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Catedral Tomada. Revista de crítica literaria latinoamericana
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This is an Open Access Journal

Open Access journal
ISSN (Print) 2169-0847
Published by U of Pittsburgh

[30 journals]

Body-Worlds in Crisis: Aesthetic-Political Resistance in Recent Chile
- Authors: Alejandra Bottinelli, Darcie Doll
  Abstract: Presentation
  PubDate: 2022-12-20
  DOI: 10.5195/ct/2022.596
  Issue No: Vol. 10, No. 19 (2022)
Woman, Body and Violence in Sumar by Diamela Eltit
- Authors: Patricia Espinosa Hernández
  Pages: 1 - 18
  Abstract: This text proposes that in the novel Sumar (2018) by Diamela Eltit, counterhegemonic practices or about resistance to power are made visible, which appears configured as an entity of political control. These counterhegemonic practices not only take place in traditionally
  subversive activities, such as the protesting march, but also in the protesters' own bodies, which becomes the stage of the systemic violence. On the basis of the above, I can assert that in this novel its characters raise the utopia of emancipation to the neoliberal model, from bodies that operate as refractory signs to a patriarchal-war logic; framed in a context of defeats of doctrines and practices that in the past pointed towards a path of liberation.
  PubDate: 2022-12-20
  DOI: 10.5195/ct/2022.578
  Issue No: Vol. 10, No. 19 (2022)
Body-World in Diamela Eltit’s Essay Writing. An Initial
Approximation
- Authors: Edda Hurtado, Darcie Doll
  Pages: 19 - 47
  Abstract: This article is focused on Diamela Eltit’s critical discourse present in three books: Emergencias (2000), Signos Vitales (2008) and Réplicas (2016). They comprise a variety of texts and topics and a vast diversity of primary sources, such as conferences, literary critique, art critique, forewords and book presentations, collaborations in magazines and newspapers, among others. We are interested in the representation of the body in Diamela Eltit’s essay writing, which we find anticipated, considering the current discussions revolving around corporality in contemporary theoretical exchange of points of view. We read the body from the subjectivity of the essay writer, in a style that breaks the body-mind duality, establishing a fissure which allows an intrusion in the materiality of emotions and not only in the essay construction as an instrument of thinking and knowledge. Considering that, the body in Eltit’s essay writing is presented as subject, recognition and emancipation, this proposal has been developed from the categorization of body/pain, body/market and body/social class/memory of women’s body in her writing.
  PubDate: 2022-12-20
  DOI: 10.5195/ct/2022.585
  Issue No: Vol. 10, No. 19 (2022)
Notes for a Feathered Dawn: Eyes, Balaclavas and Hearts in Lemebel's
“Deleuzian” Readings
- Authors: María del Pilar Jarpa Manzur
  Pages: 48 - 86
  Abstract: From a critical gender perspective, this article offers an analysis of the chronicle that Pedro Lemebel dedicates to Subcomandante Marcos, paying special attention to the Deleuzian dimensions that it incorporates. Dimensions that are not only present in what could be interpreted as a theoretical wink, but also in the practices -visual, oral, written- with which Lemebel seems to overflow and enrich his philosophical origin. If, in general, within the multiple recreations of becoming that are promoted in his chronicles, Lemebel tends to question the symbolic universe of the new man, the text that consecrates Subcomandante Marcos seems to introduce unusual forms of subversion that question and at the same time confront the local revolutionary imaginary. However, it is not only a matter of destabilizing the binarized discourses of the revolution, but also of making visible other possible forms of disrespect and resistance. And that is what seems to be re-created in the memoirs that, in the context of the Chilean revolt of 2019, have taken Lemebel's name from the line of flight to the front line of fire.
  PubDate: 2022-12-20
  DOI: 10.5195/ct/2022.569
  Issue No: Vol. 10, No. 19 (2022)
Insurrectionist Poetics. The Multiple Images of a Rebel Emblem in La
Bandera de Chile by Elvira Hernández
- Authors: Karem Pinto Carvacho
  Pages: 87 - 109
  Abstract: The aim of the article is to analyze La Bandera de Chile by Elvira Hernández, in its formal and semantic dimension. The essay proposes that the montage of images, sustained in the tension and complement of its two basic figures, irony and sentence, compose a poetics that represents and encourages the process of social insurrection. The analysis reviews a selection of three representative images of that trajectory, exposed in terms of crisis, political consciousness and liberation.
