Literatura e imagen del cómic: Laura Pérez Vernetti-Blina

En esta tesis, a partir del estudio de la obra de Laura Pérez Vernetti, objeto de estudio, pretendo ofrecer una reflexión metodológica y crítica sobre el cómic española de proyección internacional en Europa y en el mundo, que nos conduzca a calibrar mejor el lugar que ocupa hoy en el ámbito internacional. Contexto histórico en el que se centra la metodología de esta tesis, situando esta metodología para enmarcar a Laura. Desde esta perspectiva de proyección internacional, ha sido de mi interés, seguir, para este análisis, varios períodos en los que se insertan tres grupos generacionales que nos han conducido hasta unos autores relevantes que han alcanzado categoría mundial, entre los que se encuentra Laura. La reflexión llevada a cabo abarca tanto los fenómenos ligados a la industria del cómic, como sus vinculaciones al arte y a la experimentación a la que se adscribe la obra de la dibujante Laura. Asimismo, pretendo valorar cúal ha sido su contribución a la historieta del cómic mundial partiendo del postulado del cómic como arte. Situando a Laura Pérez Vernetti-Blina dentro de esta evolución de las mentalidades. La evolución a la que asistimos ahora, hace que se estudie el cómic como arte, por eso los estudios han pasado de la semiología a la integración en una historia de las artes: de una aproximación semiológica a una aproximación estética. Cómic como arte. Y dentro de esta tendencia Laura presentaba una obra original para la investigación. Por eso su obra es tan singular y digna de interés. Pero antes, de estos objetivos, trazamos antes el perfil de dos autoras como precursoras de un cómic, Núria Pompeia e Isa Feu, de justa introducción a Laura, y más allá de éstas, una mirada retrospectiva a los años 30, una generación de dibujantes que se vieron limitadas a un tipo de cómic dirigido. Mi contribución en este estudio, al conocimiento de la autora, una de las más importantes del cómic español y una autora esencial de la nueva historieta española de la década de los ochenta. Partiendo del concepto de graphic novel asociada a cómic adulto, a la historieta de autor, para poder hablar de la nueva historieta española en la creación contemporánea. Partiendo de que el cómic es un medio de expresión gráfica eminentemente narrativo. La misma naturaleza fundamentalmente narrativa de la imagen secuencial la capacita para representar el tiempo y por lo tanto es idónea para la narración (cómic y cine). No podemos más que aseverar, que desde fines del siglo pasado y en los primeros años del nuevo siglo, se ha producido un salto cualitativo en la dedicación a la investigación de estos estudios. Mientras tanto, la labor del investigador en el ámbito del cómic puede y debe abrir horizontes continuados, con estudios pertinentes que nos conduzcan a reflexiones nuevas sobre esta manifestación artística de carácter “complejo”, como es el cómic, mediante el estudio y análisis de los autores, que se sirven de este medio para expresar sus inquietudes artísticas. No he tenido más pretensión en esta investigación, que proporcionar una contribución al conocimiento de la autora y al cómic en general. Valorando la aportación al conocimiento de la historieta, que abra horizontes nuevos, para las futuras investigaciones.

Escritura entre rejas: literatura carcelaria cubana del siglo XX

The present dissertation examines literary perspectives, as well as textual and extra textual mechanisms of the Cuban Prison Literature of the twentieth century. By the term “Prison Literature” I refer to the literary works that have been developed inside the prison space –physically inside of it– and to those that take as a focal point jail itself. In other words, literary works about imprisonment created in order to reminisce about a prison experience or to recreate it, and imagine it from the outside. Likewise, I discuss the political, social and cultural context of each of the different periods where the works presented are framed, as well as the metaphorical projection of the concept of “prison” in various significant levels (the island, the city, the body and the language). Our corpus consists of a myriad Cuban intellectual works from the XXth century that we consider to be representative of the Cuban prison literary tradition, which dates back to the nineteenth century –mainly through the figure of José Martí and his poetic testimony El presidio politico en Cuba (1871)– the same continues during the twenty-first century with writers as María Elena Cruz Varela, Roberto Jesús Quiñones, Raúl Rivero, Ángel Santiesteban and Agnieska Hernández...

