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

Short tales

This paper reviews the book Tras los rastros de un corpus seropositivo: VIH y sida en la poesída costarricense (1983-2017), by Ronald Campos López (2022). First, its importance for the studies on Costa Rican HIV-positive literature is exposed; in addition, the relevance of its theme — “forgotten” in the literary academic field— and of the theoretical contributions that support the analysis of Campos López are pointed out. Then, a synthesis of some chapters of the book is offered, where the approaches to the different poems selected by the author are commented. Finally, it is concluded that the book offers a lot of material for an academic, but also for a political reflection, since the study of HIV-positive literature also implies the analysis of the different kinds of knowledge that has built the “disease”.

For many years, the situation of SFL associations in Côte d'Ivoire has not kept pace with the dynamism of its teaching not only in demolinguistic terms but also in the production of teaching materials adapted to African learners. The current awakening in this field has something to do with, on the one hand, the linking power of the Internet and social networks, and, on the other hand, the passion, imagination and vision of the new generations of teachers. But this awakening should not obscure or lead to undervaluing previous associative initiatives, because it is by learning from the mistakes and successes of the past that the new Ivorian SFL associations will successfully face the challenges of the present and the future.

The objective of this article is to review some rewritings of the central plotline of the famous Quechua drama Ollantay. It finds one of its earliest formulations in the epic poem Armas Antárticas, written by Juan de Miramontes y Zuázola in Peru at the beginning of the seventeenth century and reaches the discursive operations of cultural nationalism in modern Argentina, in the writings of Ricardo Rojas. In all cases, a resignification of the narrative material is evident, associated with both formal transformations and the symbolic needs of different socio-historical contexts. As is often the case with textualized materials in the so-called «indigenous literatures», the story starring Curricoyllor and Ollanta (or their various avatars) periodically bursts into the continuum of South American letters, forming variations of a common language, with mythical projections.

Few language researchers reveal the visions and conceptualizations that Bolívar had about America and Peru through his words in his manuscripts. The objective of this linguistic study is to analyze the stereotyped and racialized voices in Bolívar's letters towards his arrival in Peru. Methodologically, a corpus of the epistolary correspondences from 1814 to 1825 was selected considering the containment of  words such as “citizen”, “slave”, “Indian”, “white”, since their use shows meanings and ideologies of his own and of the period. In the analysis, the evolution of the concepts is observed, as well as the social representations embodied in the discourse. The paper concludes that through the semantic examination of the vocabulary it is seen that Bolivar tried to describe realities that were changing according to his own experience, travels and processes of independence, especially towards Peru, which responded to ways of believing or conceiving the Other.

In her book Casas del Vedado (1983), Cuban author María Elena Llana explores themes and compositional strategies of non-realistic literary traditions that have remained in force in Latin America to date. In this paper I analyze one of her stories, "Claudina", with the aim of obtaining an understanding of her specific poetics in the general framework of supernatural fiction in our continent, as well as the symbolic meaning of the supernatural used by the author in this short story.

When investigating the conditions of the production process of the university student of visual arts and its link with the technique, a didactic model of teaching focused on the production of work it’s found. This model contains a paradox, because by shedding light on the student's process that leads to the achievement of the work, placing the focus on the formal and technical quality of the product, it makes the subject's situation invisible in his work. This is why, this communication presents a productive approach to artistic education and a reconceptualization of the notion of production with Aristotelian roots, carried out in the light of the philosophical orientations of Heidegger and Agamben. With this the investigation seeks to establish a conceptual framework appropriate to the complexity of contemporary artistic work to apply to the field of research in visual arts education.

The following text is a review about a recent book from professor José Romera Castillo, related to Spanish dramaturgy from the current century, it is divided into four parts and an epilogue. The first part is “El caudaloso río teatral en el siglo XXI y algunos afluentes”, in it the author deals with the main research centers on current Spanish theater and talks about the importance of the growing presence of women in the theater field. The second part analyses the importance of the (auto) biographical, in today's Spanish scene; the third part discuss about the meta-theater dramaturgy, and the fourth, the emergence of young playwrights on the Spanish scene in recent years. In the epilogue, “Dos apostillas lorquianas”, Romera Castillo closes with a tribute to the great Granada playwright, whose theater has not lost its validity. Due to its semantic and formal complexity, Lorca's theater lends itself to very interesting inter-artistic experiments.

This article analyzes the importance of funeral rituals, of their compliance and non-compliance in some examples from Greek literature based on the funerals of the characters Patroclus, Hector, Elpenor and Polynices, the first two are mentioned in the Homeric text The Iliad, the third one in The Odyssey and the last one in Sophocles' Antigone. First, the category of rites of passage will be defined to then continue with a classification of funeral practices divided into rites of separation, rites of liminality and rites of aggregation, acts within which pre-depositional, depositional, and funeral practices of the Greek people are framed, in this case, from the Mycenaean Period to the Classical Period. Then, the raptor deities and psychopomps that intervene in the passage of souls to the underworld are mentioned, and later, the aforementioned literary examples are detailed in order to apply these concepts. Finally, by means of a comparison of these funeral ceremonies and their context, the aspects that define the importance of these practices in the religious and social field are presented.

Several authors have recognized the importance that emotions play in the literary text to capture the reader's attention without literary criticism having incorporated them into their study. In the present work, the first digital sentiment analysis in Cervantes’ narrative of which there is evidence carried out to identify the author's use of emotions. The results show how Cervantes uses an important number of emotional words that varies in frequency and quantity in the course of his work. Likewise, it shows how the constant change in the polarity of the text contributes to create a certain emotional tension that the author knows how to use masterfully. This emotional contrast can be observed not only throughout each of the literary works analyzed, but also throughout the literary career of Cervantes. This novel analysis makes an approach to a promising field of study that presents results of value and significance for the advancement in the knowledge of the use of emotions in the literary text.