Contenido: This essay deals with Puerto Rican literary texts from various unusual or vanishing cultural contexts as are “La carta” by José Luis González, Memorias de Bernardo Vega, En Babia by José de Diego Padró, “La muñeca menor” by Rosario Ferré, and Vanessa Droz’s book of poems Estrategias de la Catedral. They all intent to capture images of the city and citizenship focusing on languages and scenes which question those central categories of modernity: the street as the residence of inclemency, a ship’s bow between two cities, a leper’s hospital and immigration as spaces others of exile, the burning family house, the rocking chair on a balcony facing a devastated landscape, the house as a crypt, a drug addict’s giddy dance on the steps to the cathedral. In the selected texts writing, inasmuch it is both memory and interpellation, is the possibility of presenting the strangeness of the city as one of the few experiences allowed to contemporary society. It is so precisely because of its incapacity to render account of the precise reference and thus be able to feel the proximity of an image and its fugacious illumination that allow us to share another way of thinking, and inhabit, the city.

Contenido: This essay analyzes five of Panamanian author Rogelio Sinanân short stories published in the anthological volume Sin novedad en Shanghai. The essay proposes a new approach to these texts in the light of recent historical and geopolitical events such as the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US invasion of Panama in 1989, the transfer of the Canal Zone to Panamanian Administration and the dismantling of American military bases in December 1999. With the re-reading of these texts, the author takes into account several proposals belonging to the academic field of cultural studies that help explain recent shifts of philosophical and social paradigms in the Latin America. These changes make a break from the epistemic postulates of Modernity, establish a commitment with popular culture, fragment all types of intellectual authority, and defend hybridization, thus initiating the Postcolonial debate and the concept of peripheral Modernity and Post Modernity in Latin America. Finally, through this trans-disciplinary re-reading of the texts, the author underlines the various linguistic and disciplinary approaches and narrative strategies displayed by Sinán in these short stories and how through the appropriation and recreation of old myths, allegories and legends, he created a cultural product that is both Latin American and Panamanian as well.

Contenido: The coincidence of a memory boom (Huyssen, Todorov) and a new “cycle of race” (Laó Montes) in the last decades has generated a wide corpus of cultural practices related to the memory of slavery, continuing and renovating the long tradition of post-slavery narratives. These new practices, which I will call “residual memories”, make use of documents and testimonies, key elements of the archives of slavery, while marking their precariousness and their paradoxes. They propose new mnemonic, indirect, elusive, contradictory, incisive accounts of a slaveholding past and of what remains of slavery. From these perspectives this paper proposes an approach to La ceiba de la memoria by Roberto Burgos Cantor and to the visual production of Marcos Lora Read. For this I will rely on W.J. Mitchell’s proposal to think slavery as an “obstruction of memory”, and on Derek Walcott’s, Édouard Glissant’s and Toni Morrison’s reflections on remains as a crucial element of Caribbean memories. On the basis of this framework I will inquire about the ways in which these practices of residual memories approach the problem of trauma and its (re)presentations. 

Contenido: Between 1816 and 1822 the French botanist Auguste de Saint-Hilaire travelled widely in Brazil, closely studying the tropical flora, and, at the same time, taking particular interest in the social and cultural situations of local populations. He thus collected a vast number of observations which he later developed into detailed travel narratives. On the last and longest of his journeys, he reached the province of Rio Grande do Sul, and the territory known as the “Banda Oriental” (today Uruguay). In both these regions, of a more temperate climate, he censured the predomi-nance of a cattle-bound economy and the widespread consumption of beef, and analysed the psy-chological effects of an excessive familiarity with the spectacle of cattle-slaughter. Certain com-ments in his travel journal on particularly colourful scenes denote a marked cultural breach, but they also allow one to glimpse, behind the overt censuring, rejection and indeed horror, a hidden fascination, which would somehow be responding to the ancient and complex symbolic relationship between human beings and animal flesh.

