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Current Issue Article Abstracts December 2009 Vol. 62.2 • • • • • • • • "Estética, política y el posible territorio de la ficción en 2666 de Roberto Bolaño" Ángeles Donoso Macaya This article analyzes the novel 2666 (2004) by Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño. The aim of this study is to rethink the intertwining of fiction, politics, and violence in Bolaño's literature: this means to reflect on the potentiality of Bolaño's writing, and from this perspective to reconsider the specificity of Bolaño's political engagement. This article identifies and describes the ways in which violence is used in the construction of the fiction. By reading 2666 together with Jacques Rancière's ideas on the relationship between politics and aesthetics, this study highlights 2666's aesthetic 'disagreement', which consists in the repetition of the heterogeneous. In the novel, this repetition produces a specific form of violence. By means of repetition, the narrator of 2666 draws a possible connection between two different forms of violence experienced during the 20th Century: the Jewish genocide and the Mexican feminicide of Ciudad Juárez. Bolaño develops within his writing a 'methodology of evil', which allows him to make seeable and sayable specific manifestations of violence, specific crimes. This is how politics relates to aesthetics in Bolaño's fiction. This study briefly comments on other works by Bolaño, Amuleto (Amulet) and Estrella distante (Distant Star). "Attuned Listening in Ricardo Piglia's Plata quemada" Eva-Lynn Jagoe This article argues that Ricardo Piglia's novel Plata quemada should be read not simply as a postmodern experiment in polyvocal narration but as a collage of sounds of all kinds, of which voices are but one, and which should be experienced "musically." An attuned listening is proposed as a way to approach the text. This listening is modeled on the Lacanian psychoanalyst who seeks to attend to the articulations of the analysand without imposing his or her ego onto the process of analysis. This approach to the novel does not close itself off through guilt, defensiveness, emotionality, or narcissism, but rather attends to the form of the text rather than interpreting its content. By attuning our reading to the complex and intimate music that makes up a novel, we can begin to understand the ways that form renders intelligible complex social formations and subject positions. This offers a reading of the novel that it is attentive to its formal and technological interest in addition to its political concerns. "Panorama y panóptico en México y los mexicanos de José Zorrilla" Christina Karageorgou-Bastea This article analyzes the ways in which panorama and panopticon, two visual and disciplinary techniques, invented in the late eighteenth century become discursive strategies in the writing of José Zorrilla's México y los mexicanos, the first history of Mexican lyric poetry, published in the mid nineteenth century. The book, written in the form of letters to the Duque de Rivas, is the result of historical, aesthetic and personal circumstances that are put forward by the author of Don Juan Tenorio in an attempt to render visible and audible the poetic accent of an independent nation to a Spanish audience. The aspects of the Romantic poet, the expatriate, and the resentful son, shape Zorrilla's position with respect to the geographical, political, and intellectual landscape of Mexico. Such multifaceted perspective makes possible an awareness that the Spanish writer uses to warn about the limitations of the European eye and ear in order to capture the vastness of the valley of Mexico, the turbulence of its political processes, and the value of its poetic accomplishments. Nevertheless, Zorrilla proves unable to overcome these same constraints. The effort of a panoramic sight and the demand of a panoptical vigilance convert his text to a patent example that, ironically, illustrates all the caveats put forward at the beginning of the book. Progressively, Zorrilla seems to become aware of his own inadequacy. As a result, the Spanish author abandons the discursive foreground, and the original Mexican texts resonate beyond his endorsement. "Torture and Truth in Ariel Dorfman's La muerte y la doncella" Sophia A. McClennen La muerte y la doncella (1990) represents a watershed moment in Ariel Dorfman's literary career for a number of reasons. It is his most internationally successful work, it is his first work after the end of Pinochet's official rule, and it is his first published play. It is also an example of the way that his post-exile writing bridges the local and the global. Ambiguous, provocative, and driven by questions that have no easy answers, the play lends itself to numerous avenues of inquiry that relate to the social role of truth commissions, to the representation of a nation in crisis, to storytelling and human rights, and to themes of betrayal, trust, deceit, and redemption. This essay begins by situating the end of Dorfman's exile within the larger critical context of the 1990s when three, often overlapping, social and critical shifts about globalization, about trauma, truth, and social justice, and about art and representation dominated intellectual debates. After tracing this panorama and Dorfman's response to it, I then analyze how La muerte y la doncella addresses the problems of memory, history, justice, and trauma and thereby reflects a series of critical concerns that came to the fore in the 1990s. "La ceguera de Cronos. Historia y tiempo en el cine de Víctor Erice" Luis Moreno-Caballud This article elucidates the role of time and history in the cinema of Víctor Erice. Collective history is not exactly opposed to personal life in Erice's films, because often both are characterized equally by provoking an experience of time as a linear succession of instants leading to destruction or ruins. On the other hand, this destructive time does have a crucial opponent: time mediated by dream and fascination. This fundamental dichotomy of Erice's work can be better understood by relating it to the following conceptual pair used by Gilles Deleuze in his Logic of Sense: Chronos is time as a succession of causally connected and corporeal presents, and Aion is time as an incorporeal event that is unique but also linked to other events by relations that exceed causality. Erice's cinematic art attempts to unveil time as Aion (the poetic and non-causal logic of the event) in the midst of time as Chronos (the destructive logic of time as historic or personal loss). In any case, Aion is in itself also a kind of destructive time: it cancels the possibility of attaching events to a present state of things. Erice has often used the idea of light and, in particular, of the light cinema creates, as a metonymy of the destructive power of time as event. However, as the title of his short film Alumbramiento (Lifeline, 2002), suggests, this destruction is also a way of giving new life to the event, a sort of impersonal and incorporeal life beyond any presence. "The Meaning of Blood in Argentina: Genealogy and Darwinism in the Recovery of the Past" Adriana Novoa This essay addresses how the spread of Darwinian ideas helped to revive concerns about lineage and purity of blood in Argentina by the end of the nineteenth century. An analysis of how blood was engaged symbolically, before and after evolutionary ideas became dominant, underscores how the aristocratic culture that emerged by the 1880s was linked to genealogy. This genealogical thinking deeply affected ideas regarding gender, race, and the possibility of continuity and discontinuity of certain populations. The study concludes by tracing how the return to a genealogical system created a new understanding of what was civilized and modern, one that contradicted many ideas that the Generation of 1837 held on these same questions. |
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