EL DISCURSO SUBVERSIVO DE PATRICIA ESTEBAN ERLÉS EN EL CONTEXTO DE LO FANTÁSTICO FEMINISTA

La poética fantástica de Patricia Esteban Erlés (Zaragoza, 1972) constituye una contestación al ideario conservador asumido por nuestro imaginario cultural. Así lo demuestran características relativas a la selección y el tratamiento de los personajes, la temática, la construcción y la significación del espacio narrativo, el modo de abordar la monstruosidad derivada de la realidad sexista, las propuestas formales y la apuesta por el hibridismo genérico. Su análisis estará imbricado con reflexiones sobre la consolidación de esta línea de lo fantástico feminista en las últimas décadas en el ámbito de la narrativa en español y sobre la posible existencia de un canon de autoras, tanto en español como en otras lenguas, que haya podido influir en esa fragua de lo fantástico escrito por mujeres con una clara perspectiva política, en la que lo no mimético se convierte en una herramienta ideológica de denuncia social y genérica. Abstract: Born Zaragoza, 1972, Patricia Esteban Erlés’s poetics of fantastic represents a contestation to the conservative ideology assumed by our cultural imaginary. This is demonstrated by some characteristics related to the selection and treatment of characters, the subject, the construction and the signification of the narrative space, the approach to monstrosity as derived from sexist reality, the formal proposals and the inclination towards generic hybridism. Its analysis will be interweaved with reflections on the consolidation of this trend of the feminist fantastic in the last decades in the Spanish narrative panorama and the possible existence of a female writers canon, both in Spanish and other languages, that could have influenced the forging of the fantastic written by women with a clear political perspective in which non-mimetic genres have become an ideological tool for gender and social denunciation.

A Voice Sweeter than Salt: Toyin Falola and the Construction of Subaltern Narrative Space

Gayatrl Spivak is arguably most recognized for her 1988 intervention in the dialogue of Subaltern Studies. It is within the intellectual rift of Spiva k's "Can the Subaltern Speak?" that I explore the narrative of Toyin Falola's memoir, A Mouth Sweeter than Salt. While Spivak concludes that the subaltern cannot speak be­cause of the subaltern's placement within existing knowledge production, Fa­lola's "Mouth" articulates a formation that says otherwise. Indeed, in A Mouth Sweeter than Salt, Falola's status In the subalternlty of a decolonlzlng Nigeria depicts a powerful subaltern voice with deep implications for knowledge, rep­resentation, authorial location, multifaceted identity paradox, and most of all, the tendrils of modernity. Fundamentally, this piece argues against Spivak by constructing a case for the relative authenticity of Falola's voice, despite its incorporation into Western intellectualism. Spivak claims that the subaltern cannot speak so long as the Western academy can only relate to the other within its own investigative par­adigm of the non-Western object. Here, I frame A Mouth Sweeter than Salt, not as a Western co-opting of an indigenous voice, but rather, as an invitation to explore Falola's memoir from the position of the non-Western subject. The work also allows us to move beyond the categories of the Western and non-Western subject to seriously engage the paradox of postcolonial existence. In granting credence to the idea of identity paradox, a close analysis of A Mouth Sweeter than Salt reveals the complexities of African subaltern voice and its dialectic with the forces of modernity. While Spivak might argue that this formulation is tainted by the motives of the West, such an interpretation of Fa­lola's memoir also builds ground to discuss alternatives to the Western archive in the development of African intellectualism. Falola's memoir stands as a tes­tament to the legitimization of oral history, micro-historical storytelling, and the disintegration of Western disciplinary divisions between history, literature, sociology, philosophy, and a host of other imported intellectual categories. By outlining the critical duality of Falola's act of subaltern speech, I hope to build a realm in which the African intellectual voice is not artificially segmented from the historical influence of modernity, but can also open discursive space to stand on its own ground.

How Time Flies in theCath Maige Tuired

The Túatha Dé Danann are seemingly a pre-Christian survival in early medieval Irish literature, where they are portrayed as magicians, druids, or powerfully knowledgeable artisans. Traditionally slotted into the ‘pseudohistorical’ scheme, thus constituting one of the primeval waves of invaders who shaped the land and institutions of Ireland, the Túatha Dé Danann (and their opponents, the Fomoiri) have a narrative space to themselves in the text known as the Cath Maige Tuired ‘(Second) Battle of Mag Tuired’. The characters Lug and the Dagda, ‘Good God’, represent contrasting perspectives on the struggle taking place, which I argue is primarily concerned with the question of whether, after the Battle, the Túatha Dé Danann will continue resisting time and death, or will embrace these quotidian realities.

