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

This paper approaches William Henry Hudson’s autobiographical work, Far Away and Long Ago - A History of My Early Life (1918), from the point of view of the authorial construction –carried out through memory and the autobiographical discourse– of childhood as the space of what we shall call a retrospective utopia, which is deeply intertwined with the leitmotif of the lost paradise. Our interest in Hudson’s text and its use of the utopian genre comes from the construction of a territory defined by an authorial crossing of self and hetero-images where we intend to track the marks of a representation of the Argentine, whether present or absent.

The objective of this article is to analyze the relationship between space and memory in Rafael Chirbes’ novel En la orilla (2013), and in the books De fems i de marbres (2003) and La pell de la frontera (2016), by Francesc Serés. In the first place, the relationship between space and fiction will be treated from studies on memory (applying Halbwachs’ concept of 2022collective memory) and the interest in spatial analysis in literary historiography. Secondly, the relationship established between the construction of a symbolic space and two different historical moments will be analyzed: the Spanish civil war (1936-1939) and the post-war period, and the migratory phenomenon of the early 21st century. Our hypothesis is that the books of Serés and Chirbes are based on the construction of a peripheral, changing and plural collective memory space.

The paper formulates an approach to memory in Elena Garro’s novel, its relationship with historical truth and its restatement through active imagination according to the point of view of Paul Ricoeur. The story reviews conventional binomials (collective-individual, story-dream, reality-fiction, power-love) and transforms them from the notion of anámnesis, with which it blurs the present and eliminates the past-future distance. With a perspective that goes from critical operation to action, the novel sets out to replace a notion of memory-object by a notion of memory-illusion. The author raises the act of imagination as new knowledge in the face of misfortune and marginality, not as a historical-social alternative.

This text proposes a reflection on the assimilation that the British musician David Bowie made of Science Fiction, specifically in his 1969 song, “Space Oddity”. Based on a comparative analysis between the song and the literary and cinematographic works that serve as his inspiration, this article proposes a reading of how a pop creation brought to light the theme of loneliness and uprootedness implied by nascent space travel. Bowie, in his musical proposal, explores the nostalgia and estrangement experienced by the space traveler. He also explores the psychic and emotional states that can arise in a world that is, for the first time, exposed to a new type of loneliness: cosmic loneliness. At this crossroads between science fiction and pop, reflection lines emerge on the limits between high culture and popular culture, as well as the legitimization of artistic discourses and the massification of art.

Between the last quarter of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, many newspapers and magazines emerged as the illustrated expression of self-identifying Black voices who sought to participate in national and international debates from a distinct space of enunciation. Of these, two magazines are emblematic due to their duration and stability: Nuestra Raza (Montevideo, 1933-1948) and Adelante (La Habana, 1935-1939), cultural publications which showcased and questioned various issues of interest for their respective reading publics. This article has two primary aims: first of all, to review the insertion of both magazines in the trajectory of Black periodical publications in Latin America; and, secondly, to analyze part of their content, such as discourses and publicized activities, which display elements of a shared diasporic consciousness, in accordance with the category of afro-descendant counterpublics.

From its beginnings, the modernization process in Argentina was based on the exclusionary disjunction articulated around the main antinomy civilization or barbarism. Towards the end of the 20th century, this founding antinomy becomes diluted in literary expression and it mutates into what Elsa Drucaroff in her Los prisioneros de la torre calls civilibarbarism. This change coincides in time with the post-modern rupturist negation of the bipolar logic of modernity (mind/body, and so on) and the transmodern idea of overcoming the binary reductive of the plural in the prefix trans- that describes current reality. In the present article we propose to analyze two argentinean stories – “El chico sucio” by Mariana Enriquez and “Ese zombie” by Alejandro Soifer– from the point of view of the old binomials. In both of them, the coexistence of temporal or spatial planes, the multichrony, puts in evidence both the circularity of barbarism in Argentine history, and its perfect coexistence with the civilizing process, and, in short, the absence of the antithetical founding relationship.

Ignacio García Malo is one of the most considerated and recognisced Spanish novelists of 18th century. Althought, he is remembered because his work titled Voz de la naturaleza (1787-1803), which is comprehended about twelve different novels. These pieces, until recently, have been analyzed as a whole, but not individually. To contribute to determinate the value of each text, the present work tries to analyze the first of those novels, Lisandro y Rosaura; a novel forgotten, but remarkable for its use of the fantastic, which doesn’t have any known background in Spanish 18th century novel. The supernatural appear from the intervention of divinity in human events in the face of the materialistic disbelief of one of the characters.

Although gaucho genre genealogy has made the Hidalgo-Ascasubi-Del Campo-Hernández series the sequence of transmission of an aesthetic resource that is transformed into the passage from one authorship to the other, in the 1820s there are texts whose authorship remains in anonymity and they have not attracted the attention of the critics, but, nevertheless, are the first that retake central points of the poetics of Hidalgo. We have called this increase in the gaucho genre corpus an expanded universe. This universe unfolds between 1823 and 1825 and constitutes a gap in the history of criticism of the gaucho genre as the texts that comprise it have been read only exceptionally and, in those cases, only as archival finds, but not as texts that deserve to be included in the studies of the gaucho genre. This work tries to fill that gap through a reading focused on the texts.

This paper proposes an analysis of Juvenal’s XIV Satire based on the expressions avarus felix and pauper beatus, which shape a relevant dilemma to the interpretation of the Satire. First, I will evaluate avarus felix, looking to show that, besides being an incompatibility, it holds the notion of egestas, which would lower the individual to the moral quality of a slave. Second, I will point out that along the Satire XIV several pictures show individuals under that very conception of needed beings, so that no matter how much they show themselves publicly as free romans, in a moral level they are quite the contrary. Finally, I will evaluate pauper beatus and explain that true wealth is not the indiscriminate amassing of goods but sufficiency achieved through those owned. Thus, the relation shown by Juvenal between morality and wealth would be mediated by the ideas of sufficiency and necessity.

This study seeks to explore the functioning of some motifs of the Kabbalah and Platonic philosophy in the poem “El golem” by Jorge Luis Borges. Based on the Argentine author’s peculiar deconstructive style, the hypothesis proposed is that the poem becomes a field of experimentation where the limits of some Kabbalistic and Platonic concepts are explored with tools such as paradox and parody. The analysis concludes that a possible reading of “El golem” should not ignore the author’s relativistic and playful vision of mystical and philosophical currents, in this case the Kabbalah and Platonic philosophy. So, in the poem analyzed, paradox prevails as the deconstructive attitude of the text.