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"LaGreca, Nancy"
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Erotic Mysticism
Modernismo, Latin America's first homegrown literary movement, has garnered critical attention for its political and social import during a time of intense nation building and efforts to propel the region into modernity. LaGreca'sErotic Mysticismexplores two dominant discourses of the period, Catholicism and positivism, which sought to categorize and delimit the desires and behaviors of the ideal citizen. These discourses, LaGreca argues, were powerful because each promised to allay the individual's existential fears. Yet the coexistence of these two competing ideologies, one atheist and one religious, sowed doubt and unease in the modern intellectual who sought an alternative mode of understanding the human condition. From these uncertainties sprang a seductively liberating mode of writing: non-theistic erotic mysticism. Through analysis of key essays and fiction of Carlos Diaz Dufoo (Mexico), Manuel Diaz Rodriguez (Venezuela), Jose Maria Rivas Groot (Colombia), Aurora Caceres (Peru), and Enrique Gomez Carrillo (Guatemala), LaGreca establishes erotic mysticism as a central philosophical substratum of the movement that anticipated the work of twentieth-century theorists such as William James and Georges Bataille. In modernista texts, the mystic's ecstatic state is achieved through a sublime erotic or sensual experience. The noetic mystical state expands one's consciousness, opening his or her mind to embrace diverse ways of loving and engaging. While science and religion sought to mold heteronormal and pragmatically useful citizens, modernista writers employed mystical discourse to transcend boundaries, opening readers' minds to alternative notions of sexuality, gender, desire, acceptance, and, ultimately, art.
eBook
Rewriting Womanhood
In Rewriting Womanhood , Nancy LaGreca explores the
subversive refigurings of womanhood in three novels by women
writers: La hija del bandido (1887) by Refugio Barragán de
Toscano (Mexico; 1846-1916), Blanca Sol (1888) by Mercedes
Cabello de Carbonera (Peru; 1845-1909), and Luz y sombra
(1903) by Ana Roqué (Puerto Rico; 1853-1933). While these women
were both acclaimed and critiqued in their day, they have been
largely overlooked by contemporary mainstream criticism. Detailed
enough for experts yet accessible to undergraduates, graduate
students, and the general reader, Rewriting Womanhood
provides ample historical context for understanding the key women's
issues of nineteenth-century Mexico, Peru, and Puerto Rico; clear
definitions of the psychoanalytic theories used to unearth the
rewriting of the female self; and in-depth literary analyses of the
feminine agency that Barragán, Cabello, and Roqué highlight in
their fiction.
Rewriting Womanhood reaffirms the value of three women
novelists who wished to broaden the ruling-class definition of
woman as mother and wife to include woman as
individual for a modern era. As such, it is an important
contribution to women's studies, nineteenth-century Hispanic
studies, and sexuality and gender studies.
eBook
Rewriting Womanhood
In Rewriting Womanhood, Nancy LaGreca explores the subversive refigurings of womanhood in three novels by women writers: La hija del bandido (1887) by Refugio Barragán de Toscano (Mexico; 1846–1916), Blanca Sol (1888) by Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera (Peru; 1845–1909), and Luz y sombra (1903) by Ana Roqué (Puerto Rico; 1853–1933). While these women were both acclaimed and critiqued in their day, they have been largely overlooked by contemporary mainstream criticism. Detailed enough for experts yet accessible to undergraduates, graduate students, and the general reader, Rewriting Womanhood provides ample historical context for understanding the key women’s issues of nineteenth-century Mexico, Peru, and Puerto Rico; clear definitions of the psychoanalytic theories used to unearth the rewriting of the female self; and in-depth literary analyses of the feminine agency that Barragán, Cabello, and Roqué highlight in their fiction. Rewriting Womanhood reaffirms the value of three women novelists who wished to broaden the ruling-class definition of woman as mother and wife to include woman as individual for a modern era. As such, it is an important contribution to women’s studies, nineteenth-century Hispanic studies, and sexuality and gender studies.
eBook
Intertextual Sexual Politics: Illness and Desire in Enrique Gómez Carrillo's Del amor, del dolor y del vicio and Aurora Cáceres's La rosa muerta
This study explores the intertextuality between Aurora Cáceres's La rosa muerta (1914) and the novel Del amor, del dolor y del vicio (1898) by her ex-husband, Enrique Gómez Carrillo. Cáceres strategically mentions Gómez Carrillo's novel in La rosa muerta to invite a reading of her work in dialogue with his. Both narratives follow the sexual awakening of an independently wealthy young widow, but exhibit important differences. Gómez Carrillo's sexually transgressive character closely follows the aesthetic and discursive norms oïfin de siècle literature that pathologized female desire. His fictional women are a literary and aesthetic experiment in female decadentism, one that he ultimately puts aside by marrying the characters by the end of the novel. Cáceres's narrative revises Gómez Carrillo's representations of female sexuality and modernista representations of women more broadly. I analyze Cáceres's writing of the female body, illness, and desire to demonstrate the ways in which Cáceres simultaneously critiques misogynistic discourses of the turn of the century and presents positive and realistic images of women's sexuality for future generations of women. La rosa muerta is a modernista novel that anticipates the emboldened attitude toward female eroticism and the provocative writing style of women writers of the avant-garde and the boom.
Journal Article
Decadence as a Progressive Force in Select Prose of Julián del Casal and Amado Nervo
Based on a reading of select prose by Julián del Casal and Amado Nervo, this article reveals a tendency in modernista fiction to invert notions of unhealthy modernista decadence and salubrious bourgeois morality. Literary texts include Casal’s “La cámara doble” (The Dual Chamber), “La última illusion” (The Last Hope), and selections from Cuentos amargos (Bitter Tales) and Historias amargas (Bitter Stories), all from 1890. We will also examine a selection of short prose by Nervo published in the Revista de América (Journal of America) before 1915. The narratives in question suggest that creativity depends on the pleasure and catharsis of decadence. Importantly, these writers posit that national discourses aimed at redirecting citizens away from their own instincts and toward a narrowly and externally defined heteronormative lifestyle, and that this project debilitated the individual, thereby affecting national progress. An examination of historical and literary discourses that sought to define the ideal citizen in opposition to modernista decadence roots the texts in a Latin American context. The thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, on the cleansing function of decadence, and Carl Jung, on health and wholeness, allow us to see the confluence between Casal’s and Nervo’s narratives and the international intellectual milieu that informed Latin American modernismo .
Journal Article
The Sublime Corpse in Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda's Women's Journal Album Cubano de lo Bueno y lo Bello (1860)
This article examines Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda's choice to include articles depicting the advanced decay of cadavers, which are simultaneously horrible and awesome, in her women's periodical Album Cubano de lo Bueno y lo Bello. Background on Avellaneda's biography, women's print culture, and theories of the sublime provide a frame for the analyses. The stories under consideration are \"Historia de un suicidio,\" by the Venezuelan Rafael Maria Baralt, which depicts the corpse of a young woman who took her own life, and \"Sueño y dolor\" by the Spanish poet Dolores Gómez de Cádiz de Velasco, a first-person mourning in prose of the writer's dead infant. The graphic yet aesthetically rendered descriptions of decaying flesh anticipate the new literary vocabulary of 1880s decadence in Latin America. I propose that Avellaneda-as-editor employs the articles depicting corpses to shock readers into identification with women's suffering in an unorthodox form of early feminist social critique.
Journal Article