El tratamiento estético de la figura de la prostituta en la lírica modernista española

This PhD thesis sets out to show, firstly, that Spanish modernist poets are lavish in their sublimation of the figure of the prostitute in their lyrical compositions. It argues that ultimately, they do not do this randomly or arbitrarily, but in response to a series of mechanisms that turn this sublimation into an investigation within the modernist movement. The need for a study such as this one seems indisputable, as not very much work has been done on this topic in Spanish literature, unlike in other literatures (particularly Latin American literature, precisely in the same turn-of-the-century period and in connection with Modernism). What little work has been published on the treatment of the figure of the prostitute in turn-of-the-century Spanish literature refers to narrative prose, notably the realist and naturalist novel, as well as the short story. Also, such work usually lacks a general theoretical framework, as it deals with one novel, one author, or in the case of greater generalisation, a specific type of novel. The study of this figure in literary texts involves studying Modernism itself, as it neatly draws together the panoply of topics so dear to Modernism, namely, the erotic, the marginal, the feminine, the cursed and Culturalism...

En torno a la imagen literaria de Alfonso V de Aragón: Fortún García de Ercilla y su traducción castellana del De dictis de Antonio Beccadelli. Edición y estudio

Alfonso V of Aragon (1396-1458), who won from his contemporaries the title “the Magnanimous”, became one of the most brilliant fifteenth century monarchs, not only because of being a shrewd politician and king of one of the main kingdoms in the Iberian Peninsula, but also due to his cultural activity. Thanks to him the Aragonese territories were extended throughout the Mediterranean up to Naples, where he established a magnificent court that turned into maybe the most remarkable centre of intellectual vitality and development of Humanism. His patronage attracted a considerable number of leading poets of the period, as well as the most important Italian humanists. The presence of so many writers and outstanding scholars, together with the academic environment that the monarch encouraged, promoted an enormous literary production in four languages: Latin, Spanish, Catalan and Italian. Additionally, the valuable library gathered by the king and the Academy founded in order to spread knowledge illustrate part of his intellectual concerns. This way, through his love to literature and generosity to men of letters, Alfonso the Magnanimous boosted the culture of that time. The principal protagonist in the cultural activities of the circle of erudites formed around the sovereign was Antonio Beccadelli, called Panormita (1394-1471). He, one of the most prominent personalities of Italian Humanism, assumed the role of main royal advisor. His work De dictis et factis Alphonsi regis (The sayings and deeds of king Alfonso), which will be studied in our dissertation, became a very popular text about Alfonso’s personality, as a kind of biography based on anecdotes of the Magnanimous’ life by way of exempla to be imitated. The success of these episodes lasted for a long time and they are appreciated even nowadays. The work was valued as specula principum and had great impact in sixteenth century, when De dictis was republished several times and translated from Latin into Spanish. One of these translations, the one by Fortún García de Ercilla, caught our interest since it is in a manuscript signed by Ercilla himself and this version is still unpublished...

El Libro del Governador o Suma de collaciones o de ayuntamientos: versión castellana del "Communiloquium" de Juan de Gales

The intellectual production of Johannes Gallensis (also known as John of Wales, c. 1210/30 – 1285), regent-master of the Friars Minor at Oxford and later a lecturer and Doctor of Theology at Paris, was oriented towards furnishing Catholic preachers with a variety of compilations of moral philosophy aimed to serve them in their pastoral ministry. One of these compilations is the Communiloquium, a manual of a kind, which displays its author's attempt to provide adequate and specific argumentation for admonishing all sorts and types of devotees. Its most prominent characteristic is a highly accurate use of classical auctoritates and exempla, which turned this work into a kind of anthology of quotations and references, for it offered its readers the possibility of citing sources and texts that they themselves had never actually consulted. The impressive number of manuscript copies of the Communiloquium that reached our times bears witness to its great popularity (some one hundred and sixty dispersed in different European libraries, according to Jenny Swanson’s John of Wales. A Study of the Work and Ideas of a Thirteenth-Century Friar). The Communiloquium must have reached the Iberian soil by means of Franciscan friars and soon spread through courtly circles, as much as in the religious milieu, due to the political taint of its first part, rooted in the organological metaphor and containing extensive reflections on the virtues and the due behaviour of a monarch. In the Crown of Aragon, the Communiloquium used to be read out loud even among the artisans. In Castile, on the other hand, particularly between the XIIIth and the XVth centuries, its main audience happened to be the lettered nobility and those intellectuals who, dedicated to composing glosas and specula principum, required its resources...

