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

This article seeks to deepen the internal logic of Brazilian modernism and its possible comparative approaches, taking as its starting point the reevaluation of the aforementioned movement brought about by the 100th anniversary of the Week of Modern Art, which took place in 1922. Thus, the first part of this text explores central elements of Brazilian modernism, such as the literary decentralization, the construction of historical milestones and the creation of prisms based on groups. In the second section, these elements unfold unto the Latin-American horizon. In order to explore the latter, the internal logic of Chilean avant-garde, a context that is apparently quite different from the Brazilian one, is analyzed, as well as Vicente Huidobro’s role in that literary environment.

In the salutations of two sermons preached in Cuzco in 1662 and 1679, Juan de Espinosa Medrano (c. 1629-1688) evoked Trimalchio’s banquet in Petronius’ Satyricon. Previously, he had used another passage from the same work (frequently quoted in the polemic around Gongorism) in his Apologético en favor de Góngora. However, in the sermons he adopts a more daring approach to Petronius’ text by developing a novel Christian allegorization of Trimalchio’s banquet as a prefiguration of the Eucharist (Oración panegírica de la renovación del santísimo sacramento) or amending its original profane nature (Sermón del Miércoles de Ceniza). The history of the dissemination of the Satyricon text; the distinctive features of the edition used by Espinosa, which had been prepared by the Protestant humanist Joseph Scaliger; and the latter’s placing in the Index of forbidden books are instrumental in grasping the implications of citing Petronius in the context of colonial culture.

This article proposes an alternative reading of the novel Marco Zero I: a revolução melancólica by Oswald de Andrade as a dialectic between panorama and snapshot that through discontinuous fragments shows the impossibility of building a totalizing image of Brazil. For this, we discuss the reception of the novel and we analyze the “mural form” as an innovative narrative proposal that allows to present the peculiarities of a specific social matter. Our central thesis is that Oswald’s novel, despite being considered a failed work, develops an innovative literary form that allows addressing the social and historical conflicts of the 1930s through a (re) presentation of the popular that avoids its totalization in such a way that both the form and the matter of what is narrated make palpable the ideological and historical fractures of a process of peripheric modernization.

The diagnosis of the modes of citation of classical references among the Creoles of the Spanish viceroyalties reveals various forms of irregularity and disrespect. Serving the expression of knowledge in competition with the peninsular priority, this operation of intentional translation can be traced in all the great names of the colonial baroque to become an operative key that works in another way, on the bias we might say, in versions that go from the image of Franciscans as atlantes of the Trinity to the bees of Aristeo emerging from the inane and mute body of the ox of Saint Thomas, passing through the no less strange form of a loving moray fish swimming in the waters of christic communion. By enumerating some of these iconotropies, this article studies the mechanisms that allow the american translatio of mythographic knowledge, mechanisms as original as they are risky, ranging from evemerism to christic prefiguration, from intentional omission or error to bordering on the most extreme anamorphosis.

Currently considered to be one of the great milestones of Brazilian literature, the novel Serafim Ponte Grande was, for many years, met with an apathetic, if not frankly disapproving, reception. Its formal composition, marked by discontinuity between its parts and by its fragmented features, was repeatedly criticized. If, on the one hand, the formal structure appeared to be a simplistic device and, on the other hand, the result was an obfuscating idealization of the contradictions of the society portrayed, the present article proposes that its literary use of the montage technique is, by contrast, a critical resource. Based on the analysis of scenes from the novel and a discussion of the montage concept, we intend to argue that the production of Serafim Ponte Grande critically outlines the limits and aspirations of the esthetic proposals that marked São Paulo’s modernism in the 1920s.

This article aims to present criticisms of 1922 Brazilian modernism, given the celebration of its centenary, and discuss “anthropophagy” as an autonomous Brazilian “ism.” The idea is to resume the “Anthropophagous Manifesto” based on two fundamental ideas: Martin Puchner’s proposal that the manifest is the genre par excellence of the artistic avant-gardes; and Fredric Jameson’s suggestion that modernism at the center, as well as at the periphery of capitalism, has the colonial question as one of its main axes. Considering anthropophagy as an “ism” through its manifesto allows us to insert it in the world history of the avant-gardes without losing its national configurations and discussing its importance and topicality in the face of present historical challenges —both in politics and in the arts.

The following essay analyzes “As enfibraturas do Ipiranga”, the final poem of Paulicéia desvairada, by Mário de Andrade. The poem written in 1921, which imitates the form of a secular oratory performed by the entire population in the center of the city of São Paulo, offers an anticipatory, allegorical, and problematic vision of the modernist movement of 1922. Here, the aesthetics disputes are presented as permeated by social clashes in the open amphitheater of the city. The impasses of the modernization process in Brazil that are present in the poem continue to resonate, like an echo, a hundred years after its writing.

As a contribution to the study of video poetry produced by women, one of the first video poems ever produced in the Americas will be analyzed and discussed. In this work, the artist is committed to a decided and rhizomatic deterritorialization of the written poem, proposing an audiovisual creation that irreverently tears apart the figure of the authority of the male poet. Becerra Cano uses various types of translations to video-graphically trace a hybrid spacetime of potential nomadic and poetic creation, responding to the contemporary cultural and technological context with historical gender and colonial implications.

The aim of this paper is to explore and to analyze the critical production by Alan Pauls. Specifically, the form, ethics and literary uses he develops he comments and analyzes the work of others. The hypothesis is guided by a series of questions –How does he read, when he reads others? What vocabulary, resources, and figures of speech make up his critical writing? What principle, truths, and persistences shape his ethics as a critical reader? What does he expropriate, what does he keep when intruding in others‘ fiction? –, my hypothesis is that such critical production a) evaluates books according to an economic vocabulary and logic; b) practices a cult of the untimely according to an affirmative conception and use of anachronism; and c) exhibits the principles and operations that his literature extracts from a national anti-historicist library: Borges, Saer, Puig y Piglia.

This study expects to be a demystification of the person and work of the Argentinean poet Alejandra Pizarnik. To do so, we elaborate an analysis of the jail as an obsessive motif in the poem “El despertar” that allows us to explain the birth of the “personaje alejandrino” as well as some of its main traits: loneliness and isolation. The literary theory that supports this work is the psychocriticism of Charles Mauron. However, we distance ourselves from this theory when we discover that this character is a voluntary product –and not an unconscious one– of the poet, who is forced to create an author figure to exist in a literary world dominated by men. To sum up, this work appears as an answer to the common use of the myth based on the biography of Pizarnik to analyse her literary work. In this practice we discover once again the habitual mythification –mainly in women artists– of mental illness and suicide.