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

In this paper, we look at how theory and publishing practices were intertwined in Argentina between 1967 and 1976. We do so by analyzing “El hombre y su mundo” [“The Man and His World"], a collection of books directed by Oscar del Barco for Ediciones Caldén (Argentina) during that period. We hold that del Barco´s multifaceted work as editor, translator, compiler, and essayist, created a politics of theory, focusing on two interrelated aspects: 1) a poetics of publishing, with translations of works by political theorists, structuralist and poststructuralist thinkers coming together in a unique collection mediated by del Barco’s critical texts, and 2) a "smuggling" publishing practice –as texts were selected, translated and shaped into small books from foreign magazines with no copyright permission. We see a performative force in such interrelation of theory and publishing strategies, as “El hombre y su mundo” made available books through practices and materialities that acted upon what those very books were calling for.

A singular corpus of the Chilean narrative of the nineteenth century develops the topic of prevented love between Spaniards and Mapuche, according to which the happy ending only be possible through the civilization of the indigenous or thanks to their submission to Christian doctrine. For this reason, these are texts nor alien to the debate that is currently present in the theses regarding categories such as multiculturalism, interculturality, cultural plurality, among other approaches and exposes interculturality as “conflictivity” (Fornet-Betancourt, 1998, Dussel, 2005; García Canclini, 2011) according to the hybrid, precarious and inharmonious condition. It is, in fact, a “culturizing” narrative that gives way to paroxysmal outcomes typical of the folletin which at the time were called as typical of an “indian novel” by Zorobabel Rodriguez (1873). Our working hypothesis proposes that these transgressions end up being transferred from the melodramatic imaginary to a historiographical and cultural condition that does not attend to the conflictive but to the hegemonic with respect the conformation of our national identity.

In the following we seek to consider the ways in which the cultural representations about punk lives in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl represent an inquiry around female precariousness that refers to economically superfluous stocks, unproductive jobs and garbage jobs closer to the universe of anonymous and imperceptible lives. And that marking supposes a potentiality in relation to the feminine condition and gendered in juxtaposition to the condition of workers. Punks are fundamentally lazy, indifferent and apathetic towards labor relations, hence work is that absent sign that makes it work and becomes an explanatory principle.The series of cultural materials in question examines the filmic work of Sarah Minter in her first video art films that are Nadie es inocente (1987) and Alma Punk (1992) crossing different analyzes from of the wandering becoming of its protagonists.

Review

This article proposes a new reading of Venezuelan oil novels Mene and Guachimanes from the theoretical framework of geological writing. While literary criticism has focused on anthropocentric aspects of these novels, a geological analysis considers other factors within their narratives (non-human agency, materiality of bodies, and accumulation processes). I argue that reading these novels from this materialist perspective enables us to highlight substantial narrative elements in oil fiction that other readings have not adequately addressed, which has led to the literary devaluation of these petrofictions.

This paper focuses on three authors who have narrated their experiences of living with HIV: the Venezuelan José Vicente de Santis, the Cuban Miguel Ángel Fraga, and the Argentine Pablo Pérez. These authors have experienced their illnesses at different times in the 1990s and in other cultural contexts. Therefore, their experiences regarding access to the medication and social perceptions of the disease are also different. However, the three writers have in common the struggle for survival and the deployment of an ethic of resurrection. The article analyzes how HIV-positive people have narrated their permanence in their communities in the first person. How do these authors think of themselves as social subjects after being considered by family and society as dying? The works that the article examines become both esthetic and ethical challenges that raise questions about how to live and narrate the experience of having HIV and engage the reader with questions about how to normalize this disease and reintroduce survivors in social spaces.

The genesis of the fictions of Gustavo Álvarez and Albalucía Ángel is demarcated in ‘el 9 de abril’, name given to the social outburst that occurs in Colombia after the magnicide of the politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán (1948). The notion of martyrdom is assimilated in the literary works as a sign and a myth to depict the disproportion of violence under the frame of the bipartisan conflict. In the fictions martyrdom is implemented as a narrative device and an artefact to revisit the past and reflect on the nation. By adopting postmodernist readings in fields such as ‘biopolitics’, cultural sociology, and concepts like ‘culture hybridity’ proposed by Homi Bhabha, we find that disfigurations of original Christian myths take place in the fictions with a subversive purpose. Although modern martyrdom is rooted in Christianity, the phenomenon erases the borders between politics and religion, given that its secularization is manifested through social movements and the cultural construction that rises around the martyr. Nowadays, ‘el 9 de abril’ not only commemorates the magnicide, but it has established itself as a National Civic Day to pay homage to all the victims of the armed conflict. 

We propose a critical reading of the novels Nick Carter se divierte mientras el lector es asesinado y yo agonizo (1975), La banda del ciempiés (2010) and Dejen todo en mis manos (1996), which make up the crime trilogy, by Mario Levrero. The Uruguayan builds his figure as a "rare" author from the use of marginalized materials and disciplines, among them, the crime fiction that goes through his writing project. However, in a strategy of dissimulation, he points out it as a type of closed and commercial literature that closes the transformation of the reader. We argue that, through parody, display of artifice, or hyperbolic variants of paranoid fiction, Levrero sets out to subvert these boundaries. The writer appropriates the crime novel to develop another search which, while dismantling the protocols of the genre, enables its possibilities of modifying the subject. Against the crime of the transcendent by modern society that deprives the subject of luminous experiences, his poetics pursues contact with the Spirit or the Unconscious, interchangeable in his worldview. He thus manifests his program that conceives writing as a therapeutic device.

Although Paul Groussac was suspicious of the quality of Argentine literature, since, like American literature in general, he considered it to be a mere copy of European literature, he did not cease to write about particular authors. Here we propose to gather and analyse his interventions, which are not few, dedicated to three authors: Juan B. Alberdi, Esteban Echeverría and Domingo F. Sarmiento. An exhaustive archival work is carried out, which allows us to recover not only the original versions of articles later collected, with modifications, in a book, but also unpublished works and others that until now had never been studied (an early article dedicated to Alberdi, which Groussac published in 1874 in the Tucuman newspaper La Razón, is included as an appendix). Two elements present in general in Groussac's work –his assessment of the (lack of) originality in American literature; his critical style consisting in pursuing, and sometimes in making coincide, in the same aesthetic judgement, praise and censure– are taken as axes to approach the specific operations he deploys in the reading of each of these three authors of the generation of 1837, to the extent that these recurrent themes run through the particular approaches and determine them.

Reseña. Manuel J. Gutiérrez y Pedro Gutiérrez Revuelta. La palabra de Pablo Neruda (1960-1973). Acción y poesía junto al pueblo. Salamanca, España, Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2020