Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures

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  Clarice Lispector: From Brazil to the World

  Earl Fitz

  Clarice Lispector: From Brazil to the World explains why the Brazilian master was so transformative of modern Brazilian literature and why she has become such a celebrity in the world literature arena. This book also shows why Lispector is not one writer, as many think, but many writers. By offering close readings of her novels, stories, and nonfiction pieces, Earl E. Fitz shows the diverse sides of her literary world. Chapters cover Lispector’s devotion to language and its connection to identity; her political engagement; and her humor, eroticism, and struggle with the concept of God. The last chapter seeks to explain why this most singular of modern Brazilian writers commands such a passionate global following.

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  Warrior Women and Trans Warriors: Performing Masculinities in Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature

  Carolina Castellanos Gonella

  Latin American literature has depicted warrior woman and trans warrior characters in armed conflicts, but literary critics have not paid much attention to their empowerment. They also have critiqued these characters using traditional gender binary concepts or have viewed their access to power as evil or abnormal. Warrior Women and Trans Warriors: Performing Masculinities in Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature introduces a new perspective by analyzing how one trans warrior and two warrior women from three canonical novels contest traditional codes of behavior and appearance. It examines Pintada in the Mexican novel Los de abajo (1915); doña Bárbara in the Venezuelan novel Doña Bárbara (1929); and Diadorim in the Brazilian novel Grande sertão: veredas (1956). Warrior Women and Trans Warriors focuses on how these three characters challenge conventional norms and empower themselves by giving orders, using weapons, fighting, competing with other characters, exposing traditional gender ideologies, and transgressing sartorial gender rules. Drawing on trans theory, intersectionality, gender performance theory, and masculinities studies, this book argues that performing masculinities allow these characters to occupy the place of the most-desired position of their contexts.

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  Santé, intimité, et identité dans la bande dessinée autobiographique de tradition franco-belge

  Cynthia Laborde

  Santé, intimité, et identité dans la bande dessinée autobiographique de tradition franco-belge examines the ways different autobiographical comic books explore the theme of health, and its influence on identity construction. How do artists represent abstract feelings of pain? How do illnesses influence our sense of self? What is the role of others in our personal history? Our state of health, both physical and mental, has a profound effect on our identity, and how we perceive and tell stories about this dimension of our lives is crucial to forming a sense of self, particularly in a contemporary digitalized world that is now flooded with information and images once considered too private for public consumption. All the works studied exhibit a constant tension between the anxieties of revealing intimacy and vulnerability, and the desire to make suffering meaningful, which is a fundamental aspect of these authors’ quest to recover and to reconstitute a sense of self. Informed by the insights of intimacy studies, psychoanalysis, comics studies, and visual studies, this book shows how these works participate in the process of meaning-making, and how the comics genre allows them to do so in particularly inventive and contemporary ways.

  Le livre Santé, intimité, et identité dans la bande dessinée autobiographique de tradition franco-belge examine les différentes manières dont les bandes dessinées autobiographiques explorent le thème de la santé, et son influence sur la construction identitaire. Comment les artistes représentent-ils le sentiment abstrait de la douleur ? Comment la maladie influence-t-elle l’image que nous avons de nous-mêmes ? Quel est le rôle de l’autre dans notre histoire personnelle ? Notre état de santé, à la fois physique et mental, a un effet profond sur notre sens de l’identité, et la façon dont nous nous percevons et racontons des histoires sur cette dimension de nous-mêmes est cruciale à la formation du moi, particulièrement dans un monde qui est de nos jours inondé avec d’informations et d’images autrefois considérées trop privées pour être partagées publiquement. Toutes les œuvres étudiées dans ce livre montrent une tension constante entre les anxiétés de révéler son intimité et sa vulnérabilité, et le désir de trouver un sens à la souffrance endurée, qui est un aspect fondamental dans la quête des auteurs de se retrouver. Basé sur les théories des études sur la littérature intime, de la psychanalyse, et des études sur les bandes dessinées et l’art visuel, ce livre analyse la manière dont ces œuvres participent au processus de fabrication du sens, et comment la bande dessinée leur permet de réaliser cela de façon particulièrement inventive et contemporaine.

