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In El Torito de los Muchachos (1830), Luis Pérez deploys voices, not always Gauchos and Federalists, but sometimes Uniterian and literate, who utter fictional truths in the form of a confession. In a historical moment in which the press was a vehicle of influence on public opinion, Pérez aims his publications toward broad swaths of the public to include of illiterate groups through oral readings. This paper analyzes the ways in which these confessions allowed truths to stand up amid a war of words, as they sought to occupy an imagined public space on whose field discursive conflicts were fought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the perspectives of everyday aesthetics and hermeneutics, this paper analyzes Pequod (1995), a Vitor Ramil novel set in the Brazilian pampa and conceived around the unique features offered by the experience of cold weather. By analyzing the thoughts and actions of Pequod's characters, our main goal is to point out how a vital relationship with weather leads to an existential stance, or philosophy of life, aimed at understanding the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Dos partidos en lucha (1875), and especially in La bolsa de huesos (1896), Eduardo Holmberg configures fictional narrations in which Darwinian theories and the contemporary debates and dilemmas of science acquire a significant centrality. In both cases, and in addition to an emphatic adherence to Darwinism and a clear apology for the scope of scientific practice, it is possible to detect a problematization of the institutional place of science, its feasible connections with the society and politics, and its role within the state structure. As a correlate, both narrations reveal tensions around and reformulations of one of their central axes, which is also central to the work of Charles Darwin: the modes of thinking, emphasizing or relativizing the link between human life and animal life. The aim of this paper is to address the interaction between these two issues in Holmberg's fictions, through a contrastive textual analysis that contemplates the cultural context of the period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The memory of peoples is built upon the clash between different discourses and sectors which strive to occupy a privileged place in this collective symbolic space. Other discourses work deconstructing those hegemonic narratives, reporting what they have left aside and giving voice to those who have been systematically silenced. This work tries to account for the way in which La lengua del malón, by Guillermo Saccomanno, builds itself as a counter-discourse, which allows to discern the position of some social sectors in reference to discourses and devices that determine what is adequate, moral, vulgar, tasteful, normal. To the same extent, this paper attempts to exhibit those sectors's complicity in keeping hierarchies, categories and institutions, which are conservative, oppressive and repressive, together with their alliances with those who interrupted democratic and popular processes. The novel is based on the coup d'etat which overthrew Perón's government in 1955, and it hints the continuing relationship with other tragic moments of the Argentinian history: the extermination of native peoples and the dictatorship that started in 1976. La lengua del malón is built as a narrative of abjection suffered by those who fail to answer those hegemonic parameters supporting not only the official history, but also the society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies Victor Juan Guillot's detective stories, hitherto, completely ignored by the literary criticism and the historiography of the detective genre in Argentina. We assert that in these stories it is possible to see the transition from a certain detective narrative -which was clearly predominant from late 1870s to 1930s, having melodramatic features and close links with the political and social reality-into a new kind of tale much closer to the English detective story of the Golden Age, and further from empirical national life. In Argentina, this new type of detective tale will be developed vigorously during the 1930s and the 1940s. Thus, we attempt to show that the detective stories included in Historias sin importancia (1920) and El alma en el pozo (1925) are in the same line with the early tradition of the genre in Argentina, while the stories included in Terror: cuentos de crimen y misterio (circa 1935) have mostly the same features as those of the 1930s. We also seek to put on view how Guillot's conception of the detective story in 1925 anticipated Jorge Luis Borges's conception of the genre in the 30s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literary criticism on Ricardo Piglia s narrative has often been oriented to micro-analyses, as if a permanent focus on minimal features was required: a sentence, a phrase, a quote. This leads to a further problem: the difficulty in envisaging a macro approach and systematization of the originality of Piglia's narrative process. Thus, this paper intends to provide a broader view in an attempt to identify four recurrent rhetorical devices in his work: understatement, paradox, ellipsis and synechdoque, in relation to some literary genres (Bildungsroman, detective fiction and paranoid fiction). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why should we ask ourselves about Baroque's meaning? In fact, ¿can we define it? During the 20th century -and specially for the last thirty years- Baroque has been one of the most studied and discussed issues. It remains an inevitable topic when thinking about Latin-American literary and critical history. Two questions have driven, mainly but unequally, its interest: one referred to its concept, the other to its corpus. Thus, the relations between concept and corpus -be they understated or self-evident- remain frequently unattended or implicit. This paper aims to reexamine and clarify the concept of Baroque following its critical drifts, specially the literary ones and mostly for Latin America. It also aims to thoughtfully analyze several excerpts from the work of sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Mexico, 1648-1695) and from Juan de Espinosa Medrano (Peru, ¿1630?-1688) that makes it possible to properly analyze the relationship between concept and corpus. Finally, it aims to clarify this relationship and the critical conditions in which it emerged in order to think a possible distinction between the seventeenth Baroque and the twentieth (Neo)Baroque. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the main difficulties raised by Petronius' Satyricon for literary criticism is its genre categorization. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate the importance of the new papyrus discoveries for this subject, especially, to consider if the relationship between the Petronian text and the Menippean Satire is a valid one, and to support the appropriateness of the label novel as a genre which describes how the Salyricon works; it will be necessary to review briefly some of the hypotheses of generic attribution of the Satyricon and some of its outstanding formal characteristics, i.e. the prosimetrum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]