Salvadoran writer Horacio Castellanos Moya offers a provocative example of postwar cynicism in his 1997 novel "El asco: Thomas Bernhard en San Salvador." By telling the story of Edgardo Vega, an emigrant who returns to El Salvador in the mid-1990s after living in Canada for eighteen years, "El asco" represents the mass exodus…

Ventura García Calderón (1886-1959) was a Peruvian man of letters and a diplomat who was at the center of the hispanophone community in Paris in the first half of the twentieth century. Known as a proponent of Spanish American literature, García Calderón achieved a global celebrity for his dramatic, colorful, and ironic short stories. These…

Cervantes's "novela" creates a complex protagonist due in part to the involvement of the slaves' destructive and creative energies: a linguistic and erotic paradox. Linguistically the female slave foregrounds the historical dichotomy between "ladinos" and "bozales" and the related problematic of conversion,…

In Marcela del Río's science fiction novel "Proceso a Faubritten," utopia comes in the form of eternal life for all of humanity, thanks to Dr. Alexander Faubritten's "Bomba L." This polyphonic work includes diaries by Faubritten and his Mexican lover, María Corona. In my analysis of these two diaries, I will show how…

"Atlas de Geografía Humana" constitutes a critique of the much vaunted notion of a progressive Spain that has rectified the gender inequalities of the Francoist era, as one of the highly educated and successful protagonists, Fran, unwittingly adopts her mother's alignment with patriarchal norms. This novel elucidates the…

The Spanish author Carmen Laforet is recognized almost exclusively for her first and seminal novel "Nada" published in 1945. However, her posthumous "Al volver la esquina" (2004), the last of her five novels, is an indispensable example of the author's achievement as a psychological novelist. Yet ten years following its…

Much of the limited scholarship dedicated to Sor Juana's "autos sacramentales" tends to separate them from the "loas" that were meant to introduce them. Critics often exalt the "loas" for the sympathy that they express for indigenous beliefs, while neglecting the "autos" or viewing them as masterful…

This essay reappropriates the segmentary form of the three works of Agustin Fernandez Mallo's "Nocilla" project ("Nocilla Dream" [2006]; "Nocilla Experience" [2008]; "Nocilla Lab" [2009]) en route to an urban reading of its fragmentary structure. The project's interdisciplinary push, overwhelming incorporation of both scientific and…

The article analyzes the portrayal of the male perpetrator of heterosexual domestic violence in a selection of contemporary Spanish texts (novel, drama, and autobiography) that form part of a clearly discernible cultural response to the issue of intimate partner violence in Spain today. It reads the figure of the abuser in conjunction with a range…

"La gran Cenobia" deals with the war between Queen Zenobia of Palmyra and the Emperor Aurelian. Calderon de la Barca draws most of his information from historical sources; the dramatist, however, changes history and adapts it to his own dramatic purpose. The theme of Fortune gives unity to the play. Aureliano is portrayed as a tyrant who, to prove…

This essay seeks to provide parallel and interchangeable approaches to teaching Ramon del Valle-Inclan's challenging play "Luces de bohemia". A greater understanding of the cultural and mental frameworks of the early twentieth-century Spanish spectator will permit students to penetrate the dense intertextuality that characterizes Valle's…

Courses in advanced placement (AP) Spanish language and AP Spanish literature are intended to provide students with college-level instruction comparable to a fifth- or sixth-semester conversation and composition experience and to a one-semester introduction to literature experience, respectively. In spite of clearly articulated college…

Interpreting the occurrence of sexual violation in seventeenth-century Spanish literary works necessitates for modem scholars the difficult task of understanding prevailing contemporary attitudes toward rape. Studies by Higgins and Silver, Casas, and Welles discuss how literary texts with rape scenes as narrative material often use the act or its…

Clara Janes's "Kampa" is a love song dedicated to the renowned Czech poet Vladimir Holan. The work includes a musical and lyrical composition performed on tape, and its unconventional musical mode offers an alternative to divisions between western and non-western literary and musical forms. The poetry of "Kampa" presents musical methods of…

Martin Gaite's only Franco-era play contests some fundamental Catholic and Francoist prescriptions for the female. The fact that it was not published or performed for nearly forty years is likely due at least in part to patriarchal censorship. The work dramatizes the personal development of two half-sisters who defy various gender norms and…