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  Marvelous Bodies: Italy's New Migrant Cinema

  Vetri Nathan

  Historically a source of emigrants to Northern Europe and the New World, Italy has rapidly become a preferred destination for immigrants from the global South. Life in the land of la dolce vita has not seemed so sweet recently, as Italy struggles with the cultural challenges caused by this surge in immigration. Marvelous Bodies by Vetri Nathan explores thirteen key full-length Italian films released between 1990 and 2010 that treat this remarkable moment of cultural role reversal through a plurality of styles. In it, Nathan argues that Italy sees itself as the quintessential internal Other of Western Europe, and that this subalternity directly influences its cinematic response to immigrants, Europe's external Others. In framing his case to understand Italy's cinematic response to immigrants, Nathan first explores some basic questions: Who exactly is the Other in Italy? Does Italy's own past partial alterity affect its present response to its newest subalterns? Drawing on Homi Bhabha's writings and Italian cinematic history, Nathan then posits the existence of marvelous bodies that are momentarily neither completely Italian nor completely immigrant. This ambivalence of forms extends to the films themselves, which tend to be generic hybrids. The persistent curious presence of marvelous bodies and a pervasive generic hybridity enact Italy's own chronic ambivalence that results from its presence at the cultural crossroads of the Mediterranean.

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  The Ripple Effect: Gender and Race in Brazilian Culture and Literature

  Maria José Somerlate Barbosa

  In The Ripple Effect: Gender and Race in Brazilian Culture and Literature, Barbosa adopts a comparative, multilayered, and interdisciplinary line of research to examine social values and cultural mores from the first decades of the twentieth century to the present. By analyzing the historical, cultural, religious, and interactive space of Brazil’s national identity, The Ripple Effect surveys expressive cultures and literary manifestations. It uses the martial art-dance-ritual capoeira as a lynchpin to disclose historical ambiguities and the negotiation of cultural and literary boundaries within the context of the ideological construct of a mestizo nation. The book also examines laws governing gender in Brazil and discusses honor killings and other types of violence against women. The Ripple Effect appraises the contributions that some iconic female figures have made to the development of Brazil’s distinctive cultural and literary production. Drawing on more than fifteen years of field, archival, and scholarly research, this work offers new interpretative venues, and broadens the critical focus and the methodological scope of previous scholarship. It reveals how literature and other arts can be used to document cultural norms, catalog life experiences, and analyze complex constructions of social values, ideas, and belief systems.

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  Fábula del Poder: Corporalidad, biopolítica y violencia en la narrativa de Sergio Ramírez

  Daniel Chávez Landeros

  A noncommissioned officer of the Nicaraguan National Guard travels to New York to meet the famous bodybuilder, Charles Atlas. When he approaches his hero, he finds a body pierced with syringes and tubes, a cyborg of fragile artificial life. In the garden of a Central American dictator’s mansion, a prisoner is locked in a cage next to a lion’s. Nature and animal instinct will take their course. In post-Sandinista Nicaragua, an amputee policeman must face—alone and wounded—a drug gang commanded by his former guerrilla leader. Despite the gravity and violence present in many of Sergio Ramírez Mercado’s short stories and novels, his writing is governed by irony and parody. Fábula del Poder proposes a novel critical assessment of the narrative work of Ramírez, who won the Cervantes Prize in 2017, emphasizing the mechanisms of representation and criticism of power in contemporary Latin American literature. In an entertaining and dynamic way, the book applies an interdisciplinary, theoretical approach, borrowing concepts from political theory, literary criticism, video games, visual culture, and sports, and reviews the contemporary historiography of Nicaragua and Latin America.

  Un suboficial de la Guardia Nacional de Nicaragua viaja a Nueva York para conocer al célebre fisicoculturista Charles Atlas. Cuando logra acercarse al héroe, encuentra un cuerpo traspasado de jeringas y mangueras, un cíborg de frágil vida artificial. En el jardín de la mansión de un dictador centroamericano, un prisionero es encerrado en la jaula contigua a la de un león. La naturaleza y el instinto animal seguirán su curso. En la Nicaragua post-sandinista, un policía amputado de una pierna debe enfrentar—solo y herido—a una banda de narcotraficantes comandada por su antiguo jefe guerrillero. A pesar de la gravedad y violencia de las historias contadas en muchos de los cuentos y las novelas de Sergio Ramírez Mercado, su obra está regida por la ironía y la parodia. Fábula del Poder propone una novedosa valoración crítica de la obra narrativa de Ramírez, quien recibió el Premio Cervantes en 2017, haciendo énfasis en los mecanismos de representación y crítica del poder en la literatura contemporánea de América Latina. De manera amena y dinámica el libro utiliza un marco teórico interdisciplinario y aplica conceptos de teoría política, crítica literaria, videojuegos, cultura visual y deportiva, y repasa la historiografía contemporánea de Nicaragua y América Latina.

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  Cartografías cosmopolitas: León de Greiff y la tradición literaria

  Marco Ramírez Rojas

  Cartografías cosmopolitas: León de Greiff y la tradición literaria analyzes the poetic works of this twentieth-century Colombian writer as a manifestation of cosmopolitanism, global cultural cartographies, and a self-fashioned poetic genealogy. Ramírez Rojas approaches de Greiff’s poems as cultural maps that reveal both a desire of connectivity with the world and a need for reorganizing the imaginary library of world literature. From a self-assumed position of eccentricity, de Greiff builds a network of global connections and disputes the binary division of cultural centers and peripheries, revendicating marginality as a productive condition. The study of this alternative cosmopolitanism brings de Greiff’s writings into current debates about Latin America’s cultural positionality within the frame of global cultural networks and world literature.