  PubDate: 2022-12-20
  DOI: 10.5195/ct/2022.553
  Issue No: Vol. 10, No. 19 (2022)
The Dark Basement of Lina Meruane's Children Stories
- Authors: Cora Requena
  Pages: 110 - 132
  Abstract: Las infantas by Lina Meruane proposes a new reading of the fairy tales that are part of the children's imaginary of European literature. Through the rupture and inversion, both of the canon and of roles and archetypes, the author formulates a multifocal approach to some characters who transit as marginal bodies through the textual and social space of exclusion and fracture. From them, Meruane develops discursive strategies of resistance that displace desire and sexuality, which inaugurate specular spaces of great symbolic force.
  PubDate: 2022-12-20
  DOI: 10.5195/ct/2022.573
  Issue No: Vol. 10, No. 19 (2022)
The Condemned Bodies of Tocopilla: Namazu by Rodrigo Ramos Bañados
- Authors: Valeska Solar Olivares
  Pages: 133 - 170
  Abstract: The recent narrative of the Norte Grande in Chile has focused on the ways in which the body is affected and stressed by the geographical space of the desert and the problems of the area today, such as extractivism, the marginalisation of subjects, the mining industry, and the sacrifice zones, among others. On this basis, different works have sought to represent how this marginalised space affectively configures the bodies of the subjects who inhabit it, thus elaborating different figures that address the construction of these bodies, pointing to a deepening of the relationship established between subjects and spaces. In this article we will focus on the figures of the body that are proposed in the novel Namazu by Rodrigo Ramos Bañados, where we investigate the link between Tocopilla, the city in which the novel is set, and the characters who visit and inhabit the place, in the context of the imminent disaster that stalks the story from the beginning: the Great Earthquake of the Norte Grande. In this link, the central figure will be that of the condemned body, condemned to death by the earthquake itself and by the marginalisation of the town, and the figures of the strange, monstrous and foreign body.
  PubDate: 2022-12-20
  DOI: 10.5195/ct/2022.576
  Issue No: Vol. 10, No. 19 (2022)
Youthful Bodies and Nationalist Practices: Four Artistic Approaches
Towards the Colonia Dignidad Case
- Authors: María Angélica Franken
  Pages: 171 - 199
  Abstract: During the last recent years there has been a series of intermedial works situated between the thresholds of fiction and testimony which have considered the dramatical events taken place in the German settlement of the former Colonia Dignidad (1969-1997), where systematic rape and abuse was inflicted against Germans and Chileans. That is the case of the novel Sprinters. Los niños de Colonia Dignidad (2016) by Lola Larra, the pictorial series La Colonia (2015) by Mariana Najmanovich, the stopmotion animation La casa lobo (2018) by León&Cociña, and Un lugar llamado Dignidad (2021) by Matías Rojas Valencia. In all of them a series of ‘First World’ affective imaginaries and practices are represented, such as being in contact with nature, the practice of sports and musical development, understood as a chosen space/time for education, submissiveness, and bodybuilding of docile bodies conducted by Paul Schäfer. These artistic works realised on how these allegedly childish and familiar practices hide an unsettling and contradictory reality which gave rise to the uncanny and to a German nationalist identity linked to transnational imaginaries such as Romanticism on Chilean soil.
  PubDate: 2022-12-20
  DOI: 10.5195/ct/2022.572
  Issue No: Vol. 10, No. 19 (2022)
“Poner el cuerpo” y “tomar la palabra”: Violence, Affect and
Self-representation in Contemporary Feminist Documentary in Chile
(2010-2019)
- Authors: Milena Gallardo, Natalia Morales
  Pages: 200 - 244
  Abstract: This article analyzes three contemporary Chilean documentaries from an interdisciplinary framework and places them in a context of feminist practices, interpreting a certain corpus of recent documentaries made by women in Chile in light of the growing politicization process that the country has experienced during the last decade. This analysis considers the use of a series of resources and strategies of self-exposure in film, as means through which the complex affects derived from the intersection of multiple violences experienced and elaborated in the films, are embodied and put in language and on stage. In this way, we propose the development of a political self-exhibition of the bodies in documentary, which, from the exercise of self-representation, inserts these works into current feminist political practice.