Suburbia as a Narrative Space in the Cinematic Universe of Douglas Sirk

Douglas Sirk, now fully recognized as an influential filmmaker, was considered a successful but uninteresting director in the 1950s. His melodramas were considered bland and subsequently ignored because they focused on female-centric concerns. In the following decades, he started to be considered as an auteur that not only had an impeccable and vibrant mise-en-scène, but also a unique ability to deliver movies that might seem superficial on a surface level but were able to sneak in some subtle and revolutionary criticism about American society. The aim of this paper is to analyse the most rebellious and subversive aspects of Sirk’s classic All that Heaven Allows (1955) from a gender perspective and how Todd Haynes’s tribute Far from Heaven (2002) added new challenges by touching upon thorny subjects that already existed in Sirk’s time but were deemed taboo for mass audiences.

Esa soy yo: un recorrido por la intimidad en Teoría de la gravedad de Leila Guerriero

Contrary to the 19th century’s modernist chronicles – such as Ruben Darios's or José Martí's– in which the “self” of the subject was defended (Rotker, 1992), in Leila Guerriero's narrative journalism, the subjectivity is expressed by the ways of telling chosen by her; i.e., in each process that form her writing practice, more than what is grammatically expressed. In Teoría de la gravedad (2018), the speech is codified through a particularly poetic use of the language. In these self-referential–chronicles (or profile-short story), the author recalls her childhood, her youth and her writing days from a perspective that intends to question her own privacy, through a precise dynamic of “looking” and “telling”. She represents herself in the narrative space as a limit-subject (at times, blurred) between a subjective interior and a tellable exterior, with the final purpose of finding another writing-place that can shelter her in the process of becoming more than in that of being.

Revisiting the “Inhabited Space” of English Country House in Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger

The English Country House happens to be one of the most iconic topoi in English literary studies. Since narratologists have long privileged time over space, narrative space remained a relatively unexplored territory until the twentieth century, which intensified the interest in the house as the thematic fulcrum of literary works. British novelist Sarah Waters’s first venture into the realm of the sub-genre of English Country House fiction, The Little Stranger (2009) is a befitting discourse that appropriates the poetics of manorial space. Hundreds Hall, the Warwickshire seat of the Ayreses, encapsulates many roles as the epicentre of the story and as a powerful symbol of the gradual decay of English aristocracy in the post-World War II Britain. The article will try to incorporate Gaston Bachelard’s spatial criticism elaborated in his The Poetics of Space (1958) and the concept of heterotopia by Foucault for the interpretation/ (s) of the narrative. The study seeks to locate Bachelard’s bourgeoisie points of view, which the author subverts by portraying the rise of the proletariat. The focus of the article is to highlight the ingenuity of Waters’s creative process, which resorts to the genre of English Country House fiction to capture the condition of British aristocrats in a time of crises.

The Uninhabitable Space of Home

By locating the reader uncomfortably within its circumscribed fictional world, Home highlights the confining cultural and narrative structures through which the everyday dynamics of family are often experienced and represented. In its refusal to provide mechanisms of imaginative transcendence that would transport the reader out of the Boughtons’ oppressive dwelling or make it more hospitable, the novel renders domestic and narrative space equally uncomfortable. Using narrative theory, cultural studies explorations of family and memory, and feminist theories of gender and space, this chapter explores how Home unsettles the culturally sanctioned idea of home as an escape from the contesting ideologies of the larger world even as it reveals the force of our investment in a domestic ideal that legislates, sanctions, and naturalizes scripted performances of the ordinary.

Counter-narratives

Adrian A. Husain, “Counter-narratives: Wuthering Heights and the Intervals of the Brutalized Self” (pp. 33–56) This essay is concerned with meaning and genre and how these become accessible in our encounter with the critically strange. The focus is on a deconstruction and redefinition, by Emily Brontë in Wuthering Heights (1847), of “reality” as a given of domestic realism and a situating of the “real” in the interstices of Gothic romance and domestic realism. The essay contends that Brontë perceives the question of reality and the related question of genre as initially arising at the level of reading and as a problematic of perception necessarily linked to the esoteric nature of literary discourse itself. That reality, to be inclusive, must allow for the crucial idea of pain and the sentient self is understood. The departure from contemporary fiction is seen as involving a symbiosis and at the same time a radical disjunction between civil and visceral, localized and phantasmagorical, whereby a renewed reality—a new narrative space—is enabled to come about. Wuthering Heights is perceived as moving away, with a view to achieving a realized meaning, from the deliberate construct of language toward an involuntary and fragmented mimetic mode—or a language of the gut—more directly expressive of emotion. The essay argues that the production of a hybridized temporal perspective—or a “Bergsonian” time—is equally part of Brontë’s quest for reality.