  Cartografías cosmopolitas: León de Greiff y la tradición literaria analiza la obra de este poeta colombiano del siglo XX como una manifestación de cosmopolitismo, cartografías culturales globales y la construcción de una genealogía poética. Ramírez Rojas se acerca a los poemas de León de Greiff como mapas culturales que revelan tanto un deseo de conexión con el mundo como una necesidad de reorganizar el archivo imaginario de la literatura mundial. Desde una asumida posición de excentricidad, de Greiff construye una red de conexiones globales y pone en cuestión las divisiones binarias de centro y periferia, reivindicando así su marginalidad como una condición productiva. El estudio de este cosmopolitismo alternativo contextualiza los textos de León de Greiff en los debates actuales sobre el posicionamiento de América Latina dentro de las redes de cultura global y de la literatura mundial.

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  Everyday Consumption in Twenty-First-Century Brazilian Fiction

  Lígia Bezerra

  Everyday Consumption in Twenty-First-Century Brazilian Fiction is the first in-depth study to map out the representation of consumption in contemporary Brazilian prose, highlighting how our interactions with commodities connect seemingly disconnected areas of everyday life, such as eating habits, the growth of prosperity theology, and ideas of success and failure. It is also the first text to provide a pluralistic perspective on the representation of consumption in this fiction that moves beyond the concern with aesthetic judgment of culture based on binaries such as good/bad or elevated/degraded that have largely informed criticism on this body of literary work. Current Brazilian fiction provides a variety of perspectives from which to think about our daily interactions with commodities and about how consumption affects us all in subtle ways. Collectively, the narratives analyzed in the book present a wide spectrum of more or less hopeful portrayals of existence in consumer culture, from totalizing dystopia to transformative hope.

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  Song of Exile: A Cultural History of Brazil’s Most Popular Poem, 1846–2018

  Joshua Alma Enslen

  Song of Exile: A Cultural History of Brazil’s Most Popular Poem, 1846–2018 is the first comprehensive study of the influence of Antônio Gonçalves Dias’s “Canção do exílio.” Written in Coimbra, Portugal, in 1843 by a homesick student longing for Brazil, “Song of Exile” has inspired thousands of parodies and pastiches, and new variations continue to appear to this day. Every generation of Brazilian writers has adapted the poem’s Romantic verses to glorify the wonders of the nation or to criticize it via parody, exposing a litany of issues that have plagued the country’s progress over the years. Based on a core of five hundred texts painstakingly gathered over a five-year span, this book catalogs the networks of the poem’s reinvention as pastiche and parody in Brazilian print culture from nineteenth-century periodicals to new media. Mapping the reoccurrences of the original’s keywords and phrases over time, the book uncovers how the poem has been used by successive generations to write and rewrite the nation’s history. This process of reinvention has guaranteed the permanency of “Song of Exile” in Brazilian culture, making it not only the nation’s most popular poem, but one of the most imitated in the world.

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  Las ciudades del deseo: Las políticas de género, sexualidad y espacio urbano en el Caribe hispano

  Elena Valdez

  Las ciudades del deseo explores the representations of gender, sexuality, and urban space in contemporary narratives from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. By examining a corpus of novels published since 2000, this book shows how the changes in urban landscape create a new image of the city that destroys traditional gender roles and produces different discourses on sexuality. At moments of crisis in political agendas that took place between 1990 and 2000, queer subjects became spokespeople outlining new national projects on each island, while claiming space in the national imaginary. The nation is no longer built on blood ties, patriarchal norms, or biological procreation, but rather starts incorporating previously excluded racial identities and sexual practices. By juxtaposing the narratives of the three countries and putting into dialogue the topics of nationality, sexuality, urban space, and sex tourism, Las ciudades del deseo breaks away from a tradition that tends to study them separately. The book contributes new perspectives on an emerging culture of resistance to heteronormative dynamics and power structures that is developing simultaneously in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. It sheds light on larger connections between literature and LGBTQ activism in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean.

