ROSALÍA CORNEJO-PARRIEGO, ED. Black USA and Spain: Shared Memories in the 20th Century. New York and London: Routledge, 2020. 291 pp.

Reseña de Black USA and Spain: Shared Memories in the 20th Century de Rosalía Cornejo-Parriego, ed.

“Jugamos a la guerra”: Boys, Toys, and Military Masculinity in Galdós’s La desheredada

In the sixth chapter of Benito Pérez Galdós’s La desheredada, we find children at play in an impoverished neighborhood of Madrid. But what at first glance appears to be a simple representation of boys playing war is, upon closer inspection, a problematization of Spanish masculinity. This article suggests that the concepts of militarism and masculinity were synonymous throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. Galdós, however, critiques this conflation by converting the children’s game into a tragedy.

Animation and Affirmative Aging in Ignacio Ferreras’s Arrugas

This paper enters the ongoing debate on the portrayal of old age in Ignacio Ferreras’s animated feature Arrugas (Spain, 2011). My approach to a new understanding of Ferreras’s film is two-fold: first, I engage with the often-overlooked animation to ask how it too contributes to the cinematic vision of later life; second, I aim to liberate Arrugas from the predominant binary discourses of successful aging/aging-as-decline often employed to understand the film. Drawing on theories of animation and aging, I highlight how Arrugas reflects later life as more complex, a notion central to Linn Sandberg’s theory of affirmative old age.

Un católico en Nueva York: Lorca’s Tragic Vision of the United States

This article discusses the role of Spanish Catholic tradition in the poetry of Federico García Lorca, especially in Poeta en Nueva York. Beginning with key concepts from Miguel de Unamuno’s Tragic Sense of Life to elucidate this tradition of irrationality, suffering, and spiritual vitality, we see that Lorca uses similar ideas as resistance to a “Protestant” modernity that, according to Lorca, favored materialist progress while eschewing human suffering. This article also demonstrates how the use of Spanish religious tradition complicates long-standing stereotypes of Spain’s supposed lack of modernization.

La utopía a prueba: formas heterogéneas de vida en Eugenia de Eduardo Urzaiz

Este artículo analiza la relación entre vida y utopía en Eugenia. Esbozo novelesco de costumbres futuras (1919) de Eduardo Urzaiz. Partiendo de nociones como utopía crítica (Moylan) y utopía experimental (Abensour), el artículo explora cómo la novela de Urzaiz desoculta sistemáticamente las ambivalencias y contradicciones inherentes a las sociedades eugenésicas. Estos casos de contradicción revelan que la vida, a pesar de las tecnologías que intentan codificar su devenir constante, es en realidad un flujo que excede cualquier forma preestablecida. Eugenia pone en escena la existencia de formas-de-vida (Agamben) que buscan desactivar el control biopolítico de los cuerpos y poblaciones.

Roberto Arlt and the Readers of Romance

This essay examines the role of female readership in the work of the Argentine writer Roberto Arlt. I argue that the conflicted and embodied status of the reading public in Arlt’s work is crystallized in the female (or feminized) reader of romances. Through this figure, the Arltian text reveals the pervasiveness of normative sentimental discourse, and narrates how this discourse circulates, impacts, and is absorbed by the bodies of its readers. These critiques emerge quite clearly in Arlt’s novels, where the author enjoys greater freedom of expression. However, his periodical publications and theater necessarily employ a more oblique critical strategy. Focusing on his aguafuertes, the short story “Eugenio Delmonte y los 1300 novios” and the play Trescientos millones, I show how Arlt interpolates his readers as readers of romance while also enacting a rupture in the boundary between the work and the medium in which it appears, encouraging the reader’s awareness of the influence of those media in her daily life.

El mandato de parecerse a una cara: desertificación y reconstrucción en El desierto y su semilla de Jorge Baron Biza

La novela El desierto y su semilla de Jorge Baron Biza presenta de forma ficcional los acontecimientos reales del ataque que el escritor, pornógrafo, político y dandy argentino Raúl Baron Biza produjo a su esposa Clotilde Sabattini cuando le arrojó un vaso de ácido sulfúrico en el rostro deformándola de por vida. La construcción literaria de Jorge Baron Biza, hijo del atacante y la víctima, no solo reconstruye textualmente el ataque y sus consecuencias, sino que plantea una operación formal que emparenta la reconstrucción del rostro de su madre con la construcción básica del relato nacional argentino.

STEPHEN BOYD, TRUDI DARBY, AND TERENCE O’REILLY, EDS. The Art of Cervantes in “Don Quixote.” Critical Essays. Cambridge: Legenda, 2019. 289 pp.

Reseña de The Art of Cervantes in “Don Quixote.” Critical Essays de Stephen Boyd, Trudi Darby, and Terence O’Reilly, eds.

JUAN R. DUCHESNE WINTER. Plant Theory in Amazonian Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 103 pp.

Reseña de Plant Theory in Amazonian Literature de Juan R. Duchesne Winter

JENNIFER SMITH, ED. Modern Spanish Women as Agents of Change: Essays in Honor of Maryellen Bieder. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2019. 236 pp.

Reseña de Modern Spanish Women as Agents of Change: Essays in Honor of Maryellen Bieder de Jennifer Smith.