming a practice of reading and writing, at the same time as they informed, also conformed an accurate idea about what was described and about the author of the writing. They built an institutional image although it also resulted in a construction of the author’s own. At the same time that the Letters were building, the authors were also identified, thus being able to know the Order by the individual as well as by the practices of the same.

The memory can be seen as a way of becoming aware of itself or as a form of inheritance that leaves a generation to those who succeed. This research is a visual journey through the concepts of memory and forgetfulness. The memory is constituted by a high sensible load, that feeds on the individual memories of the subjects and that, when being annexed to the colectivity, it becomes visible, so that it can be turned into a form of expression of the urban memory of a group and, in this way, load of meaning the moments of the existential space experience by the subject. The question on which this research is constructed focuses on the way in which the urban memory of the Carrera Séptima de Bogotá between 1950 and 1970 can be reconstructed through the analysis of photographs taken from family albums and stories of its inhabitants. This research acquires power as a document insofar as the subjects who access it, perceive it as a concretion of the experience of the existential space of the citizen of the epoch in question, loading the narrations and the images gathered here of symbolism, in their own lived experience.