El romancero tradicional de Cantabria: el ciclo del tabú del incesto

El objetivo principal de esta tesis doctoral supone una nueva propuesta de análisis del ciclo del incesto aún presente en el Romancero, y de forma más precisa, en las versiones cántabras de los romances Delgadina, Silvana, Tamar, Primos Romeros, Cura Traidor y Blancaflor y Filomena. Para el mejor manejo de los cientos de versiones existentes de estos romances, nos hemos centrado en los textos procedentes de Cantabria. Para tal fin, hemos confeccionado el corpus de Cantabria con los romances que se han venido publicando desde los albores del siglo XX hasta la actualidad, incluyendo mi aportación personal al corpus fruto del trabajo de campo realizado entre 1999 y 2003 en los que recopilé 250 versiones de romances, 190 textos de la tradición oral y entrevistado cerca de 192 informantes. Así, los romances Delgadina y Silvana tratan el incesto paterno filial, el romance Tamar versa sobre el incesto entre hermanos, el texto Primos romeros, el incesto entre primos, el romance vulgar Cura Sacrílego nos presenta el asunto del incesto espiritual, y, finalmente, el romance Blancaflor y Filomena trata la prohibición existente entre cuñados. Los romances nos informan sobre los argumentos de evitación del incesto en los que, en algunos casos, media la violencia. De este modo, se expresa la subversión de los roles de parentesco, la prohibición basada en un precepto divino y el infructuoso intercambio frente al argumento de la belleza de la joven. Incluso, se trata el tema de la venganza a través del infanticidio y del banquete ritual. Estos trágicos sucesos colocan a los lectores al lado de la víctima al tiempo que nos interpela y cuestiona sobre la actualidad de estos romances en un tema considerado tabú. Con todo, sigue resultando llamativo el hecho de que estos romances sigan transmitiéndose principalmente por la figura femenina...

La ciudad en la narrativa latinoamericana: 1950-1975

The representation of the city has always been present in the literature. A clear example of this is the famous city of Troy. The city in terms of where the actions take place, a novel in this case, despite the efforts of some works of the contemporary narrative to eradicate or reduce to its barest minimum expression, has continued to sit as a strong element of differentiation that gives the characters certain linguistic, historical, social and cultural characteristics. In the Hispanic narrative, according to historical features of the continent, the conquest, independence, and subsequently the constitution of the republics, the representation of the city acquires some unique characteristics, whose dimensions and implications, toward the second half of the twentieth century, transcend the simple notion of 'place' in which occur the facts narrated to acquire a central notion in the works, changing from being a support to become the central structure of the novel, which is able to articulate different situations, confront characters and articulate historically to the entire countries. This paper will talk mainly about the representation of the city in the published narrative between 1950 and 1975. We will try to have a transverse reading over these works through the analysis of the representation of the city that in them we can find, and that basically divided into three broad categories, each with its own specific functions: * The royal city. Corresponds to the cities that we can actually find in the American territory, and whose spaces and descriptions, historical references and territorial, it is possible to identify the reality or in any encyclopedia: streets, historical events, places, characters, etc...