  Las ciudades del deseo explora las representaciones del género, la sexualidad y el espacio urbano en la narrativa contemporánea de Cuba, la República Dominicana y Puerto Rico. Aportando un análisis de varias novelas publicadas después de 2000, el libro muestra cómo los cambios del paisaje urbano crean una imagen nueva de la ciudad que destruye roles de género tradicionales y produce múltiples discursos de sexualidad. Durante la crisis de las agendas políticas que sucede en 1990–2000 los sujetos queer esbozan nuevos proyectos nacionales en cada isla. La familia como metáfora de la nación deja de basarse en los lazos de sangre, normas patriarcales y procreación biológica. En cambio, empieza a incorporar identidades raciales y prácticas sexuales. Yuxtaponiendo las narrativas de los tres países y poniendo en diálogos los temas de la nación, la sexualidad, el espacio urbano y el turismo sexual, Las ciudades del deseo rompe con una tradición que tiende a explorarlos por separado. El libro contribuye a una perspectiva nueva de la emergente cultura de resistencia contra las dinámicas heteronormativas y estructuras de poder que se está desarrollando simultáneamente en los tres países y establece conexiones extensas entre la literatura y el activismo LGBTQ en el Caribe hispano.

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  Arteletra: The Sixties in Latin America and the Politics of Going Unnoticed

  Jason A. Bartles

  ArteletrA analyzes the Sixties in Latin America in order to revisit the core claim of literary and cultural studies to political relevancy in the contemporary world: the task of making visible the invisible. Though visibility can secure rights for the disenfranchised, it also risks subjecting them to the biopolitical and capitalist arrangements of space. What is at stake in this book is a series of aesthetic and ethical tools for engaging in politics—defined here as the potential to disagree—without first passing through visibility. These tools cohere around a practice Bartles calls “the politics of going unnoticed,” which he derives from an archive of three noteworthy, though under-appreciated, authors who wrote during the Sixties: Calvert Casey (1924–69), Juan Filloy (1894–2000), and Armonía Somers (1914–94). For the first time ever, Casey, Filloy, and Somers are put in dialogue with one another to further demonstrate the unique contributions of Latin American writers to contemporary debates about the crossroads of literatures and politics. What unites them is their shared investment in stories about those who go unnoticed. As a practice, going unnoticed creates space and opportunities for queer, rural, and female subjects, among others, to step back from unjust institutions. As a political discourse, going unnoticed deactivates the binary structures of biopolitics (e.g., visible/invisible, pure/filthy, friend/enemy) that divide humans from one another in the service of power and economic inequality. Though the politics of going unnoticed was ignored during the Sixties for its apparent individualism, these three writers work through alternatives to the politics of visibility that has animated political discourse on the left for the last half-century. More than a self-interested critique, going unnoticed opens new possibilities for engaging in the messy business of politics while imagining and creating better communities.

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  Paroimia: Brusantino, Florio, Sarnelli, and Italian Proverbs From the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

  Daniela D’Eugenio

  Proverbs constitute a rich archive of historical, cultural, and linguistic significance that affect genres and linguistics codes. They circulate through writers, texts, and communities in a process that ultimately results in modifications in their structure and meanings. Hence, context plays a crucial role in defining proverbs as well as in determining their interpretation. Vincenzo Brusantino’s Le cento novella (1554), John Florio’s Firste Fruites (1578) and Second Frutes (1591), and Pompeo Sarnelli’s Posilecheata (1684) offer clear representations of how traditional wisdom and communal knowledge reflect the authors’ personal perspectives on society, culture, and literature. The analysis of the three authors’ proverbs through comparisons with classical, medieval, and early modern collections of maxims and sententiae provides insights on the fluidity of such expressions, and illustrates the tight relationship between proverbs and sociocultural factors. Brusantino’s proverbs introduce ethical interpretations to the one hundred novellas of Boccaccio’s The Decameron, which he rewrites in octaves of hendecasyllables. His text appeals to Counter-Reformation society and its demand for a comprehensible and immediately applicable morality. In Florio’s two bilingual manuals, proverbs fulfill a need for language education in Elizabethan England through authentic and communicative instruction. Florio manipulates the proverbs’ vocabulary and syntax to fit the context of his dialogues, best demonstrating the value of learning Italian in a foreign country. Sarnelli’s proverbs exemplify the inherent creative and expressive potentialities of the Neapolitan dialect vis-à-vis languages with a more robust literary tradition. As moral maxims, ironic assessments, or witty insertions, these proverbs characterize the Neapolitan community in which the fables take place.

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  Cantidades hechizadas y silogísticas del sobresalto: La secreta ciencia de José Lezama Lima

  Ómar Vargas

  Arguably the most important Cuban writer of the twentieth century, José Lezama Lima (1910–1976) is well-known as a poet, essayist, cultural promoter, and novelist, but not as a scientist. In fact, there is no evidence of any concrete relationship between him and any pure science discipline. How then it is possible to establish connections between Lezama’s literary works and the disciplines of science? How are certain scientific discoveries and developments, such as the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, modern logic, thermodynamics, or the big bang theory, embraced in the cultural imaginary of Cuba during the first half of the twentieth century? And finally, how do those scientific discoveries and developments inform Lezama’s aesthetic production?

