O negro na construção da identidade nacional: auto e heteroimagens no romance abolicionista cubano e brasileiro

Die vorliegende Arbeit nahm sich vor, das Bild des Afroamerikaners in jeweils zwei kubanischen und brasilianischen Romanen des 19. Jahrhunderts zu analysieren: El negro Francisco, Cecilia Valdés, A escrava Isaura und O mulato. Das Hauptziel war es, zu untersuchen, wie das Bild des Afroabstammenden von den Autoren angeeignet und instrumentalisiert wurde, um Veränderungen in ihren Gesellschaften zu erzielen. Darüber hinaus, versuchte man darzustellen, wie der Afroamerikaner und seine Kultur aus dem kubanischen und brasilianischen nationalen Projekt ausgeschlossen wurden. Zunächst wurden die Haupttheorien über die Konstruktion von Auto- und Heterostereotypen vorgestellt und auf die Relevanz der Stereotypenbildung im kolonialen Kontext hingewiesen. Daraufhin wurde der historische Kontext der Sklaverei und der Abolition in Kuba und in Brasilien dargelegt. Auf diese Basis wurden die Werke analysiert. Im letzten Kapitel wurde auf die Resultate der Fragestellungen eingegangen, die die vorliegende Arbeit geleitet haben. Solche wie: Welche Bilder der Weißen und der Schwarzen wurden in den Werken kreiert? Wie positioniert sich der Autor bezüglich der Abolition und der Vermischung der Ethnien? Welche Bedeutung hatten die ethnischen Diskurse im kubanischen und brasilianischen kollektiven Gedächtnis des 19. Jahrhunderts? Es konnte gezeigt werden, dass das Bild des Afroamerikaners in den Romanen verwendet wurde, um die Zukunft der eigenen Nation zu projizieren, von der der Schwarze nur ein Teil werden könnte, wenn er die weiße Kultur und Hautfarbe annehmen würde, das heißt, wenn er sich dem Prozess eines physischen und kulturellen „branqueamento“ unterziehen würde. Die abolitionistische Narrative, auch wenn sie nach außen hin dem Schwarzen zu verteidigen scheint, trug in Wahrheit zur Fixierung und Perpetuierung der ethnischen Stereotype bei, die die Schwarzen in den marginalen Sphären der Gesellschaft verewigten und die Macht in den Händen der Weißen konsolidierten.

El pueblo y los libros: prácticas de apropiación e intención editorial

Common people and books seem to be opposed terms. On the one hand books are usually the symbol of culture; on the other hand the culture of the Volk did not used to be a literate one. This article reviews the relation between both terms from the 16th to the 19th Century and shows that it is not possible to separate both terms, because the different ways of appropriation allow people to 'read' books in many different ways.

Las Voces de los Quijotes

In this work we present a detailed analysis of the character profile in the three Quijotes by Cervantes and Avellaneda. Several properties of the languages and sub-languages are explored.

Picasso y Cornuty. La absenta como adicción cambiosecular europea

Electricity coined the nightlife in the European capital par excellence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: Paris. Under the artificial reflection dandies, elegant workers, and bohemians flocked to the new playground. Painters, converted to urban chroniclers, show pictorial modernity and vitality; in the canvas of Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas or Jean Béraud we see a common element: the glass of absinthe on the table. The absinthe took sacrosanct dyes in the daily living of Parisian habitants and became an indispensable ritual to Henri Albert Cornuty, a poet who was part of the Madrid bohemian and in the gallery of disinherited that Picasso painted in blue stage. A writer and a painter that bring us to the drink-image of the intelligentsia of the time; this elixir was attributed with hypnotic, aphrodisiac and hallucinogenic powers; the myth of absinthe was part of the imaginary Paris at end of the century, an iconography that continues shaping identity in the twenty-first century.

Los convulsos años treinta en el espejo del tiempo: La rehabilitación de la responsabilidad social del escritor

In the 21st century field of culture, the economic crisis (and its consequences) has fomented a debate on the social responsibility of the writer. In particular quite a few works of Spanish literature account for a marked responsible, interventionist and dissident discourse. Thus, from the present day and aware of historicity, this article pauses at a key episode in the trajectory of the said debate: the rehumanization of art during the 1930s, the passing from autonomy to commitment in art. A crucial aspect in the Edad de Plata is addressed with the aim of precisely showing how a milestone in the attitude of the creator before society and its disruptions arose, how an exemplary case developed for exploring aspects specific to this positioning of the author, which is itself being reconsidered today.

Entre ética e ironía: aspectos retóricos en los “pies de foto” de Juan José Millás.

The aim of this short essay is to analyze the techniques of argumentation developed by the writer and journalist Juan José Millás in his articles named Pie de Foto. Millás is known for his peculiar way of writing, in which language is highly unstable and is thereby apt to the creation of new perspectives and points of view. In the Pie de Foto, this ambivalence of language is enriched by the presence of a picture, of which his textual article is a comment. Using the definition given by Genette, Millás rhetoric is not a ‘restricted’ one but it is a complex system, in which also the apparently superficial figures can provide semantic effects and enrich information. Within this frame, irony plays a fundamental role because it helps questioning the standard discourse of politics. By means of techniques such as the mechanical reproduction and the ridiculing of the fallacies hidden in common sense, Millas raises ethical problems and develops a critique to the postmodern way of life in western countries.

