Razones para la guerra en la sociedad global

In this article I develop an analysis in the context of the global society, a context split into its practical subsystems, due to the prevailing logic of confrontation and violence. Some of its expressions are studied, in the fields of international law and geopolitical relations between given societies. Also discussed are analyses of the relations between religions and cultural systems, from the perspective of mutual destruction logistics. In a context of violent interactions through diverse levels of social reality, I claim for a different strategy to guide social practices, from the recognition of universal human rights for concrete human beings, understanding that such recognition implies reducing the historical production of deaths, and the magnification of human life and of the conditions for its reproduction.

THE ARTIFICIAL PARADISES OF DES ESSEINTES, A DECADENT ESTHETE

In the late nineteenth century, the discoveries of the unconscious universe and the fondness for mysterious dimensions of existence have influenced a group of young artists to probe world mysteries through the incantatory power of words. From the opposition to scientific Realism and Naturalism, and also inspired by the revolutionary poetry of Charles Baudelaire, thus arose Decadentism. The novel À Rebours, by the French novelist and art critic Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907), is an important expression of that spirit. In that work, there is a fruitful dialogue between painting and literature, which inaugurates a new style opposing the already exhausted realistic model. Duke Des Esseintes, the eccentric protagonist of the novel, struggles to modernity and emerging bourgeoisie’s unrefined taste of emerging bourgeoisie. In his searching for a new literary model, Huysmans bet on environment descriptions and art transpositions. The painting served as an aesthetic paradigm for the novel construction, not limited only to the frequent descriptions of Moreau or Redon’s paintings, but also encompassing the way Huysmans described the furniture, tapestries, artificial flowers and fishes, book covers etc... Being outstanding was his idea, things beyond the reach for the common man, devoted to trivialities of everyday life. The transposition of art, or the creation of an artistic work by language, acquires immeasurable value to the critical Huysmans engrossing him in À Rebours. There, the critical superimpose the writer. The decadent style of Huysmans opposes the analytical reason. In his work, the art aims to retake the passion, the dream, the mystery, fear, death, totally disengaged of the desire to represent the reality.

THE GUARDIANS OF SIGNS: WOMEN OF LATIN-AMERICAN LITERATURE

One hundred years of solitude, Report on the blind and Alturas de Machu Picchu, outstanding works from the Latin American Literature of the period of its boom, broke the relationship with facile and nineteenth schemes, and brusquely sprouted in a world that went far ahead of the surrealistic theses spread by André Breton. This was possible by the emergence of magical realism in the Hispanic American pens. According to Alejo Carpentier, “Our magical realism is the one we found in a raw state, omnipresent all through Latin America. Here, the unusual is daily, in fact it has always been daily”. It should not be forgotten that Carpentier and Sábato were in Breton’s work staff, because they guarded each a deep knowledge of Surrealism. Yet the history of the religions should also be taken into account, since the knowledge of myths, with Mircea Eliade as the chief head, enables an important and close approach to the works of these authors. That is the reason why, in this essay, the mythical aspects in the previously mentioned works are analyzed.

Is the flower still beautiful after hours and hours closed in a pocket? About representations, idealizations and disappointments in Augusto Abelaira

The present work proposes a reading of the artistic-intellectual project of the Portuguese writer Augusto Abelaira, from de novels The City of Flowers and Bolor, in order to place him in the scenery of the Portuguese neo-realism and the intellectual resistance against fascism. The expression of the idealizations and disappointments in the work of Abelaira points to an opposite direction to that identified with the socialist realism and with what was conventionally called doctrinaire neo-realism in Portugal before the public emergency of the controversy between those who defended the primacy of the content and another aesthetic response that problematizes the pre-eminence of a specular model. Thus, there never was an internal homogeneity neither aesthetic nor theoretical in the movement. The public emergency of this debate translates a controversy that is not confined to the aesthetic, but is, in its most profound dimension, theoretical and political. The objective of the work is to demonstrate the writing procedures of Augusto Abelaira as susceptible techniques to represent conceptions of life and of the world able to translate a social demand, that are, ultimately, writing programs appropriate to the envisioned transformations. Therefore, there is not one unique neo-realistic writing program, but there is a neo-realistic aesthetics which is the literary neo-realism itself that the works of Augusto Abelaira helps to compose.      Keywords: Augusto Abelaira; Intellectual writer; Neo-realism. 

MYTHICAL ELEMENTS IN GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ, SÁBATO AND NERUDA

One hundred years of solitude, Report on the blind and Alturas de Machu Picchu, outstanding works from the Latin American Literature of the period of its boom, broke the relationship with facile and nineteenth schemes, and brusquely sprouted in a world that went far ahead of the surrealistic theses spread by André Breton. This was possible by the emergence of magical realism in the Hispanic American pens. According to Alejo Carpentier, “Our magical realism is the one we found in a raw state, omnipresent all through Latin America. Here, the unusual is daily, in fact it has always been daily”. It should not be forgotten that Carpentier and Sábato were in Breton’s work staff, because they guarded each a deep knowledge of Surrealism. Yet the history of the religions should also be taken into account, since the knowledge of myths, with Mircea Eliade as the chief head, enables an important and close approach to the works of these authors. That is the reason why, in this essay, the mythical aspects in the previously mentioned works are analyzed.