La narrativa de Sara Insúa

No resulta en absoluto desconocido que en las primeras décadas del siglo XX, precisamente desde 1900 hasta 1939, en España se inicia una época caracterizada por el florecimiento cultural y artístico en la que la mujer se incorpora al ámbito laboral y empieza a adquirir ciertos derechos de los que hasta entonces no gozaba. Tales cambios la llevan a desempeñar un papel eficaz en el ámbito político, cultural y social, superando los impedimentos convencionales que la mantienen al margen de la sociedad, dedicada exclusivamente al entorno familiar y el sagrado deber conyugal y maternal. A partir de 1914, debido a la incorporación femenina al campo laboral, el asociacionismo y las reivindicaciones vinculadas a la emancipación, empieza un momento de gran esplendor y toda la sociedad española experimenta grandes transformaciones. No es de extrañar, pues que la nueva España brinde una oportunidad a la mujer para acceder al ámbito literario, tras estar sometida al rechazo e intolerancia con que el siglo anterior vincula la relación femenina con la pluma, permitiéndole por fin, ejercer la actividad intelectual, aunque con ciertas limitaciones, debido a que la sociedad estaba aún influenciada por los cánones decimonónicos. En este contexto, he de señalar que la participación femenina en el mundo de la literatura fue muy relevante, aunque muchas de las autoras que empezaron su trayectoria en aquel periodo han sido relegadas al olvido. Una de estas escritoras es Sara Álvarez Insúa Escobar a la que elegí como tema de esta tesis doctoral con el fin de poner al descubierto su obra junto a su prolífica labor literaria en una etapa difícil para el reconocimiento profesional de la mujer. Por ello, el principal objetivo de este trabajo tiene como fin contribuir a la recuperación actual de su prestigio literario. Durante la fase de investigación, descubrí que Sara Insúa se encuentra entre las destacadas escritoras de la época de la "Edad de Plata" que dejan su impronta en la literatura escrita por mujeres en aquel momento y también noté que su obra sufre una gran desatención por parte de la crítica. Por ello, como primera fase de elaboración de ese estudio, tuve que recuperar y reconstruir una gran parte de sus datos biográficos...

Aspectos cognitivos en torno a la novela y el cine de la memoria histórica: "La voz dormida" de Dulce Chacón y su adaptación fílmica

Culture, history, and biology are inseparable. Cultural manifestations are necessarily immersed in a context, originate in the embodied minds that create them, and are directed to the embodied minds that receive them and recreate them within their contexts (individual and collective). The novel and the film of historical memory in Spain aim to connect their audiences with a problem that has not been solved, as the Civil War, the postwar, and the pact of forgetfulness left a wide sector of the Spanish society voiceless. During the last few years, a series of initiatives coming from the arts, as well as other realms such as the legal, have sought to reexamine the unhealed wound that still haunts Spanish subjects. La voz dormida [The Sleeping Voice] is one of those initiatives. It begins as testimony, develops into a hybrid and intertextual novel, and later becomes a film. It constitutes an inclusive project, one of offering an alternative version to the “official history”, while incorporating the marginal voices of women that had been left out of the memory of the war and the dictatorship. Objective and Results By examining both the literary and the cinematic versions of Chacón’s work I aimed to evidence the connections that exist between the artistic portrayal of the postwar repression (particularly how it affects women) and the current movement of recovery of historical memory in Spain. Specifically, I was interested in showing how both the novel and the film employ a series of narrative strategies that emphasize the body and intentionality, with the purpose of creating in readers and spectators an empathetic response that may lead to prosocial behavior. In order to carry out this interdisciplinary study, which relates fiction, mind, and socio-historical context, I draw on cognitive theories of literature and film, as well as theories from social and developmental psychology, such as the Richard Gerrig’s theory of narrative experience, Keith Oatley’s psychology of fiction, Suzanne Keen’s theory of narrative empathy, and the empathy-altruism hypothesis, derived form the ideas of Jean Decety, among others...

