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The essay is dedicated to the 120th birthday of the classic of Cuban literature Alejo Carpentier and the 110th birthday of the prominent Argentine writer Julio Cortázar. Despite the fact that they belonged to different generations, these like-minded writers, creators of the new Latin American novel, had much in common. Their interest in the fantastic serves as their shared artistic orientation in the essay, although the very nature of the fantastic in these writers’ works is completely different: in case of Carpentier, the founder of magical realism, we are talking about his formula of lo real maravilloso, rooted in the reality of the continent; as for Cortázar, one is faced here with his individual intellectual mythologizing. However, despite the differences in their poetics, both writers were united by the polemical intensity of their manifestos and interviews, both fought for the marvelous and the fantastic in literature as opposed to all sorts of cliches, banalities, snobbish prejudices, and literary fashion. For example, both received a creative impulse — each in his own way — by recoding and rearranging reminiscences and quotations from André Breton's Surrealist Manifesto. Defending their artistic principles and political convictions, both writers “played seriously”, as Cortázar said, and it is as evidenced by the examples of what they created “on a bet”.

Associated with German post-expressionism, new objectivity, French surrealism and dadaism, magic realism is regarded as an ontological scandal, a violation of the logic of identity through the invention of a third level of reality. The name was coined by a German critic and art historian, Franz Roh, in his book “Nach-Expressionismus. Magischer Realismus. Probleme der neuesten europäischen Malerei”, published in 1925, and employed again in Foto-Auge, a book on the new phtography jointly published by Roph with Jan Tschichold which served as a catalogue for the avant-garde “Film und Foto” exhibition (FiFo) held in Stuttgart between May and June 1929. By then, however, Roh’s essay had already been translated into Italian and Spanish and promoted by prominent thinkers of the day, such as Jose Ortega y Gasset, who published it in the influential “Revista de Occidente” in Madrid in 1927, and by Massimo Bonterupelli, who translated it for the Italian journal, “900” ['Novecento']. The prompt and resonant international echo generated by Roh’s new art can hardly be understood otherwise than on the assumption that it was striking a familiar ring in the rapidly changing and polyphonous score of European modernism. Reputed for its international and heterogeneous character, modernism is thus revealed to have been crossed by some common currents of poetic matter and energy. The present essay sets out to dig up the roots of a hybrid, literary and plastic artistic mode in the earlier half of the last century, and to identify legacies in the aftermath of Roh’s celebrated manifesto.

Cuban painter Wifredo Lam (1909-1982) returned to the Caribbean in 1941 after spending eighteen years in Spain and France. In the following four years his painting practice transformed, generating the iconic imagery that he would become known for inventing. His return from Europe figures prominently in essays that Lydia Cabrera, Alejo Carpentier, and Aimé Césaire wrote about him soon after his 1943 completion of La jungla, his most famous painting. These Caribbean writers had close relationships of friendship and collaboration with Lam, and while their essays have become important sources for Lam criticism, they rarely receive critical analysis. In my analysis, I am interested in how they illuminate the role of return in shaping the dichotomy that Alejo Carpentier went on to establish between surrealism and the Americas-located aesthetic he dubbed “lo real maravilloso.” For Carpentier, the aesthetic of the marvelous that the surrealists sought to render emanated readily from social reality in the Americas. I understand this idea to be predicated upon his own return from Europe, and I argue that his earlier work on Lam, alongside Cabrera’s and Césaire’s, offers coordinates for a theory of return, from Europe and surrealism, through which to understand the real-marvelous aesthetic in Lam.

Archivo histórico de Kipus: Revista Andina de Letras y Estudios Culturales, 1995 y 1996.

