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

Some of the postulates reviewed and proposed in Humberto E. Robles’ study on the notion of the vanguard in Ecuador set the tone for a new exercise of critical reading of César Dávila Andrade’s Boletín y elegía de las mitas. This paper proposes reading the Boletín as an exercise of culmination of the notion of the Latin American vanguard proposed in the 1930s by Jorge Carrera Andrade and reviewing two of the central antecedents in the poetic tradition of the Indian theme in Ecuador: José Joaquín de Olmedo and Jorge Carrera Andrade himself. Keywords: vanguard, Ecuador, poetry, mitas, Humberto E. Robles, José Joaquín de Olmedo, Jorge Carrera Andrade, César Dávila Andrade.

Polvo y ceniza by Eliécer Cárdenas engenders the legendary and mythical figure of the bandit hero. The first circumstances with which the protagonist Naún Briones faces teach him that, due to his condition as a third-rate citizen, he must be limited and subjected to a deceitful and unjust world in which he has no possibility of improvement due to his social condition. There is no solution in sight for him through the path of the law. His only alternative is to follow the path of assault, robbery or murder; this violence does germinate a change, even if it means being outside the law and death lurks around any sinister shortcut. His person became glorified because his mission was to help the abandoned and miserable; he brought welfare and satiated the hunger of the needy. He became a robinhoodsian outlaw who ended up immolating himself for a cause, at the very least, questionable.

This article inquires into the way of expressing illness in Medicinas para quebrantamientos del halcón by Eduardo Chirinos, a collection of poems in which the Peruvian author addresses the expression of the body in relation to illness linked to the notion of the foreigner in the organism and to the notion of otherness of the poetic word. It also explores how illness and the poetic language allude to rebelliousness. In illness, this rebelliousness constitutes a condition of the destruction of the body, as opposed to the rebelliousness of words in the poem which construct states of sensibility and union between the author and the readers.

The text investigates, in the prolific work of Eliécer Cárdenas, two of his cardinal themes: the saga of bandits and the historical novel. The first contains his most famous fable Polvo y ceniza and several others about vigilante bandits like Naún Briones and even heartless ones like Arnoldo Cueva and his evil exterminators like Major Deifilio Morocho, as well as novels about thieves of religious dresses, such as Rafles, and mentions of the Águila Quiteña. The historical novel includes five fictions about figures such as Bolívar, Monsignor González Suárez, actors of the Conquest and Independence, and even the farcical and funny plot of several writers plotting to steal someone else’s novel. The whole highlights the enormous literary quality of Eliécer Cárdenas.

This text remembers and exalts the man, and at the same time the multifaceted writer and university professor Juan Valdano, who cultivated essays, research, novels and short stories. It evokes the Ecuadorian who celebrated the country by dedicating more than one work to our way of being, to our idiosyncrasy, to our sense of nationhood. He studied Philosophy and Literature in Cuenca, Hispanic Philology in Madrid and French Literature in Provence. Member of the Ecuadorian Academy of Language, he received several awards and distinctions such as the Eugenio Espejo Award for his career and his works. As a tribute to his memory, a critical commentary is added to a personal anthology of his short stories entitled Juegos de Proteo (2012).

This tribute to Humberto E. Robles follows two complementary directions: two book reviews and two objectives. From my reflections on La noción de vanguardia en el Ecuador. Recepción, trayectoria y documentos 1918-1934 (1989) and Imagen e idea de Guayaquil (2019), I intend, first, to acknowledge his valuable legacy of knowledge and critical readings that will continue to guide future readers of Latin American literature and culture in general. Then, I offer here a testimony of my personal friendship with Humberto that was born in Guayaquil’s Municipal Library in 1979.

The novel Azulinaciones (1990) by Natasha Salguero constitutes an important referent of experimentation with language, de-centering of canonical literature and affirmation of a feminine writing of excess and overflow. This fragmentary writing is presented through critical categories such as différance and dissemination, taken from Jacques Derrida’s theory of deconstruction. With these elements it is possible to approach a reading from the margins of the literary world, where perspectives occupy other places in the interpretation and writing maneuvers of Salguero’s novel, configuring an aesthetics of the everyday. In addition, the importance of the relationship between language and transiting a space is rescued, in order to turn the fictional space into a living and moving space. In short, Azulinaciones becomes an example of the “pulsional novel” that dissociates itself from the rationalizing and outdated hierarchies of literature, to propose a unique game in terms of the art of writing and the deconstruction of literary forms.

This essay traces the literary development of Jorge Velasco Mackenzie, including a personal testimony of the final meetings with the author in the months prior to his death. It includes the beginnings in the short story genre, the milestone represented by the novel El rincón de los justos, and the sure progress that followed.

In light of Rosi Braidotti’s nomadism and the grotesque studied by Bakhtin, the aim is to open a way to affirmatively think the body in literature. After analyzing the myths of descent through Ricoeur’s anthropology, the images of the hollow in Gabriela Ponce’s Sanguínea (2019) are observed in order to propose this as a figuration of the body, that is, the flesh as hollow which ungrounds normative discourses of the body. Through this figuration, a connection is proposed between the writing of the body and the development of the Renaissance grotesque. In this connection we find the necessary laughter to write about the flesh, a destabilizing laughter of the reign of the Subject as Selfhood (universal, masculine, white, heterosexual, rational).

This article presents elements of the literary work Alborada, a series of three Chilean historical- memorialistic novels written by Iris (Inés Echeverría Bello). The racialist discourse, detected in the reading of this and other works by the author, will be analyzed. References to the semantic field of race are not strange at the time, however, it is necessary to contextualize the production of Iris to understand the meanings of the concept of race in this work. We will analyze the novels in the historical and intellectual context where the author moved. Race, in conclusion, was a concept that allowed the emerging of an evolutionary discourse, which channeled the messianic message of Alborada, in accordance with the theosophist tendencies to which the author ascribed.