  PubDate: 2022-12-20
  DOI: 10.5195/ct/2022.577
  Issue No: Vol. 10, No. 19 (2022)
Que su rostro cubra el horizonte (Delight Lab, 2018). The Image-Body as an
Interruption of Urban Space
- Authors: Tania Haydeé Medalla Contreras
  Pages: 245 - 263
  Abstract: This article explores the relationship between body and image, through the analysis of the light projection Que su rostro cubra el horizonte (2018), by the chilean art collective Delight Lab, on November 15th, 2018. This intervention is inserted in a field of contemporary photographic practices that manifest as performances. Considering the above, this article proposes to think about the relationship between the photographic image and performance practices, not only as a means of recording and circulating these actions, but also as a way of appearing the body, articulated through the reflection on the resources that, from the embodiment of the photograph, allow its displacement and the rupture of its two-dimensional format. By examining the works Huincha sin fin, by Luz Donoso, and Obra Abierta, by Hernán Parada as precedents, and the light intervention of Delight Lab, this article will outline the relationship between the trajectory of the resources of activisms, the displacement of photographic materiality, and the drifts of the body as a resource for political-aesthetic questioning, through the figure of interruption, which disrupts the experience of the city and bursts into the mechanisms of the image and the dominant gaze.
  PubDate: 2022-12-20
  DOI: 10.5195/ct/2022.579
  Issue No: Vol. 10, No. 19 (2022)
When Words Are no Longer Enough: Two Forms of Face-to-Face in
Post-Dictatorial Chile
- Authors: Alia Trabucco Zerán
  Pages: 264 - 286
  Abstract: This paper examines two face-to-face encounters during the Chilean post-dictatorship: the “cueca sola” as a way of facing the disappeared, and the confrontation of Francisco Cuadrado Prats with the corpse of Augusto Pinochet, as an encounter with the face of the dictatorship. I examine the centrality of the face in ethical relationships, and analyze these performances and their connection to silencing, in the “cueca sola”, and to spitting as a mute but significant act when words are no longer enough.
  PubDate: 2022-12-20
  DOI: 10.5195/ct/2022.574
  Issue No: Vol. 10, No. 19 (2022)
The Return to Life: Ethics of Resurrection in La Condenación o Jeremías
aún no ha muerto de SIDA by José Vicente de Santis, No dejes escapar la
ira by Miguel Ángel Fraga, and Un año sin amor. Diario del Sida by Pablo
Pérez
- Authors: Mirta Suquet
  Pages: 287 - 320
  Abstract: This paper focuses on three authors who have narrated their experiences of living with HIV: the Venezuelan José Vicente de Santis, the Cuban Miguel Ángel Fraga, and the Argentine Pablo Pérez. These authors have experienced their illnesses at different times in the 1990s and in other cultural contexts. Therefore, their experiences regarding access to the medication and social perceptions of the disease are also different. However, the three writers have in common the struggle for survival and the deployment of an ethic of resurrection. The article analyzes how HIV-positive people have narrated their permanence in their communities in the first person. How do these authors think of themselves as social subjects after being considered by family and society as dying' The works that the article examines become both esthetic and ethical challenges that raise questions about how to live and narrate the experience of having HIV and engage the reader with questions about how to normalize this disease and reintroduce survivors in social spaces.
  PubDate: 2022-12-20
  DOI: 10.5195/ct/2022.549
  Issue No: Vol. 10, No. 19 (2022)
Paul Groussac: a Fragmentary Critique of Argentine Authors
- Authors: Alejandro Eduardo Romagnoli
  Pages: 321 - 361
  Abstract: Although Paul Groussac was suspicious of the quality of Argentine literature, since, like American literature in general, he considered it to be a mere copy of European literature, he did not cease to write about particular authors. Here we propose to gather and analyse his interventions, which are not few, dedicated to three authors: Juan B. Alberdi, Esteban Echeverría and Domingo F. Sarmiento. An exhaustive archival work is carried out, which allows us to recover not only the original versions of articles later collected, with modifications, in a book, but also unpublished works and others that until now had never been studied (an early article dedicated to Alberdi, which Groussac published in 1874 in the Tucuman newspaper La Razón, is included as an appendix). Two elements present in general in Groussac's work –his assessment of the (lack of) originality in American literature; his critical style consisting in pursuing, and sometimes in making coincide, in the same aesthetic judgement, praise and censure– are taken as axes to approach the specific operations he deploys in the reading of each of these three authors of the generation of 1837, to the extent that these recurrent themes run through the particular approaches and determine them.