During the period of Caribbean decolonization (1950–65), a subset of Caribbean authors reimagined the temporal role of the continental Caribbean's tropical interior: rather than a space outside history that colonists or residents could use as a resource to construct historical progress, the tropical hinterlands became a historical agent that possessed and assimilated people into an alternative temporal order through a saprophytic process. This essay focuses on three novels—Wilson Harris' The Palace of the Peacock (1960), Edgar Mittelholzer's My Bones and My Flute (1955), and Alejo Carpentier's The Lost Steps (1953)—that enact what I term a "saprophytic temporality": a form of time in which the past is constantly recycled, decomposed, and transformed into new forms. This process of continual regeneration also causes Caribbean residents to realize their involvement in ongoing imperial violence against the interior and its Indigenous inhabitants. In effect, this key subset of Caribbean novels of the 1950s and 1960s imply that the alternative to colonial development is not the independent Caribbean nation but a stranger and more unfathomable form of existence defined by the temporality of the Caribbean environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1920s, declamadora Berta Singerman was frequently criticized by the Argentine avant-garde because her popular performances never included their poems. Dismissed as an embodiment of cursilería ever since, she was in fact a key component of international poetry circuits who developed relationships with Alfonsina Storni, Federico García Lorca, and Gabriela Mistral, among others. In correspondence with Alejo Carpentier, the Cuban writer counseled her on capturing the dynamics of declamation onscreen, suggesting that she could emphasize the rhythms of her performances through close-ups on her moving hands accompanying the poem--a technique Singerman employed in a 1942 film. No stranger to working across media, Carpentier recognized rhythm as the crucial connection between declamation's two types of corpus: the collection of poems and the body. In conversation with Carpentier's observations, this piece focuses on how rhythm shaped production and reception alike as Singerman attracted large crowds across the Americas. It argues that Singerman, who would call herself the "libertadora de poesía," accented rhythm in her performances so that audiences could make sense of the recited poems--and this process involved not only allowing those poems to be heard and felt but also creating a space for them to perform ideological work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies a short story by Alejo Carpentier, 'El milagro del ascensor (Cuento para un apéndice a la 'Leyenda Áurea')', as a way to discuss multiple elements which would come to be foundational of the latter marvelous realism in the new Latin American narrative. Among them, we find a rewriting, under modern irony, of a baroque discourse, besides a resignified use of the allegory as a mean of expression, and also a dialectic between the local and the foreign that is synthesized through the project of a mestizo cultural identity and a marvelous based on the ubiquity of a syncretic Christianity formalized in a literary aesthetic -- characteristics that have an effect on the verbal expression of time and space in the narration, as well as on the relation between narrator's and character's discourse, conceived as actively responsive. We are helped by Carpentier's own definition of marvelous real, created in 1949, Walter Benjamin's discussions on allegory and Bakhtin's definitions of modern irony and the cultural value of the foreign language; those theoretical definitions are then mediated by further studies on Latin American literatures that identify in them the prevalence of a baroque and allegorical discourse (Doris Sommer, Luis Ernesto Lasso and Irlemar Chiampi). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay highlights the importance of the first-known antecedent of Alejo Carpentier's novel El reino de este mundo (1949)—a story published in the journal Gaceta del Caribe in 1944 under the title "Capítulo de Novela." A reading of the two texts together reveals that traces of the Gothic heritage of Edgar Allan Poe and Horace Walpole that were explicit in "Capítulo de Novela" were systematically erased from the final manuscript of El reino de este mundo. These erasures advanced the notion of an authentic American aesthetic that would be risked if the novel were read for what it was: a sophisticated bricolage of documentary sources on Haitian history, collections of oral sources on Vodou, and clichés drawn from horror literature of European and North American origin. Thus, Carpentier's attempt to combine a revolutionary ethos, transatlantic enlightenment, abolitionism, and the renewal of the novel in a new branch of the fantastic was done at the expense of the emergence of the gothic form in "our America." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alejo Carpentier’s work is known for its scathing disprovals of surrealist ideas. Although, at young age, the author promoted the movement and built himself intellectually from within surrealist precepts, as well as attached to surrealist artists. The presumed disruption with Surrealism is a benchmark in Carpentier’s literary production and shows an ambiguous position, since it is possible to track significant surrealist traces in his essays and narratives. The main concept linked to the author (the "Marvelous Real") is in the spotlight between the rejection of surrealism, as a basic precept, and the resumption of some of itsideas. In this work, we aim to analyze the contradictory position of Carpentier’s discourse through the dialogue between essays written by him at different moments of life, as well as their comparison with critical works on the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Este artigo examina um conto de Alejo Carpentier, ‘El milagro del ascensor (Cuento para un apéndice a la ‘Leyenda Áurea’)’, para discutir por meio dele elementos que constituiriam, em obras posteriores, o realismo maravilhoso da nova narrativa latino-americana. Encontramos principalmente uma reescrita, sob a ironia moderna, do discurso barroco, assim como um uso ressignificado da alegoria como modo de expressão, além de uma dialética entre o local e o estrangeiro que busca sua síntese em um projeto de identidade cultural mestiça e de um maravilhoso que se baseia na ubiquidade de um cristianismo sincrético, absorvido como estética literária – aspectos que afetam a própria expressão verbal do tempo e do espaço na narração, além da relação, concebida como ativamente responsiva, entre o discurso do narrador e da personagem. Recorremos à própria definição de real maravilhoso criada por Carpentier em 1949, assim como à discussão de Walter Benjamin sobre a alegoria no drama barroco alemão e às definições dadas por Bakhtin para a ironia moderna e o valor cultural da palavra estrangeira; tais definições teóricas são então mediadas pelos estudos de Doris Sommer, Luis Ernesto Lasso e Irlemar Chiampi, que identificam nas literaturas da América Latina a prevalência de um discurso barroco e alegórico.

