Women defending themselves: Cuban Romantic feminine voices (poetry and short stories)

Throughout history, women have played an important role in literature. Nevertheless, since Sappho's poetry until now, feminine voices have had to struggle for recognition of their works. ^ Before the nineteenth century, women were almost ignored in Spanish literature. Society kept them as “ángeles de la familia,” taking care of their homes, husbands, and children. Some of them, such as María de Zayas y Sotomayor in Spain and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in Mexico, complained about their situation in their writings. However, they expressed their fight not as a generation but as individuals. ^ In the nineteenth century, the ideas and ideals of Romanticism, were brought to Latin America from Europe. Cuba was among those countries where the new movement took roots. Initiated by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, a group of women began to participate in literary reunions, and to found newspapers and magazines where works authored by women, dedicated to feminist ideas, were published. They indeed through literature started to live out womanhood in order to intellectually leave the ideological prisons where society had been keeping them. ^ This study scans the literary works of all Romantic women writers in Cuba. It specifically analyzes poetry and short stories, and investigates how these authors expressed themselves in their works against the patriarchal society, where they lived and wrote their books. An eclectic critical method has been used. ^ Findings were very revealing. Only three of the fourteen writers studied in my dissertation had been previously mentioned by major critics. Most of them had been ignored. However, the greatest discovery was that they prompted something new: For the first time they projected themselves as a group, as a collective consciousness, and this fact established a difference with former women writers in Cuban literature before Romanticism. In other words, they produced a “Renaissance” in Cuba's literature. In spite of how they lived between 1820 and 1900, their struggles for women's rights have linked them to our current times. ^

Ecfrasis: Escritura y pintura en el costumbrismo argentino

This dissertation examines the discursive practice of Argentine costumbrista texts from a novel perspective. In (re)reading the works of selected prominent writers from the late colonial period to the end of the Nineteenth Century, including those of Alonso Carrió de la Vandera, Emeric Essex Vidal, León Pallière, Lucio Vicente López, Lucio V. Mansilla, and Pastor Obligado we focus on the presence of ekphrastic enunciations with a view toward linking the plastic, painterly dimensions of the prose to parallel representations by artists of the same period. Thus the costumbristas are studied in tandem with the watercolors, oil paintings and lithographic compositions of artists such as Carlos Enrique Pellegrim, César Hipólito Bacle, Raymond Monvoisin and Hipólito Moulin. The resulting comparative study of the two arts---the verbal and the pictorial---illustrates the notion described by W. J. T. Mitchell that a literary text may well "represent a work of visual or graphic art." And thus, it provides us with visual, spatial motifs that enhance its powers of representation. ^ In developing our focus on ekphrastic representations we have followed the theoretic studies of Murray Krieger, Jean H. Hagstrum, James Hefferman, John Hollander, W. J. T. Mitchell, Johann Gottfried Herder, and Wendy Steiner among others, all of whom in various ways take their cue from Horace's Ut pictura poesis and the notion that poetry, that is literary discourse, can be likened to a panting and that in both arts there is a refractive quality that makes literature a spoken vehicle of expression and painting a silent, complementary voice. ^ In studying the literary and plastic discourses comparatively what becomes evident is that they share cultural and ideological concerns that center around the notion of self-definition, national identity, and the relation of the individual to the incipient national community (Benedict Anderson). These concerns are highlighted via the depiction of customs, mores, dress, work habits, professions, and social classes. In late colonial literature and painting and especially in the Nineteenth Century, which constitutes the defining period of Argentine political independence, the confluence of the two disciplinary discourses addresses, and underscores the issues of socio-political empowerment in the new Argentine nation. ^

La kabala dentro del discurso contemporaneo y urbano: El ejemplo de Marcos Ricardo Barnatan

This dissertation analyzes the relationship between several mystic Sephardic texts called the Kabalah which include the three basic mystic books of Judaism: Sefer Yetsira, Sefer Bahir, and Sefer Zohar, and Argentine writer of Jewish descent, Marcos Ricardo Barnatan’s experimental work. The premise is that several mystic Sephardic texts have certain literary characteristics that make them fertile sources for the inspiration of writers like Barnatan. This thesis proves that Barnatan’s poetry and his first novel El Laberinto De Sion both use the most general concepts of the Kabalah in developing his literary and artistic creations. ^ This study is focuses on the concept that there exists a possibility of reading kabalistic texts not only in an exegetical way, but also in a poetic way. Barnatan’s literature is prone to this kind of reading of the texts. He creates a surprisingly expressive structure without ties to established models. This expressive structure is built on a vast amount of symbols, which results from this freedom. Barnatan adopts multiple symbols from cosmogenic theories and makes use of them, thus incorporating both the spirit and style of kabalistic texts into his own work. ^ Instead of addressing some of the main concerns of Kabbalistic study and its commentary, Barnatan avoids the concern for Law, the study of the Torah and its commentaries, while avoiding the use of the Hebrew language. For this reason Barnatan is too deviant to be considered an extension from the mainstream Kabbalistic commentary. Barnatan’s work is destined for a reader who cannot only understand his experimental methods, but who can also assemble a disjointed text while accepting a fundamental instability of space and time.^