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

Several researchers and critics insist that the “sense of humor” in Oliverio Girondo’s work is one of his main qualities. However, this has rarely been examined in detail, since they have preferred to interpret the more “cultured” features of Girondo’s work. In this paper, starting from the categorizations around the aesthetics of laughter, we analyze how the conception of the city, as well as the notions of the modern and the new are constructed from humor in Veinte poemas para ser leídos en el tranvía (1922). It will also show how this vision of the new ¾which stars from the finite, the small or the insignificant— has a deeper intention than mockery itself; it is about degrading, relativizing, deconstructing and straing everything considered sublime, grandiose or sacred, which, ends up being an affront to tradition and the dominant aesthetics of the time.

The following essay synthesizes different definitions of regional literature from three perspectives: sociocultural location, the use of specific language codes and reference to a specific cultural heritage. On the other hand, by linking a spatial variable and another historical-temporal variable in the definition of literature (for example, if a regional literary history is conceptualized, which is the orientation that the essay follows), the epistemological problem refers to theoretical-methodological reflections from literary studies. , language sciences and social sciences, to generate complex definitions of regional literature, which at the same time transcend the center versus margin paradigm typical of sociocultural histories. Thus, by reviewing different theoretical propositions (coming from the aforementioned fields: literary studies, language sciences and social sciences), the use of the term literary memory is proposed as a category that would allow the understanding of literary expressions, in addition to the speeches and textual archives of a region, without depending on the institutional control of their interpretation, or on aesthetic value judgments about these expressions, but which participate in the development of the heritage and cultural memory of a community.

This essay explores the lingering presence of postmodernist aesthetics in contemporary literature, specifically through the works of Argentine author Ariana Harwicz. Despite the apparent decline in theoretical discussions on postmodernism, the cultural and literary echoes of postmodernist thought remain evident. The analysis focuses on Harwicz's Trilogía de la pasión, comprising Die, My Love (2012), Feebleminded (2014), and Tender (2015), which collectively critique and deconstruct societal pillars such as family and motherhood. These novels embody the postmodernist spirit through their fragmented narratives, exploration of dislocation, and subversion of binary oppositions like sanity and madness, rationality and irrationality. Harwicz's narratives challenge the hegemonic metanarratives that have historically shaped Western cultural norms, particularly the idealized concept of motherhood. By highlighting the dissident maternal experiences of her protagonists, Harwicz exposes the constructed nature of reality and the marginalization of alternative perspectives. The essay argues that, far from being a relic of the past, postmodernism continues to offer a dynamic framework for understanding contemporary literature. It remains relevant in its resistance to categorization, its challenge to accepted truths, and its exploration of the complexities of identity, making it a vital lens through which to examine the ongoing evolution of cultural and literary production.

The short story “La pesada valija de Benavides”, by Argentine writer Samanta Schweblin (1978-), develops a critique of the elements that constitute the process of artistic communication: the author, the work, its intermediaries, and the audience. To achieve this, the story utilizes the resource of allegory, enabling the extrapolation of the narrated story to the communication process of Western art. Moreover, the use of allegory allows for the denaturalization of the aesthetic object by pushing the roles of those who have designated it as “art” to the point of absurdity. In this way, “The Heavy Suitcase of Benavides” is an example of how it is possible to denounce the aesthetic process from a feminist critical perspective, capable of naming cultural realities that have long been obscured. Among these are the justifications of violence against women in the service of an artistic dimension, supposedly isolated from the adverse socio-historical conditions in which they lived but which, in reality, the aesthetic object itself can cover up or reproduce.

While the history of Teresa Urrea, a Mexican folk saint known as the “Saint of Cabora,” has been explored at length, “teresismo,” the name given to the phenomenon of revolts carried out in her name, has not been considered from the perspective of intellectual history. This essay analyzes Tomochic! Redención! (1896), a work written and published by Urrea and Lauro Aguirre in El Paso, Texas. In their retelling of the rebellion and massacre that occurred in Tomóchic, Chihuahua (1892), the authors politicize Spiritism, a doctrine that aims to find a balance between science and religion, in order to construct a form of rebellious thought. This entails the resignification of ideological materials and the intensification of discursive features, especially by articulating an intense social conflict. Focusing on the work’s “Introduction,” this essay examines a series of religious figures invested with new meanings in the context of border struggle: the narrator, a prisoner plagued by spiritual doubt; a spirit that consoles and advises him; and the visions the narrator experiences when he falls asleep. In conclusion, the essay suggests that this process of politicized syncretism was a widespread phenomenon in border journalism leading up to the Mexican Revolution, an ideological “exile” that accompanied physical exile: the final years of dictator Porfirio Díaz’s reign in Mexico created a situation in which expatriation, new conflicts and new forms of solidarity, and journalism worked together to produce new forms of thinking, writing, and doing. Though little-known, they represent a fascinating moment of intellectual history.