  Grounded in his disciplinary experience in both literary and mathematical studies, Vargas attempts to unearth the overlaps and connections between science and art, thus offering a new critical apparatus with which scholars can study Lezama’s works. In this book, he provides a close reading of Lezama´s narrative works, including his two novels—Paradiso and Oppiano Licario—as well as Lezama’s essays, press articles, and interviews. The author also examines the catalog of Lezama´s personal library, revealing that his poetics are based on an original and fascinating appropriation of concepts, problems, solutions, and rhetorical devices in science.

  Probablemente el escritor Cubano más importante del siglo XX, José Lezama Lima (1910–1976) es reconocido como poeta, ensayista, promotor cultural, y novelista, pero no por su relación con alguna disciplina de las ciencias puras. ¿Cómo es posible entonces establecer algún tipo de asociación entre el pensamiento y la obra de Lezama con disciplinas científicas? ¿Cómo se registran en el imaginario cultural de la Cuba de la primera mitad del siglo XX ciertos descubrimientos y desarrollos científicos como la teoría de la relatividad, la mecánica cuántica, la lógica moderna, la termodinámica, o la teoría del big bang? Y finalmente, ¿quedan registrados esos descubrimientos y desarrollos científicos en la producción estética de Lezama?

  Apoyado en la perspectiva que le brinda su formación académica tanto en matemáticas como en estudios literarios, Vargas intenta resolver estos interrogantes. Una lectura detallada de la obra narrativa del autor cubano, incluyendo sus dos novelas—Paradiso y Oppiano Licario—y de gran parte de sus ensayos, artículos de prensa y entrevistas concedidas por él, así como un examen cuidadoso de lo que sobrevivió de su biblioteca personal, muestran que la propuesta poética de Lezama está sustentada sobre una fascinante y original apropiación de conceptos, problemas, soluciones, y características retóricas del quehacer científico.

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  Don Quixote and Catholicism

  Michael McGrath

  Four hundred years since its publication, Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote continues to inspire and to challenge its readers. The universal and timeless appeal of the novel, however, has distanced its hero from its author and its author from his own life and the time in which he lived. The discussion of the novel’s Catholic identity, therefore, is based on a reading that returns Cervantes’s hero to Cervantes’s text and Cervantes to the events that most shaped his life. The authors and texts McGrath cites, as well as his arguments and interpretations, are mediated by his religious sensibility. Consequently, he proposes that his study represents one way of interpreting Don Quixote and acts as a complement to other approaches. It is McGrath’s assertion that the religiosity and spirituality of Cervantes’s masterpiece illustrate that Don Quixote is inseparable from the teachings of Catholic orthodoxy. Furthermore, he argues that Cervantes’s spirituality is as diverse as early modern Catholicism. McGrath does not believe that the novel is primarily a religious or even a serious text, and he considers his arguments through the lens of Cervantine irony, satire, and multiperspectivism. As a Roman Catholic who is a Hispanist, McGrath proposes to reclaim Cervantes’s Catholicity from the interpretive tradition that ascribes a predominantly Erasmian reading of the novel. When the totality of biographical and sociohistorical events and influences that shaped Cervantes’s religiosity are considered, the result is a new appreciation of the novel’s moral didactic and spiritual orientation.

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  Neorrealismo y cine en Cuba: Historia y discurso en torno a la primera polémica de la Revolución, 1951–1962

  Anastasia Valecce

  Neorrealismo y cine en Cuba: Historia y discurso entorno a la primera polémica de la Revolución, 1951-1962 examina la historia estética y las relaciones entre la producción cinematográfica cubana y el neorrealismo italiano. El recorrido histórico comienza en 1951, antes del triunfo de la Revolución, y termina en 1962, año que marca la ruptura entre los cineastas cubanos y la estética neorrealista italiana. Las colaboraciones principales sucedieron entre los directores de cine Tomás Gutiérrez Alea y Julio García Espinosa y el cineasta neorrealista italiano Cesare Zavattini. Las circunstancias que llevaron al fin de las relaciones entre Zavattini y los cineastas cubanos están conectadas a la película El joven rebelde, dirigida por García Espinosa y estrenada por primera vez en 1961. La ruptura se dio por divergencias creativas e ideológicas sobre la manera en que se quería retratar al protagonista del largometraje. Este detalle, que aparentemente puede parecer de menor importancia, tuvo repercusiones importantes que llevaron a un distanciamiento de García Espinosa, de Gutiérrez Alea, así como del resto de los cineastas cubanos que estaban trabajando en el Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC) a partir de 1959, para buscar sus propias estrategias creativas con el fin de moldear una producción cinematográfica nacional. Sin embargo, cabe señalar que los cineastas cubanos no habrían encontrado la gramática necesaria para reescribir su cine revolucionario sin las colaboraciones y sobre todo sin la ruptura con Zavattini. Este nuevo lenguaje cinematográfico no habría podido existir sin las varias pausas y distancias que caracterizaron la relación cubana con el neorrealismo. En otras palabras, el intercambio fragmentado entre García Espinosa, Gutiérrez Alea y Zavattini creó nuevos espacios dentro de los cuales los cubanos pudieron encontrar oportunidades creativas para expresar su propia visión cinematográfica.

