Presentation

This issue of Letras de Hoje, dedicated to literature in Spanish language, is the result of collaboration between the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul-PUCRS and the University of Vigo (Spain), through the graduate program in Letters, area of concentration in Literature Theory and the Department of Literary Studies, respectively. The call of this number invited researchers and scholars interested in the narrative genre in Spanish to reflect upon long narratives (novels) or short narratives (short stories and/or micro-reports), to revisit this literary universe by considering theoretical approaches that are both differentiated and open to the analysis of the productions of the 19^th to the 21^st century.

Given the invitation, the authors of the texts presented herein include works (novels and short stories) of writers from different countries. Each text brings to light analyses that pervade significant questions involving human relations in the most diverse situations that literature, as its essence is art, allows the reader to reflect on this unique universe and, at the same time, multiple, which is life.

As a starting point, we present the text “Sociopolitical cartography of Venezuela: the novels of Miguel Otero Silva”, by Carmen Becerra. In it, the researcher focuses on the work of this Venezuelan author, whose reading makes it possible to perceive a portrait of Venezuelan reality of the 20th century, aiming to collaborate with the dissemination of the fictional narrative of this writer and journalist little known outside his native country. Following in the American context of the 20th century, with the aim of contributing to the diffusion of the literature, in this case, produced in Ecuador, the text “A look at the generation of the 1970s in Ecuador: Theory of disenchantment, Raú Pérez Torres” by Leonardo Monroy Zuluaga, presents an analysis of this novel with the purpose of knowing, through a hermeneutic reading of Schlegelian roots, some of the meanings suggested by the novel, among them, the questioning of Western theory through particular narrative strategies, the configuration of the city of Quito as spiritually alien space, disappointments against Marxism and counterculture in the 1970s.

Leaving the fictional production of America, going to the other side of the Atlantic, but following in an American atmosphere, the article “The colonies in the Galdosianos Episodes”, by Dolores Troncoso, turns to the work of Galdós to show how the reference to the colonies and their meaning for Spanish society of the 19^th century are present in the course of the Episodios nacionales. In addition, the article shows in detail its location and reflects on Galdós' critical view of the way in which his contemporaries and 18^th Spanish politicians perceived the colonies at the historical moment of the end of the Spanish colonial empire.

Continuing in the Latin American space between Uruguay and Argentina, is the essay “The cities of Juan Carlos Onetti”, by Iuri Almeida Müller, who analyzes the tales' On the south, Onetti, and “El sur”, by Jorge Luis Borges, aiming to understand how the displacement of the characters of these short stories explicitly addresses cultural and geographical issues regarding the modern city, specifically the city of Buenos Aires. In the same universe, now just in Argentina, the article “Appropriation in El Aleph engordado”, by Tatiana da Silva Capaverde, analyzes the appropriation made by the Argentine writer Pablo Katchadjan of the text “El Aleph”, by Jorge Luis Borges, in order to signal the practiced intertextuality and the resignification of the authorship provoked by the changes made. Still on Argentina, the text “All translators: the translator and literature in the work of Julio Cortázar, by Janaina de Azevedo Baladão, highlights the importance of the translation for the education of the writer Julio Cortazar, through the analysis of his own work, interviews, especially those awarded to Harss (2012), Prego Gadea (1985), González Bermejo (2002) and Picón Garfield (1996), and other critical and biographical texts, namely Herráez (2011), Goloboff (1998) and Maturo (2004). Remaining in this American space, now turned to Colombian literature, the article “Maria dos Prazeres e Noi: à la marge”, by Bethânia Martins Mariano, presents the reading of the short story “María dos Prazeres”, from the book Twelve Short Stories by Gabriel García Márquez, considering that the literature that flourishes in cultural underdevelopment acquires the national and universal consciousness, presenting a glance of the margin, moving away from the European traditions.

Following in America, now in Mexico, the article “Flavors and Loves in the Kitchen of Laura Esquivel”, by Jenison Alisson dos Santos and Ana Cristina Marinho Lúcio, addresses the novel “Like Water for Chocolate” by Laura Esquivel, analyzing, from an affective perspective, how the author uses gastronomic resources to recode and re-signify the expression of the characters' feelings as love, hatred, austerity and resentment. The article “Josefina Plá and the conformation of the Paraguayan short story: the desolation of belonging to two worlds” by Maria Josele Bucco Coelho, from the analysis of the short story “Sixty Lists” (1981), shows the transcultural / phagocytic power of Josefina Plá's narratives, at the same time as the violence engendered by coloniality in the cultural community of the South Atlantic.

Still in the American universe, including the European narrative, David García Cames' article “Goal and Memory: football in its narration in the Spanish language of the 21^st century”, analyzes a set of texts produced in the 21^st century, whose theme is football narrative, to expose main dynamics, works and authors, and to show how the short story and the novel coexist with hybrid forms situated between the essay and the fiction.

Also part of this issue of Letras de Hoje, the text “Las Revistas: fin de un proyecto?”, by Pablo Rocca, which revisits some moments in which textual production, authors, cultural assets and readers interrelated from journalism and the cultural journal (especially the literary one), taking as examples Latin American episodes, to point out proposals about the current possibilities taking into account the “empire of the Internet”. To close the present issue, joining both sides of the Ocean, is the fictional production “Jorge, Enrique, its personas”, by Reginaldo Pujol, uniting two names of the literature in Spanish language, Jorge Luis Borges and Enrique Vila-Matas, to reflect, in a narrative, possible interweaving between these authors, the question of authorship, the postmodern question of appropriation, of quotation, of echo.

Finally, we thank the contributors for their valuable contributions and challenge them to new and exciting proposals about fictional production in Spanish. This thank you goes also to the other colleagues who contributed to this issue, and especially to the colleagues at the University of Vigo, to whom I will be eternally grateful for the welcome and opportunity of the studies conducted there.

The Organizers

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  Oct-Dec 2017