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

The narrative world presented by Cervantes in Rinconete and Cortadillo is immersed in a hyperrealistic environment. This research aims to explain the variety and semantic-stylistic richness of verbal predicates in the narrative dynamics guided by the speaker-narrator, the environmental description of the scenes and the interlocutive relationship of the characters. For this, we resort to a methodology based on the analysis of the wide diversity of discourse, where the word is the protagonist along with the characters and the verbal predicate is the focus of attention of the narrator. To emphasize the importance of the verbal in the organic presentation of the scenic paintings, the action of the novel moves within a dynamic narrative field that goes from orality to writing. Thus, through the verbal expression Cervantes portrays the society of his time.

The motif of the falling leaves has a double meaning in Western literature: meta-literary and affective-existential. The purpose of this article is to present an analytical and interpretative overview of the different variants, linguistic formulas, and meanings that the lyrical affective-existential function of this motif went through in twentieth-century Latin American poetry, particularly during the Postmodernismo and Vanguardias, until the semantic variations that it acquired in the second half of the twentieth-century and the beginning of the twenty-first. The explicit intention of the Vanguardias was to reject the literary tradition, in particular, the legacy of subjectivity of Romanticism, during which the topos of the falling leaves was one of its highest expressions. Its semantic core, we argue, expresses the end of a loving relationship (during Romanticism and Post-romanticism) or a life (in the twentieth-century), and it is depicted, mainly, in narrative poems.

This study documents the oscillographic and spectrographic properties of non-modal phonation observed in Boruca, an already extinct Chibchan language that was spoken in Costa Rica. Traditionally, the creaky and breathy phonations of Boruca have been interpreted as phonetic cues for the laryngeal segments /Ɂ/ and /h/. However, this article reanalyzes these phenomena as phonological specification of the [constricted glottis] and [spread glottis] features associated with vowels. Thus, Boruca does not have laryngeal consonants but it does contrast between modal, creaky and breathy vowels. The study presents evidence that creaky voice concentrates in the middle of vowels while breathy voice concentrates in the final section of vowels. Moreover, Boruca can force creaky voice to surface as a glottal stop segment under certain conditions, and can also insert breathy voice in certain segmental environments.

The paper offers a comparison between two embassy speeches: Odysseus, in the Greek Epics (Il. IX, 225-306); and Kṛṣṇa, in the Sanskrit Epics (MBh. V. 122,6-122.61). For each one, the embassy as a historical practice is contextualized in its respective tradition of diplomacy and hospitality, the argumentation is analyzed based on the cultural values, and the ideology regarding war and peace is contrasted. Lo Cascio’s (1998) methodological proposal on the “Grammar of Argumentation” is followed. These conclusions are drawn: both speeches follow the diplomatic practice; both are based in values that are typical of the culture in which they are inscribed, but fail to convince their addressee due to a difference regarding the hierarchy; and, while in the Iliad war is idealized, in the Mahābhārata so is peace.

Typically, the origin story of Existentialism has depicted Latin America’s contributions as subsequent and tributary to its European counterpart. Nevertheless, a select few critics have approached this history in Hispanic America from a chronologically inclusive perspective, by calling attention to an Existential Poetics in modernismo. This article expands the borders of Existential Poetics to fashion a Latin American literary imaginary. Given the work already done on Rubén Darío and José Martí, both of whom have been studied independently, my analysis will be collective, favoring philopoetic works by Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, Julián del Casal, José Asunción Silva, and João Cruz e Sousa. The purpose of examining Hispanic-American poets in conjunction with a Brazilian is to accentuate the Pan-American quality of this Existentialism avant la lettre.  As I will discuss, all these poems deal with a crisis of irrelevance and overtly question being in the world, classic motifs of Existentialism. Together, these poems allow for the synchronized inclusion of Latin American voices to the universal history of Existentialism, an approached not explicitly carried out by most philosophical and literary historiographers.