Historiografía, mantenimiento y pérdida de la identidad léxica y cultural: el caso de Gualchos a través de los datos del proyecto Vitalex

This work aims at providing a first approximation to the study of lexical vitality by comparing its results to those of ALEA as well as carrying out a study on the current state of affairs. These results represent our early data collection from location 515 corresponding to Gualchos in La Alpujarra. Here we show a very interesting relationship between the deep socio-economic and demographic transformation of the area and a lexical mutation that is shown by a high percentage of lexical mortality and a loss of dialectal specificity giving rise to a shift towards standard terms, especially in fields related to agricultural and ranching life.

Una esquina con identidad uruguaya – la mirada propia, la mirada ajena

The aim of this paper is to introduce the less known part of the Río de la Plata: Uruguay. The main question is whether a country relatively young and of tiny dimensions has its own identity. For that, after giving some theoretical information, we present a brief history of this country and the results of two surveys. The first done a couple of years ago for the Spanish newspaper El País and the other conducted recently among a group of Argentines. It is not a professional survey, rather an invitation to reflect on the process of the creation of the Uruguayan identity, its principal points and relations between two apparently very close countries, separated by the same river.

Breve aproximación a la crítica de la sociedad polaca en la novelística de posguerra en la novelística de Stanisław Lem

There is no doubt that the figure of Stanislaw Lem is a solid reference in the context of science fiction literature of Eastern Europe in the second half of the twentieth century. Lem developed a literary game in which the criticism of the political system was implied in each paragraph along with an acid humor that transferred into masterpieces of contemporary science fiction.

Montesquieu, Rousseau, Herder. De las teorías climáticas a la voz del pueblo como factor constitutivo

This article shows in which way the so-called climate theories, which have been developed since Antiquity, change over the course of time and influence the different theories on the origin of language. Via Montesquieu and Rousseau, the “climate theories” have influenced Johann Gottfried Herder, who bases on the romantic concept of Volk. By this means, a lot of ideas come into being which are fundamental for the foundation and development of the national philologies in Europe.

Conflictos entre el pueblo y las autoridades. Bubenreuth: un ejemplo actual en Baviera

The sovereign of a democratic state is „the people“. However, they transfer their voices to a few political party representatives in order to make them exercise legislative and executive powers in the name of “the people”. In different European countries, this model of representative democracy is marked by elements of direct democracy. In Switzerland, for example, there are frequent plebiscites on a number of issues and in France, the President of the Republic is elected directly. In Germany, the constitution calls for a “Volksabstimmung”, or a referendum at the federal level, a “Volksentscheid” or plebiscite at the federal state level and a “Bürgerentscheid” at the city level. But in small municipalities where everyone knows each other and people talk, a different form of direct democracy continues on. In the case of Bubenreuth, where I have lived for more than 30 years, the community dared to raise its voice against the mayor and against town councillors to have them revoke the application of a legal but unjust regulation, or for them to at least mitigate the effects.

Nombre, imagen, cuerpo, voz. Apariciones del pueblo como grupo social diferenciado en textos del siglo XIX español: proclamas de la guerra contra Napoleón, Mariano José de Larra, Rosalía de Castro

This paper analyzes the emergence of the term 'pueble', or 'people', in Spanish literature of the nineteenth century with the meaning of differentiated social subject in a corpus composed of texts of the War of Independence by Mariano José de Larra and Rosalia de Castro. The texts and authors selected are representative of their cultural and historical contexts and together they form a part of the Spanish Romanticism.

Lo que sé de los hombrecillos de Juan José Millás: la ficción psicótica de la sociedad perfecta.

This short essay deals with literary representations of identity and of social reality, especially in relation to the novelistic works published by the Spanish writer Juan José Millás. The article is divided into three parts. The first section is dedicated to a general overview of the new perspectives brought by the contemporary ‘linguistic turn’ in culture, which is currently considered as the product of different discourses and not as an ontological datum. The postmodern condition, on the other hand, is described as the age in which it has become radically difficult to rely on such ideas as “nation” and “people” for the construction of personal identity. The second part of the article identifies Millás’ poetics as an excellent example of describing the neurotic symptoms produced by the urban way of life in Western communities. Millás recognizes the separateness between language and material reality as the origin of the subject's isolation, especially in contemporary life. Finally, the third part handles with Lo que sé de los hombrecillos, the last novel by Millás, in which we witness a significant switch from neurosis to psychosis in the mind of the protagonist who offers us a distorted realisation of his idea of community and plenitude.

Un urbis encomium a lo vulgar: el caso de los dictados tópicos

Analysis of popular topics taught in the light of the topics learned poetry, revolving around the urbis encomium, understanding the popular verses somehow respond to a similar structure to that established for the praise of copyright poetry. The popular songs are close to the issue which are specific to them, collected by imitation or by spontaneous coincidence and adopt many of the tools of author's lyric poetry. Within this framework, we go deeply into analogies we found when studying the group of songs we label " songs to the earth" with the topics of classical rhetoric making up the urbis encomium, the praise for the city.

Historia en voz baja: la oralidad y el rumor para la narración de la Guerra Civil española en la ‘Primera derrota’ de Alberto Méndez

The first of the four paths that structure the book "Los girasoles ciegos", by Alberto Méndez – with its theory about the delayed end of the Spanish Civil War as a longing for destruction outside of any kind of strategy based on military logic – presents the construction of a memory based on certain oral marks, facts provided quietly by apparently non-central characters, the distrust of written documents, and the use of speech patterns mostly associated with spontaneity in order to set up a level of verisimilitude which makes the memory emerge in parallel pathways considered relatively reliable (for example, the case of a report), forged speech on the basis of indirect references, testimonials and letters. The aim of the paper is to consider an example of contemporary Spanish narrative in which a journey, perhaps weak in terms of the material, support to the channels through which the narrator comes in the story through the voice of the people – but functional as an approach to a search of the recent past – contributes to a certain conception of memory.