El pensamiento de José Enrique Rodó en la obra de Alfonso Reyes

This article addresses the impact of the ideas of José Enrique Rodó on the work of Alfonso Reyes. In the text, it will be shown how the Rodonian topics reverberated through the inflections and porosity of Alfonso Reyes’ art as an essayist. In fact, in Reyes’ writings we can recognize some of the topics that characterized the thinking of Rodó: the enthusiasm and vital optimism, the importance he attributed to the Hellenic miracle, the significance of establishing a humanistic educational project for young generations, and finally, the ideal of a great Latin American homeland.

Mujer que sabe viajar: autorrepresentación y subjetividad femenina en Cartas a Ricardo, de Rosario Castellanos

This paper reflects on the relationship between the female traveling experience and the epistolary genre through a reading of Rosario Castellanos’s Cartas a Ricardo as travel literature. The aim is to analyse the hybrid nature of the letter as a genre that allows the exploration of ideas and confessing or revealing affects during particular processes of constructing female subjectivities. Different than conventional travel chronicles, it is argued that the travel accounts transmitted through the female epistolary genre can throw light on physical and emotional displacement, but also on the intellectual and creative work of women in (self)censored or repressed environments. It is concluded that for Castellanos both traveling and writing are conscious acts of intellectual and gender freedom.

Los de abajo. Mitificación y metalepsis

The study of narrative resources such as free indirect discourse and narrated monologue, in Los de abajo, although it has been clearly pointed out by critics such as Mansour, Escalante and St. Ours, is scarce in comparison with the works on the Mexican Revolution and the controversy over the ideological position of its author, Mariano Azuela. In the present work, an approach to these resources is made, following the precepts of narratology, starting from the relationship between the narrative voice and the figural discourse, and between the discourses of the characters; that is, from the citation processes. Specifically, an approach is made to the way in which Demetrio Macías recounts his exploits by repeating the speech of Alberto Solís, shaped, in turn, by other anonymous speeches. The relevance of self-narrating in this way is such that it implies a radical change in the personality and destiny of Demetrio Macías.

Las ideas-guía de un maestro. El pensamiento de José Enrique Rodó en la obra de Alfonso Reyes

This article addresses the impact of the ideas of José Enrique Rodó on the work of Alfonso Reyes. In the text, it will be shown how the Rodonian topics reverberated through the inflections and porosity of Alfonso Reyes’ art as an essayist. In fact, in Reyes’ writings we can recognize some of the topics that characterized the thinking of Rodó: the enthusiasm and vital optimism, the importance he attributed to the Hellenic miracle, the significance of establishing a humanistic educational project for young generations, and finally, the ideal of a great Latin American homeland.

De la confesión a la autobiografía en Desierto Mayor: hacia una autopoética de Abigael Bohórquez

This article analyzes the passage from confessional enunciation to autobiographical enunciation in Desierto mayor (1980) by Abigael Bohórquez’s (1936-1995), linking it to autopoetics. To carry this out, Bohórquez’s work is contextualized in the poetic panorama of his time in order to understand some lines that could have influenced his writings of the self linked to memory. Subsequently, a framework is created by which we conceptualize confessional and autobiographical poetry in Desierto mayor. Finally, the poems are analyzed, giving an account of their confessional and autobiographical marks, to later reveal Bohórquez’s autopoetics expressed in them.

Poética de la culpa y la confesión en El libro vacío, de Josefina Vicens

The Empty Book (1958), by Josefina Vicens (1911-1988), has attributes which define it as a confessional work. This article analyzes the assertions of the protagonist of the novel José García when he experiences a deep guilt and appeals to be ambiguously forgiven for trying to write a perfect book. The guilt and the confession, predominant in the text, are tackled through the following: the rhetorical technique captatio benevolentiae; the narrator’s larval state and stripping (La Confesión. Género literario, by María Zambrano); the silence’s imposition and unfathomable condition (The Writing of the Disaster, by Maurice Blanchot); the summit of being and the incompletion as a goal (Notebooks, by Paul Valéry); the ghost novel (The Preparation of the Novel, by Roland Barthes); and the dependent or conditioned beauty, as well as the free or self-sufficient beauty (Critique of Judgment, by Immanuel Kant).

De Le livre rouge a El libro rojo: la mexicanización de un proyecto literario francés

The article peruses the influence of Le livre rouge (1863) in Vicente Riva Palacio’s and Manuel Payno’s El libro rojo (1870). It expounds how those responsible for El libro rojo, instead of just copying the French model, adapted it into a certain written and visual representation of history: violent, liberal, and providential. The article’s structure follows the Mexican version’s four innovations: martyrological hagiographies were elaborated instead of disquieting biographies; lithography, of greater expressive power, was substituted for the engraving technique; a taxonomy of violence was discarded in favor of a periodization based on the spillage of blood; lastly, the oeuvre was endowed with a liberal optimism absent from the French text. Thus, El libro rojo is situated within a context of transatlantic influences, which highlights its uniqueness, and illuminates the liberal and triumphalistic representation of Mexican history.

Nostalgia de la muerte de Xavier Villaurrutia dentro de la tradición filosófica en lengua alemana: Heidegger, Rilke, Hegel, Schiller

One of the greater influences on Xavier Villaurrutia’s poetry was the philosophical work of Martin Heidegger. Also, among the Mexican poet’s favorite readings was The notes of Malte Laurids Brigge, a novel by Rainer Maria Rilke, which is conceptually connected with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s dialectical philosophy and Friedrich Schiller’s humanism. The present work is an interpretation of Nostalgia de la muerte by Villaurrutia based on the concepts of “turn towards the open” (Heidegger), “personal death” (Rilke), “subject as the absolute and as nothingness” (Hegel) and “aesthetic education of the human” (Schiller).