Ruina/basural: Lógicas temporales y espaciales de la ciudad de La Paz en Saenz y Viscarra

This article analyzes spatio-temporal logics in the representation of the city of La Paz in Imágenes Paceñas by Jaime Saenz and the urban chronicles of Víctor Hugo Viscarra. Juxtaposing the concepts of chrononormativity and queer time, it explores how linear temporal logic remains insufficient for the understanding of the city and its inhabitants in the two narrative projects. The article postulates that the marginal spaces of architectural ruins and garbage dumps, and the marginalized people who inhabit queer space-time are key to “revealing the hidden city” and understanding its contradictory place in the national narrative and space.

Photo Gallery

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La nada germinal: Desplazamiento y transformación ritual en La Noche de Jaime Saenz

In Jaime Saenz’s poem La Noche, mystical, linguistic, and symbolic elements interact to alter our conception of reality. I carry out such a reading by focusing on ritual and the ways that it influences Saenz’s poetic language. I show that this poem proposes to think about night as a cyclical territory in which time and space are decentered from their daily useage. This decentering reflects an identity crisis that emerges when we come face to face with the alterity within ourselves.

Mediating Andean Modernity: The Literary Oracular in Muerte por el tacto by Jaime Saenz

Upon his return from Berlin in 1939, Jaime Saenz started working in La Paz for intelligence agencies and public relations offices of Bolivia and the United States, which led to correspondent positions with Reuters and McGraw-Hill World News. His trajectory into Cold War Bolivian state nobility seemed all but guaranteed. However, on the brink of this breakout moment, he renounced his job —and professionalism altogether— committing himself to a life of literature and alcoholism as his marriage unraveled. In response to repeated interventions, he justified his every loss with a further indictment of the precautious, which was an outgrowth of his belief in the existence of a higher truth that was both accessible and impervious to analytical reason. In this article, I ask how Saenz’s poetry from the 1950s metabolized the rhetoric of indictment which it had inherited from the Tellurism of the Chaco generation. How might Muerte por el tacto (1957) be symptomatic of a broader aim of restoring to modern poetry its oracular legitimacy? On what grounds did Saenz indict precautious defenders of historical culture? And how did such an indictment mediate “national energy” (Tamayo) as it came into language through the nativist discourse of the land? Paying focal attention to regimes of revelation in Saenz’s early poetry and the historical conditions of its production, this article updates a discussion among Transatlanticists about the legitimization of irrationalism in 20th-century poetics and politics by assessing the socio-symbolic value of the oracular in the regionalist discourse of modernism.

“¿No habría algún lugar en que se pudiese estar como en la propia casa?” Saenz, la cuestión del “estar”, el encuentro con Heidegger y la proyección de estos asuntos en Kusch y Churata

This article addresses one of the major themes for reflection in Jaime Saenz's work: the question of “el estar”, developed as an artistic-epistemological elaboration that owes nothing to Western metaphysics. What interests here is to expose a poetic, critical and philosophical tradition of Latin American making, which is built around an ontology of "estar" and through the intervention of three key thinkers who in decisive moments of their reflection coincided in Bolivia: Jaime Saenz, Gamaliel Churata and Rodolfo Kusch. From different perspectives and expectations, these thinkers installed the philosophical provocation of "estar", giving way to the disturbing proposal that "estar” in life could precede and / or problematize the Heideggerian "being" in-the-world. The present work addresses these discussions in the case of Jaime Saenz.

Postscriptum: Apuntes sobre el universo literario de Jaime Saenz

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Announcements

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Preliminary Pages

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Mediación editorial y valor agregado: La obra de Jaime Saenz desde las redes sociales del pasado

This article offers a critical study of the place that Jaime Saenz occupies within the broader context of translated literatures to shed light on the construction of his image as a writer both in Bolivia and in the countries in which he has been translated. How is Saenz's work viewed from a global perspective? I propose a methodology that analyzes and visualizes web media to study Saenz's position vis-à-vis his Bolivian and Latin American peers within the local and global mediation scene. I read Saenz's work through a web media map that visualizes him diachronically within a framework that considers his production and reception by publishers, editors, translators, literary agents, critics and sponsors, in national and international contexts. In this article I focus on showing the editorial mediation processes of Saenz's work comparatively and in relation not only to literature, but to the broader cultural field, which includes the social sciences and audiovisual arts. The image of a writer that results from this process (dark, accursed, esoteric, and associated with a mystical Andean spirituality) adds symbolic value and prestige to the author. A web media analysis helps to visualize how this added value was created over time and within its socio-political contexts.

Elizabeth Monasterios Pérez, ed. Urgencias del latinoamericanismo en tiempos de globalización conflictiva. Tributo a John Beverley

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