8. Endings

‘Endings’ studies the endings of short stories. Poetic justice, comic relief, or tragic fulfilment could provide a shock ending. However, while conclusiveness may often mark short story endings, it is not to be taken for granted. Stories can leave dilemmas unresolved, lapsing into what can be called a ‘leisurely enigma’: the fluidity of personality and the open-endedness of the story seem commensurate in these instances. The power of a lack of finality in an ending might be that of a plot cliffhanger or, more memorably, an implication of vast consequences that can never be told and are not even latent in the story.

6. Ironies and reversals

‘Ironies and reversals’ explores how the tradition of ironic reversal, which is indelibly associated with Guy de Maupassant, still remains alive and well as the short story’s defining feature. Relentless irony opens in the gap between what people want and what they get. An ironic twist, a reversal, a moral or psychological settlement round off the action and provide a satisfying sense of technical completeness and the pleasure of poetic justice or an irony of fate. Sometimes even reversals can be reversed or new ironies devised at the last minute. And sometimes twists in the plot can come in the middle and even at the very beginning, only fully understood in retrospect.

Olvido, rechazo y marginación en dos obras del teatro histórico mexicano: Felipe Ángeles de Elena Garro y El día más violento de Bárbara Colio.

Felipe Ángeles by Elena Garro and Bárbara Colio’s El día más violento are two works that address somewhat dark characters in the history of the Mexican Revolution. Both pieces are about characters that have not been included in the worldview of the revolutionary nationalist apparatus, perhaps because they are women, as in the case of Colio's piece, or for daring to question the triumphs of that gesture, such as the piece on the hidalguense mythical General. Although there is a separation of more than 40 years, the writing of Garro and that of Colio weaves bridges, both in the feminine vision of mexican dramaturgy, and that of the historical heroes and who, despite being rejected, forgotten or marginalized characters, the theater has gradually offered them a little poetic justice.

CANTO GENERAL E SOUTH AMERICA MI HIJA: UM OLHAR SOBRE “ALTURAS DE MACCHU PICCHU”

“Alturas de Macchu Picchu”, second book from the poem by Pablo Neruda Canto General (1950), is, according to critics, the best known of the epic. The writer Sharon Doubiago, in South America Mi Hija (1992), makes with such book an intertextual dialogue from which stand out similarities and differences, that is why the purpose of this study is to investigate some of the resonances that this dialogue provides. For this purpose, bibliographic research was made based on authors such as La Vega (1604), Steel (1967), Alegría (1981), Kirk (1993), Santí (2011), among others, and the presentation and analysis of excerpts from corpora poems, the dialogue between them will be shown in this article. It is evident that the notions of ruin and poetic justice are contrasted by the way in which writers somehow redeem narratives that are components of the history of the defeated, placing them as a component of the identity of the Latin American peoples, resulting in a voicing strategy (be it from the collective, be it individual characters – mostly female, in Doubiago) that start from a look at the past with a view to understanding the present.

Introduction

This chapter sets up the methodological and theoretical parameters. Agamben’s homo sacer and ‘State of Exception’ are keys for interpreting Latin love elegy’s links to the juridical order. This theoretical background is closely linked to the age of Augustus. The chapter offers definitions of the key concepts of amor, a word related both to extrajuridical desire and to the juridical discourse of sexuality (cf. Foucault), and lex, which can mean both ‘law’ and ‘rule’. The technical and non-technical uses of lex bleed into one another in ways that Ovid will exploit in his poetry to document the interdependence of legal authority and poetic justice. The chapter gives an overview of current scholarship on law in Ovid and further explains its contribution to the interdisciplinary field of law and literature.

Law and Love in Ovid

In classical scholarship, the presence of legal language in love poetry is commonly interpreted as absurd and incongruous. Ovid’s legalisms have been described as frivolous, humorous, and ornamental. This book challenges this widespread, but ill-informed view. Legal discourse in Latin love poetry is not incidental, but fundamental. Inspired by recent work in the interdisciplinary field of law and literature, the book argues that the Roman elegiac poets point to love as the site of law’s emergence. The Latin elegiac poets may say ‘make love, not law’, but in order to make love, they have to make law. Drawing on Agamben, Foucault, and Butler, the book explores the juridico-discursive nature of Ovid’s love poetry, constructions of sovereignty, imperialism, authority, biopolitics, and the ways in which poetic diction has the force of law. The book is methodologically ambitious, combining legal theory with historically informed closed readings of numerous primary sources. It aims to restore Ovid to his rightful position in the history of legal humanism. The Roman poet draws on a long tradition that goes back to Hesiod and Solon, in which poetic justice is pitted against corrupt rulers. Ovid’s amatory jurisprudence is examined vis-à-vis Paul’s letter to the Romans. The juridical nature of Ovid’s poetry lies at the heart of his reception in the Middle Ages, from Boccaccio’s Decameron to Forcadel’s Cupido iurisperitus. The current trend to simultaneously study and marginalize legal discourse in Ovid is a modern construction that this book aims to demolish.