ABSTRACT: In the 1920s, declamadora Berta Singerman was frequently criticized by the Argentine avant-garde because her popular performances never included their poems. Dismissed as an embodiment of cursilería ever since, she was in fact a key component of international poetry circuits who developed relationships with Alfonsina Storni, Federico García Lorca, and Gabriela Mistral, among others. In correspondence with Alejo Carpentier, the Cuban writer counseled her on capturing the dynamics of declamation onscreen, suggesting that she could emphasize the rhythms of her performances through close-ups on her moving hands accompanying the poem—a technique Singerman employed in a 1942 film. No stranger to working across media, Carpentier recognized rhythm as the crucial connection between declamation’s two types of corpus: the collection of poems and the body. In conversation with Carpentier’s observations, this piece focuses on how rhythm shaped production and reception alike as Singerman attracted large crowds across the Americas. It argues that Singerman, who would call herself the “libertadora de poesía,” accented rhythm in her performances so that audiences could make sense of the recited poems—and this process involved not only allowing those poems to be heard and felt but also creating a space for them to perform ideological work. Keywords: Berta Singerman, Alejo Carpentier, declamation, poetry, cinema, media studies, body, rhythm RESUMEN: En la década de 1920, Berta Singerman fue criticada varias veces por las vanguardias argentinas porque los recitales de la declamadora no incluían sus poemas. Desde entonces frecuentemente ha sido desestimada como un ejemplo de la cursilería, pero Singerman formaba parte de importantes circuitos internacionales de poesía y se relacionó con Alfonsina Storni, Federico García Lorca y Gabriela Mistral, entre otros. En su correspondencia con Alejo Carpentier, el escritor cubano le ofreció a Singerman sugerencias sobre cómo captar las dinámicas de la declamación en el cine, proponiendo estrategias como el uso de primeros planos para mostrar el movimiento de sus manos acompañando un poema—una técnica que Singerman luego empleó en una película de 1942. Carpentier, quien manejaba una variedad de medios, identificó el ritmo como la conexión crucial entre los dos tipos de corpus que aparecen en la declamación: la colección de poemas y el cuerpo. Este artículo trabaja con las observaciones de Carpentier para pensar el modo en el cual el ritmo influía tanto en la producción como en la recepción de la declamación durante el período en que Singerman atraía a grandes públicos en las Américas y Europa. Arguye que Singerman, quien se autodenominaba la “libertadora de poesía”, acentuaba el ritmo en sus recitales para que los públicos pudieran encontrar sentido a los poemas recitados. Ese proceso implicaba la creación de un espacio no solo para escuchar y sentir los poemas sino también donde los mismos generaban efectos ideológicos. Palabras clave: Berta Singerman, Alejo Carpentier, declamación, cine, estudios de medios, cuerpo, ritmo