  Neorrealismo y cine en Cuba: Historia y discurso entorno a la primera polémica de la Revolución, 1951–1962 [Neorealism and Cinema in Cuba: History and Discourse on the First Polemic of the Revolution, 1951–1962] examines the aesthetic history and relations between Cuban film production and Italian Neorealism. The historical framework begins in 1951 before the triumph of the Cuban Revolution and ends in 1962, a year that marks a rupture between Cuban filmmakers and the Italian neorealist aesthetic. The main collaborations happened between Cuban directors Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Julio García Espinosa and Italian neorealist filmmaker Cesare Zavattini. The circumstances that led to the end of the relationship between Zavattini and the Cuban filmmakers are connected to the film El joven rebelde [The Young Rebel], directed by García Espinosa and screened for the first time in 1961. The rupture centered on creative and ideological differences regarding the way in which the protagonist was to be portrayed in the movie. This seemingly minor disagreement had considerably larger repercussions, the end result of which was that García Espinosa and Gutiérrez Alea, as well as the rest of the Cuban filmmakers who worked within the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC) after 1959, were driven to find their own creative strategies to craft a national film production. However, the Cuban filmmakers would not have found the necessary grammar to rewrite their own revolutionary cinema without the rupture with Zavattini. This new cinematographic language could not have existed without the various pauses and the distances that characterized the Cuban relationship with Neorealism. In other words, the fragmentary interchange between García Espinosa, Gutierrez Alea, and Zavattini created new spaces in which the Cubans could find creative opportunities to express their own cinematic vision.

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  Being Portuguese in Spanish: Reimagining Early Modern Iberian Literature, 1580–1640

  Jonathan William Wade

  Among the many consequences of Spain’s annexation of Portugal from 1580 to 1640 was an increase in the number of Portuguese authors writing in Spanish. One can trace this practice as far back as the medieval period, although it was through Gil Vicente, Jorge de Montemayor, and others that Spanish-language texts entered the mainstream of literary expression in Portugal. Proficiency in both languages gave Portuguese authors increased mobility throughout the empire. For those with literary aspirations, Spanish offered more opportunities to publish and greater readership, which may be why it is nearly impossible to find a Portuguese author who did not participate in this trend during the dual monarchy.

  Over the centuries these authors and their works have been erroneously defined in terms of economic opportunism, questions of language loyalty, and other reductive categories. Within this large group, however, is a subcategory of authors who used their writings in Spanish to imagine, explore, and celebrate their Portuguese heritage. Manuel de Faria e Sousa, Ângela de Azevedo, Jacinto Cordeiro, António de Sousa de Macedo, and Violante do Céu, among many others, offer a uniform yet complex answer to what it means to be from Portugal, constructing and claiming their Portuguese identity from within a Castilianized existence. Whereas all texts produced in Iberia during the early modern period reflect the distinct social, political, and cultural realities sweeping across the peninsula to some degree, Portuguese literature written in Spanish offers a unique vantage point from which to see these converging landscapes. Being Portuguese in Spanish explores the cultural cross-pollination that defined the era and reappraises a body of works that uniquely addresses the intersection of language, literature, politics, and identity.

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  Le personnel est politique: Médias, esthétique et politique de l'autofiction chez Christine Angot, Chloé Delaume et Nelly Arcan