  PubDate: 2022-12-20
  DOI: 10.5195/ct/2022.552
  Issue No: Vol. 10, No. 19 (2022)
Hugged Sisters: Philosophy and Literature in the Professionalisation of
the Argentine Philosophical Studies
- Authors: Natalia Bustelo
  Pages: 362 - 386
  Abstract: The article analyzes the way in which the so-called "antipositivist reaction" was deployed in the Argentine philosophical field at the beginning of the twentieth century and its relationship with the politicization and professionalization of philosophy. The paper reconstructs the controversy over the definition of philosophy established by the group of young people who in 1917 founded in Buenos Aires the Colegio Novecentista and the Cuadernos (1917-1919) with whom they defended socialist scientism and met around the Journal of Philosophy and its director José Ingenieros. Inscribed in intellectual history, this reconstruction attends to the history of the book and the edition to illuminate the material channels that made possible the circulation of the antipositivist reaction and offers new information about the initial trajectory of intellectuals who were relevant both in the philosophical and literary field of twentieth-century Argentina.
  PubDate: 2022-12-20
  DOI: 10.5195/ct/2022.554
  Issue No: Vol. 10, No. 19 (2022)
Anachronism of History. Alan Pauls and his Stories of Crying, Hair and
Money
- Authors: Emiliano Rodríguez Montiel
  Pages: 387 - 423
  Abstract: This paper aims to explore and analyze the set of theoretical and formal decisions that Alan Pauls takes to address the problem of the 70 Argentines in his political trilogy: Historia del llanto, Historia del pelo and Historia del dinero. My hypothesis, which arises from the question of the importance of addressing this issue in a context marked by different memorialist narrative policies, is that Pauls' stories make up an anachronistic way of approaching the recent past. An anti-memorialist and anti-denuncialist way that shows the strength of the absent generation. What is involved, with this, is remembering with literature.
  PubDate: 2022-12-20
  DOI: 10.5195/ct/2022.551
  Issue No: Vol. 10, No. 19 (2022)
From Miracle to Montage: The Interpreter Figure in the Narratives of Latin
American Travelers to the New China
- Authors: José Chávarry
  Pages: 424 - 451
  Abstract: This article analyses the role of the figure of the language interpreter in Latin American travel writing on the People’s Republic of China during the 1950s and 1960s, early decades of cultural diplomacy efforts between these regions. Through an examination of the crónica China 6 a.m. (1954), by Colombian anthropologist and writer Manuel Zapata Olivella, and the novel Los ojos de bambú (1964), by Chilean novelist Mercedes Valdivieso, this article argues that the interpreter figure, far from an invisible conduit of information, played a significant role in how Latin American travelers experienced the Chinese Revolution and negotiated their ideals of individual and collective transformation. Through the analysis of the interpretation act as an embodied, affective experience, beyond a sole cognitive transfer of meaning, Zapata and Valdivieso’s texts shed light both on the PRC’s mechanisms of soft power in Cold War geopolitical struggles, as well as the travelers’ aesthetic and political pursuits in a global context of revolution.
  PubDate: 2022-12-20
  DOI: 10.5195/ct/2022.568
  Issue No: Vol. 10, No. 19 (2022)
Review. Mónica Barrientos Olivares. Valoración Múltiple sobre la obra
de Diamela Eltit, edición al cuidado de Mónica Barrientos. Editorial
Casa de las Américas, 2021
- Authors: Cherie Zalaquett
  Pages: 452 - 460
  Abstract: Review
  PubDate: 2022-12-20
  DOI: 10.5195/ct/2022.587
  Issue No: Vol. 10, No. 19 (2022)