This article analyzes “El perjurio de la nieve” (1944) of the Argentine writer Adolfo Bioy Casares as a proposal of metaliterature. To support this postulate, first of all, it is determined the semantics of the sinister (Das Unheimlich) in the literature as a presupposition of the literary analysis of the story. Subsequently, it is discussed the literary strategy according to which time, space and the characters construct a double narrative dimension of argumentative segmentation. It also explores the literary topos of the double (Doppelgänger) as the further fragmentation of the characters and subtle decomposition of the narrative act into an epistemology that seeks to overcome the subject-object duality. It is concluded that, in contrast, two poetic constructions ambiguously created by the false testimony of the Narrator, hides the persistent imposture of the reality.

The authors approach the notion of attention to linguistic diversity from a socio-institutional perspective, as one of the priority axes in the Education and Training systems in the member states of the European Union for the achievement of quality education. A selection of national official documents is offered that are linked to this notion. The authors identify those institutional plans and actions conceived by the different Autonomous Communities –monolingual and bilingual– that address the linguistic needs of foreign students.

The observation of pre-university students in the Spanish language class led us to investigate 134 schoolchildren of different nationalities who showed deficiencies in linguistic awareness (CL) or language awareness. The objective is to identify the factors of the improvement of CL in the group of adolescents of 15-year-olds to which we teach in the Canary Islands (Spain). In order to obtain results, in the 2016-2017 academic year during 6 weeks, an investigation is planned through a writing workshop with its respective inductive and heuristic tasks which were evaluated by the teacher with a rubric, in which it appears the three dimensions of CL for grammatical errors: identification, justification of the error, and creation of the rule. The results obtained from improvement are examined quantitatively with the personal parameters analyzed: mother tongue, gender, international certification in languages, intrinsic motivation and having completed a bilingual primary school. The quantitative analysis concludes that the most influential factor in CL progress is gender, mother tongue and motivation. This result is useful for other teachers who seek to investigate CL in multilingual adolescents.

Rosa María Britton offers an intriguing narrative speculation that, from the twenty-first century, rewrites Panama with the textual ingredients of a geopolitical projection that fosters the understanding that both the author, as well as the region, must accept as Panamanian reality. In order to sustain this knowledge, it has been necessary for Britton to resort to history as a foundation and thus question the traditional paradigm of the nation; nevertheless, it is the intention of this essay to understand the young republic as a private space, coming to accept the region as a public space, achieving as a direct result a closer and more accurate vision of the citizen in both representations, individual and collective. The article is based on a geocriticism that explores the human spaces that mimetic arts organize through the texts, the image, and the cultural interactions related to them. It is the constant challenge of a fragmented community that responds to the call of a single flag to confront a nationalism already inscribed in a republican and independent century. In other words, the narrative will be seen as a mobile geography that claims its place; it is a space that, by means of a textual chain is, and will continue to be, mutant.

In this study we will analyze the construction of Eva Perón as developed in Cine (Cinema), a triad of novels by Rosario-born writer Juan Martini (1944). We will base this study on the hypothesis that the changes experienced by Argentina over the last decade may have promoted the resurgence of Evita’s “political potentiality”, apparently “warded off” during the first years of this century (Saítta, 2002). In sync with this phenomenon and relying on literary fiction, Martini models an Eva in swift transition towards her political radicalization and mythical fate. Thus, her image has not ended up subsumed under the black anti-Peronist legend, the Justicialist hagiographic pitch, or the “artifact” forged by show business (Soria 2005); on the contrary it has come to embody the essence of the “Peronist myth” (Casullo 2008) out of the “hybridization” between the “logics of representation” of the State and the cultural industry that Peronism founded and which enabled Evita’s passage to the “legendary” dimension of “collective imagination” (Rosano 2006). We will additionally examine the subjective composition of Sivori, the film-maker who seeks to create an erratic film trilogy about Eva Perón, so as to contrast their respective wills and their dissimilar senses of transcendence.