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

Review of the work of Antonio Gómez: Escribir el espacio ausente. Exilio y cultura nacional en Díaz, Wajsman y Bolaño. Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 2013. 185p.

Review of Eduardo Lalo: Simone. 1ª Ed. Colección Archipiélago Caribe. Nº 1. Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 2011. 208 p.

Cuban cinema has changed dramatically since 1990. The reverberations of the so-called Special Period coupled with the intensification of globalizing forces and the emergence of new technologies have had repercussions in the film world. A new generation of cineastes, propelled by the changes, have picked up their cameras and begun documenting their context and introducing new visions. As a result, a once concertedly national project has become a decidedly transnational practice. To trace this transformation is to focus on some of the new modes of making and marketing films in Cuba today.

Introduction to Dossier: Curren Cuban Culture.

Editorial of the number by Claudio Maíz, director of Cuadernos del CILHA

The purpose of this paper is to analyse a corpus of anthologies of Patagonian poetry and fiction published between 1991 and 2009. One of the objectives of this work is to read prefaces, preliminary notes or presentations as fragments of a literary historiography of the South. In these threshold texts, anthologists reflect upon the characteristics of the literature written in (or about) a particular area and its modes of production, claiming the existence of poetics opposed to regionalism and delineating a corpus that sometimes derives in a canon of their own. The conflicting network of negotiations and creations of tutelary figures produces at least two repertoires –founding texts and novel texts– crossed by a topic variable: a family gathered around a referent and a trip. This is what allows for a configuration of a compacted historiography from the XVI century to the present.

The geographic-politic-economic-social location of Santa Teresa, the town-protagonist of the novel 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, is conspicuous; the present essay analyzes the feminicides described in "The Part About the Crimes" of this novel from the perspective of the spatial location that contains key implications on the cultural conditions and the ethical values of the described society. The concept of non-place of the anthropologist Marc Augé, who proposes that in the transit spaces the values are fluctuating; the desert, of values, as of emotions and empathy, the notion developed by the philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky; and male chauvinism and misogyny explicated by the chicana writer and essayist Gloria Anzaldúa, contribute to comprehend the existence of a specially fecund environment for the phenomenon of the feminicides. 

This work offers a critical reading of the melodramatic novel Margarita (1875), written by Josefina Pelliza of Sagasta. It considers as a theoretical framework Peter Brook´s study on melodrama in some Nineteenth-Century European novels. Specifically, this essay focuses on those melodramatic aspects taken by Pelliza from this narrative mode, as well as in the adaptations of such a model to the Argentine concerns. In addition, this study aims to demonstrate that the representation of the Italian immigrant offered in this novel -though paranoid and pejorative as the ones configurated in the works of writers such as Eugenio Cambaceres and Antonio Argerich- derives, due to the melodramatic structure, not in the exclusive determinism of naturalist prose, but rather in acceptance of the Other ethnic as the only way towards a future society. We believe that the contribution of this study lies in giving to know one of Josefina Pelliza´s works (until now marginal), it also offers as a framework of analysis the melodramatic mode (unusual in Argentine literature of the 19th century studies). In third place, it extends the discussion of the italofobia of the Argentine literature (so far focused on the naturalistic works of the 1880s). Without claim of completeness analytical about this novel, we seek to break the almost inexistent critical bibliography about Sagasta Josefina Pelliza. 

The interweaving of a detective plot and several texts by Rodolfo Walsh, that Elsa Drucaroff defines as a historical novel in El último caso de Rodolfo Walsh (2010), is her proposition to rethink the recent history of Argentina and the role of those who participated in the extremes of the ideological confrontation of the 1970’s. This paper examines Drucaroff’s work as a novelist and her historical analysis of the forces in action at that time. The focus is on the level of political consciousness of the characters as well as the measure in which the text adds to the debate as a public discourse relevant to the tragic events in question. Even though Walsh’s writings in this novel serve to confirm the analytical approach to history by Drucaroff as a leftist intellectual, it is in the fictional passages and characters that we are able to identify a proposal free from the associations that come with the use of the iconic writer. 

Rayuela by Julio Cortázar has been interpreted as a denunciation of inauthenticity by way of the absurd. However, such a denunciation is not in itself a sufficient condition for the possibility of an authentic existence in a strict existential-ontological sense, that is, a resolved commitment in the face of finitude which is first revealed in being-toward-death but requires a projection toward future possibilities from the irreplaceability of each Dasein. Accordingly, the misfortunes of Horacio Oliveira are not attributable to a hedonistic impulse or a life without rules, but are linked to his erratic and reduccionist methodology. To the degree that it is possible to treat rationality and irrationality as two sides of the same metaphysical coin, Oliveira’s skeptical, "all-or-nothing" search can be understood as a critique of the radical subjectivism and the methodological individualism upheld modernity.