  Mercédès Baillargeon

  Regardant les questions de témoignage, de confession, de traumatisme, de sexualité et de violence dans les œuvres (semi-)autobiographiques, ce livre explore la co-construction d’identités personnelles et collectives par des femmes écrivains à l’ère des médias et de l’autoreprésentation. À une époque où la littérature française est souvent accusée d'être égocentrique et trop narcissique, Mercédès Baillargeon avance que l’autofiction des femmes a été reçue avec controverse depuis le tournant du millénaire parce qu’elle perturbe les idées reçues à propos des identités nationale, de genre et de race, et parce qu’elle questionne la distinction entre fiction et autobiographie. En effet, ces écrivaines se distinguent du reste de la production française actuelle, car elles cultivent une relation particulièrement tumultueuse avec leur public, à cause de la nature très personnelle, mais également politique de leurs textes semi-autobiographiques et à cause de leurs « performances » comme personnalité publique dans les médias. On y examine donc simultanément la façon dont les médias stigmatisent ces écrivaines ainsi que la manière dont ces dernières manipulent la culture médiatique comme une extension de leur œuvre littéraire. Ce livre analyse ainsi simultanément les implications textuelles et sociopolitiques qui sous-tendent la (dé)construction du sujet autofictionnel, et en particulier la façon dont ces écrivains se redéfinissent constamment à travers la performance rendue possible par les médias et la technologie. De plus, ce travail soulève des questions importantes par rapport à la relation complexe qu’entretiennent les médias avec les femmes écrivains, en particulier celles qui discutent ouvertement de traumatisme, de sexualité et de violence, et qui remettent également en question la distinction entre réalité et fiction. Cet ouvrage contribue à une meilleure compréhension des rapports de pouvoir mis en jeu dans l’autofiction, tant au niveau de la production que de la réception des œuvres. Privilégiant l’autofiction comme phénomène principalement français, cet ouvrage s’intéresse à la valeur politique de ce genre semi-autobiographique par-delà sa mort annoncée avec la disparition de la littérature engagée de l’après-guerre et des avant-gardes des années 50-60, dans le contexte français et francophone actuel, traversé par une crise des identités, le multiculturalisme et une redéfinition du nationalisme à travers l’écriture.

  Looking at questions of testimony, confession, trauma, sexuality, and violence in (semi-) autobiographical works, this book explores the co-construction of personal and collective identities by women writers in the age of self-disclosure and mass media. In a time when literature is accused of being self-centered and overly narcissistic, women’s autofiction in France since the turn of the millennium has been received with controversy because it disrupts readily accepted ideas about personal and national identities, gender and race, and fiction versus autobiography. Through the study of polemical writers Christine Angot, Chloé Delaume, and Nelly Arcan, Mercédès Baillargeon contends that, by recounting personal stories of trauma and sexuality, and thus opposing themselves in opposition to social convention, and by refusing to dispel doubts regarding the fictional or factual nature of their texts, autofiction resists and helps redefine categories of literary genre and gender identity. This book analyzes concurrently the textual and sociopolitical implications that underlie the (de)construction of the autofictional subject, and particularly how these writers constantly redefine themselves through performance and self-fashioning made possible by media and technology. Moreover, this work raises important questions relating to the media’s complicated relationship with women writers, especially those who discuss themes of trauma, sexuality, and violence, and who also question the distinction between fact and fiction. Proposing a new understanding of autofiction as a form of littérature engagée, this work contributes to a broader understanding of the French publishing establishment and of the literary field as a cultural institution, as well as new insight on shifting notions of identity, the Self, and nationalism in today’s ever-changing and multicultural French context.

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  Galápagos: Imaginarios de la evolución textual en las islas encantadas

  Esteban Mayorga

  Este libro intenta mostrar la representación textual de las islas Galápagos desde su descubrimiento hasta nuestros días. El argumento principal sugiere que la descripción de este espacio crucial para la modernidad, dada la retórica de los escritores de viajes y ficción, transforma el área insular para concebir formas alternativas del proyecto de construcción nacional en América Latina. Como resultado de las empresas coloniales, excursiones científicas, crónicas periodísticas o expediciones, la escritura de viaje de las Galápagos condiciona la formación del estado y su imaginario nacional. Esto ocurre por el capital simbólico que posee archipiélago y por el deseo de los intelectuales latinoamericanos de pertenecer a un territorio cosmopolita.

  El espacio insular funciona como un significante vacío donde los viajeros pueden comunicar su propio significado al narrar las experiencias de sus viajes. Este fenómeno crea una división conceptual y política entre la identidad de las islas y la nación ecuatoriana. Dichas ambigüedades narrativas crearon una ruptura que condujo a variaciones fundamentales en la forma en que los habitantes locales y entidades extranjeras interpretan las Galápagos hoy en día, ya que su literatura refleja una tensión particular de cara a las tendencias migratorias en las islas, así como los intereses globales que prevalecen en la apropiación del espacio.

  This book, written in Spanish, takes a literary and cultural studies model to explain the textual representation of the Galápagos Islands since their discovery until present day. The main argument suggests that the depiction of this crucial space for modernity in Western thought, given the rhetoric of travel and fiction writers, transforms the insular area with the intention of conceiving disparate forms of political displacement. Specifically, these depictions show several conflicts that arose from the seeking of identity in Ecuador during the nation-building project that took place at the time. As a result of colonial enterprises (scientific excursions, exile, tourism, journalistic pieces, expeditions, etc.), travel writings of the Galápagos condition the formation of the state and its national imagery because of the extreme symbolic capital of the archipelago and the desire of Latin American intellectuals to belong to a cosmopolitan territory.