Contenido: “Bouquet” is a story by Darío belonging to the Azul... period. It constitutes a remarkable prose style exercise as well as an early attempt in erudition. Currently modern editors follow the 1950’ Mejía Sánchez lecture of the Cuentos completos. For the first time in more than a century we offer here an edition that examines that canonical version with the original apparition, during Darío’s life-time: La Época, Santiago de Chile, December the 9th, 1886, n° 1698. This new edition includes some summary considerations on the subject of cuento modernista and a rich critical apparatus. It is an advance of the coming book: Rubén Darío. Retrato del poeta como joven cuentista; estudio y edición de Alberto Paredes, prólogo de Alfonso García Morales, Fondo de Cultura Económica (Tierra Firme); to appear by the end of 2016. 

Contenido: Este trabajo parte de una hipótesis: la figuración del escritor de diarios como personaje literario (la transformación de la vida en obra) depende del estilo y el tono de sus notaciones, y estos hallazgos verbales, del trabajo al que se somete diariamente con miras a una puesta a punto de carácter ético. A partir de esta hipótesis, intentamos probar cómo los diarios de Rosa Chacel, titulados Alcancía, llegan a convertirse en un experimento novelesco gracias a la definición del personaje de la diarista como un sobreviviente atravesado por las fuerzas del fracaso y la interrupción.En el marco de esta estrategia general, identificamos los dos tipos de fracaso con los que Chacel mantiene una relación paradójica, el vital y el literario, y los dos tonos que manifiestan esa tensión: el del lamento y otro menos reactivo, ligado a la voluntad de empuje y prosecución. La mezcla de los dos tonos identifica la intimidad de la diarista con los impulsos extremos que caracterizan al humor melancólico. El trabajo termina con una lectura de cómo el proyecto melancólico de Chacel (manifestar en el lenguaje el poder de la impotencia) se realiza en el juego entre la interrupción y el recomienzo, característico de la escritura del diario, y cómo la realización de este proyecto va a acompañada de una continua deliberación sobre los valores y la eficacia de la escritura diarística.AbstractThis work is based on a hypothesis: the diarist’s figuration as a literary character (the transformation of life in work) depends on the style and tone of his notations, and these verbal discoveries, on the work that he submits himself daily with the goal of an ethical improvement. From this hypothesis, we try to prove how Rosa Chacel’s diaries, entitle Alcancías, become a novel experiment by defining the diarist’s character as a survivor undergone by the force of failure and interruption.In the framework of this strategy, we identify the two types of failure with which Chacel has a paradoxical relationship, the vital and the literary, and the two tones that manifest this tension: the lament and another less reactive, related to the will of continuation. The mixture of the two tones identifies the intimacy of the diarist with the extreme impulses that characterize the melancholic humor. The work ends with a reading of how the Chacel’s melancholy project is carried out on the game between disruption and restart, characteristic of the diary writing, and how the realization of this project goes along with a constant deliberation about the values and the effectiveness of the diary writing.

Contenido: El presente trabajo ofrece una reflexión sobre la pervivencia del espíritu utópico en la narrativa latinoamericana contemporánea. Tras un repaso a la teoría generada por el “principio de esperanza”, se medita sobre la importancia cobrada por los conceptos de “contrautopía” y “distopía” en las letras actuales, consecuencias de un desencanto generalizado y, en los últimos años, contrarrestados por obras en las que se defienden ciertas utopías menores vinculadas a la defensa del hedonismo, la escritura nómada –viajera e híbrida– y la reivindicación del arte.AbstractThe present work focuses on the resilience of the Utopian spirit in the Latin-American contemporary narrative. After a review of the theoretical contributions based on the “hope principle”, the essay considers the relevance acquired by the concepts of “counter-utopia” and “dystopia” in current literary studies, consequences of a widespread disenchantment. In the last years, these notions have been offset by the “interstitial Utopias”, linked to the defense of hedonism, art and nomadic writing.