The worldview present in three lullabies contained in the book Lírica infantil de México (1984) by Vicente T. Mendoza is analyzed, based on Wilhelm Dilthey’s Teoría de las concepciones del mundo (1974), as well as on the concepts of performativity and performance developed by Jonathan Culler in Theory of the Lyric (2017). The study determines that the selected lullabies possess religious and poetic conceptions of the world based on dichotomies, which denote an exploitation of the adult’s imagination to induce scenarios with high ideological content in the child’s mind. It is concluded that the lyrical performativity of the arrullos has a singular transcendence, since it allows the creating fictitious realities at the same time that it affects the listener’s perception of reality. In addition, it is observed that the adequate performance of these compositions allows the fixation of their structures and basic contents to be fixed within the collective imaginary, which demonstrates their effectiveness in achieving the effect they wish to produce.

In Demonia, by Bernardo Esquinca, some biblical myths are inscribed, at a symbolic level, in the spaces of the texts. In this way, places are modified, they are composed of amalgamated time curves that interact in the same space-time. This writing technique, frequent in the Mexican author's narrative, generates protean places, where discourses from different eras coexist in the development of the plots and in the visceral ways of experiencing and apprehending the places. From a geocritical perspective, this paper analyzes spatial anxiety in “Moscas” and “Deuteronomio”, short stories from the aforementioned volume. Such representations call into question the sanity of the characters based on the effects produced by spatial practices that have their origin in stories from the Old Testament, especially around the predominance of evil in the worlds referred to and in the protagonists of the stories.

This critical note examines Tununa Mercado’s En estado de memoria (1990) through the concept of geopoetics, as proposed by Fernando Aínsa, in combination with Horacio Cerutti Guldberg’s social cartography, and other views on exile and writing. Based on Tununa Mercado’s experience of exile in Mexico, it highlights how her hybrid narrative ¾which interwines memoirs, essays, and stories¾ explores the relationship between space and the subjectivity of uprootedness. The analysis is organized into four sections: the first discusses the broken link with Argentina; the second details integration in Mexico and the creation of symbolic spaces; the third asks about return and the sense of alienation, while the last section emphasizes writing as a refuge from displacement. Thus, it is argued how, in the book En estado de memoria, memory and writing reshape the lived space of the exiled, providing a new emotive cartography. In that sense, geopoetics provides a enriching perspective to understand the affective connections with the inhabited territories, which can open relevant lines of research in the literature of exile.

The main aim of this essay is to analyze the way in which the labyrinth, or the idea of a labyrinth is present in El Perseguidor and Rayuela, two of the most important fictional works of Julio Cortázar. It also analyzes the way in which the author uses this idea from both a structural perspective, the labyrinth as a narrative structure, and from a pragmatic point of view, the labyrinth as a profound metaphor of human existence. In this essay, some important concepts of Cortázar´s own literary theories are presented to dig deep in literary figures such as the idea of a tunnel or an interstice and their relationship with Mythology and the constant search of other realities.  At the end of the essay, this idea of the labyrinth is briefly compared to the Bebop music of Charlie Parker, an artist who had a major influence in Cortázar´s work and who played an important role as the inspiration for the main character, Johnny Carter, in Cortazar’s short story El Perseguidor. It is well known that Julio Cortázar had an exquisite taste in this music genre.

This anthology Narradores mexicanos del siglo xxi. (Entre la entropía y la neguentropía) is a collection of seven essays of literary criticism on Mexican narrative of the present century. The coordinators, Norma Angélica Cuevas Velasco and Alfredo Pavón, have brought together a series of researchers who, through diverse perspectives and methodologies, point out from their analysis the ideological and political elements in their objects of study. Likewise, the variety of voices represents the trend that the subtitle announces: in the face of the overwhelming social, cultural and economic chaos of contemporary Mexico, literature is a battlefield for the representation of a complex modern individual. This is the main contribution that the book offers to current studies: a deep x-ray of the national narrative, underlining the convoluted link between the artistic work and its context, thus challenging the immanent reading to, instead, highlight the importance of interdisciplinary dialogue.