Edición y estudio de Bencimarte de Lusitania

La historia del invencible y clarísimo principe Bencimarte de Lusitania, emperador del gran Cairo y de otros principes de su linaje, is a handwritten Romance of Chivalries found by José Manuel Lucía Megías in the library of the Royal Palace in Madrid. There are two known copies in the forementioned library. The two copies (B1 and B2) dońt have the same content, the depth of the work is found in B1 which is selected for this thesis whereas in B2 we could only find incoherent and unconnected parts due to book binding and covering as some texts had been lost. In the present work is going to be offered a manuscript description, inner and outer features, dating issues, text variations, narrative voices and structure, chronology and worḱs primary and secondary sources, characters, summaries, arguments and what́s new according to the world of chivalry. Our initial aim was to set a conclusive text of Bencimarte de Lusitania as to it has remained unknown for the reader until nowadays. It dealt with the transcription of both manuscripts, reinterprated their contents and compared them with the original texts. On the other hand, we could make a critical edition of the final version which highlighted Bencimarte himself and its possible interpretations. Thus, we could suitably arrange the text in its period as there is no date on it by means of the text itself or any further reference. We will do the same regarding to either the author or the authors. We would study the book itself offering an interpretation and a deep analysis of its elements, both the structural ones and those that belong to Romance of Chivelries themselves (mythical and marvellous adventures, knights and ladies , prodigious characters, the topic of the found manuscript, challenges and so on) as well as what is new and unique in this work of art which means to follow a pattern apart from introducing something new in the Chivelry books...

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra y Antonio Buero Vallejo: dramaturgos ejemplares

Esta conferencia es un intento de comprensión de los valores comunes de las tragedias históricas de Cervantes y de Buero. El talante ético de ambos dramaturgos les caracteriza como ejemplares. La conclusión es doble, por un lado, la libertad es el anhelo humano más importante de la vida; por otro, la verdad, la justicia, la igualdad, la solidaridad, el amor y la esperanza son esenciales para ser una persona verdadera. La salvación del hombre está, principalmente, en el arte y en las humanidades.

El grupo Shangai y el exotismo en la novela argentina de las dos últimas décadas del siglo XX

En la Argentina de las dos últimas décadas del siglo XX, distintos autores apartan su mirada de la realidad social más reciente para reconducirla hacia otros temas más cercanos a la ficción; de tal manera que encuadran sus novelas en siglos anteriores, como la pampa argentina del siglo XIX, o las trasladan a lugares alejados de Argentina, a Extremo Oriente principalmente. El resultado es un extrañamiento tanto de tiempos como de espacios que hace pensar en el exotismo como la característica principal de las novelas de estos años. Para mostrar este propósito, se analiza una selección de novelas que van desde 1981, año en el que César Aira publica Ema, la cautiva, a 2000, año de la publicación de Un episodio en la vida de un pintor viajero del mismo autor. El nombre de César Aira aparece una y otra vez en estas páginas como novelista y como ensayista que reflexiona acerca del tema objeto de estudio de este trabajo: el exotismo. Pero también se incluyen las novelas de otros autores como Juan José Saer, Rodolfo Rabanal, Osvaldo Soriano, Copi o Alberto Laiseca; además de las obras de algunos de los miembros del grupo Shangai, que nace en 1987 como parodia de los grupos literarios y que tuvo continuidad en la revista Babel...

El teatro cómico de Enrique García Álvarez

Enrique García Álvarez (Madrid, 1883-1931) belonged to the group of writers who stood out in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth in what was known as “género chico”, label used to oppose this kind of theater to the dramaturgy considered serious. It was composed of brief and comic works whose intention was to generate a fun time for the spectators. Our author was one of the leading representatives and his numerous creations appeared profusely in the posters of the theaters per hour. In the twentieth century, he adapted to the new forms imposed on the scene. Despite his enormous fame at the time, nowadays Enrique García Álvarez remains completely unknown, not only in the eyes of the general public but also to the more knowledgeable circles of our literature. Studies of his dramatic work are almost nonexistent and basically limited to their collaborations with other authors who had more luck as Arniches or Muñoz Seca. The purpose of this thesis is, therefore, to complete a thorough study of the figure and production of Enrique García Álvarez, as well as its impact on the literature. The opening chapter is a reconstruction of the life and work of the author. In the following chapters, we proceeded to the analysis of structural features such as theme, time, space, and characters of his dramatic world. At the end of these pages, we have included a photographic appendix that illustrates some moments of his personal and professional career. We have also developed appendices to classify his librettos chronologically, by collaborator and by genre...