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  Propuestas par (re)construir una nación: El teatro de Emilia Pardo Bazán

  Margot Versteeg

  Propuestas para (re)construir una nación explores how Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851–1921) imagines and engenders the Spanish nation in her theatrical production staged and/or published between 1898 and 1909. In the aftermath of Spain’s colonial losses, when Spain’s male authors, in a growing mood of collective introspection, directed their attention to the homeland, Pardo Bazán generated a series of theatrical proposals to revitalize the nation. In her plays, she manifests her ideas about Spain’s fin de siècle crisis, reflects on Spain’s place in the international arena (emphasizing the nation’s civilizing mission), critiques the intoxicating power of the so-called golden legend (Spain’s glorious past), and sees the origin of the nation’s hardship in the lack of education of its inhabitants and in the inequality between men and women.

  Pardo Bazán’s vision of Spain is forward looking, and she imagines a future in which new social configurations will be possible. Instead of locating her plays in an ancestral Castile, she situates several of her works in her native Galicia. For the author, Spain’s regional issues are inseparable from the country’s national issues and these can all be traced back to the woman question. The playwright appeals to the spectators/readers’ reason and emotions in order to let them think and feel that the problems the nation faces can all be attributed to the Spanish men. For Pardo Bazán, Spain’s potential for national regeneration resides in the inner strength of women.

  In cross-fire with the main male players in the literary field of her time, Pardo Bazán offers her critique of national decadence in plays that cleverly subvert a broad range of by then outdated theatrical conventions, and that introduce the public to new currents of theatrical innovation (Ibsen, Maeterlinck, d’Annunzio).

  Propuestas offers a new perspective on the participation of female authors in the contentious debate about the Spanish nation. Pardo Bazán’s theater is an overlooked area in the author’s extensive creative production, and Propuestas challenges the so often repeated topic of the backwardness of the Spanish stage and the alleged lack of innovation during the fin de siècle.

  Propuestas para (re)construir una nación explora cómo Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851–1921) imagina y engendra la nación española en su producción teatral finisecular que vio la luz entre 1898 y 1909. A la zaga de la debacle de 1898, cuando la introspección colectiva dirige la mirada de los autores hacia la patria, Pardo Bazán genera una serie de propuestas teatrales para revitalizar la nación. En sus obras, expone sus ideas sobre la crisis finisecular, reflexiona sobre el lugar de España en la arena internacional (enfatizando su misión civilizadora), critica el poder embriagador de lo que llama la leyenda dorada (el glorioso pasado español) y ve la causa de los males de la patria en la falta de educación de sus habitantes y en la desigualdad entre hombres y mujeres.

  En vez de enfocarse en el ayer, Pardo se imagina un futuro en el que nuevas configuraciones sociales sean posibles. En lugar de ubicar sus obras en una Castilla ancestral, sitúa varias de sus piezas teatrales en su Galicia natal. Para la autora los problemas regionales son inseparables de los nacionales y los problemas nacionales son inseparables de la cuestión de la mujer. La dramaturga apela tanto al raciocinio como a las emociones de sus espectadores/lectores para hacerles pensar y sentir que son los hombres los que constituyen el problema nacional. Para Pardo Bazán la clave de la regeneración de España se encuentra en la mujer.

  En fuego cruzado con los jugadores más importantes del campo de producción cultural de su tiempo, Pardo Bazán ofrece su crítica de la decadencia nacional en unas obras que reciclan una serie heterogénea de materiales por aquel entonces anticuados que la autora combina de manera inteligente con formas inesperadas que introducen al público a nuevas corrientes de innovación teatral (Ibsen, Maeterlinck, D’Annunzio).

  Propuestas ofrece una nueva perspectiva de la participación de las autoras femeninas en el contencioso debate sobre la nación española. Dentro de la extensa producción creadora de la autora, su teatro es un terreno frecuentemente pasado por alto y Propuestas desafía el tan trillado tópico del retraso de la escena española y la supuesta falta de innovación durante el fin de siglo.

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  Hombres en movimiento: Masculinidades españolas en los exilios y emigraciones, 1939–1999

  Iker González-Allende

  Hombres en movimiento: Masculinidades españolas en los exilios y emigraciones, 1939-1999, de Iker González-Allende, es el primer estudio detallado de cómo el exilio y la emigración influyen en la masculinidad de los hombres españoles, tanto heterosexuales como homosexuales, que se ven obligados a abandonar su país. En el libro, González-Allende analiza la literatura producida por escritores españoles que desde 1939 hasta finales del siglo XX han experimentado el exilio o la emigración, cubriendo tres momentos históricos: el largo exilio republicano como consecuencia de la Guerra Civil Española (1936-1939), la emigración a Europa durante la década de 1960 debido a la crisis económica en España y la reciente emigración de intelectuales a los Estados Unidos a finales del siglo XX. Revelando experiencias recurrentes de aislamiento, inseguridad, discriminación y feminización en el país de acogida, González-Allende sostiene que el exilio y la emigración causan un sentido de crisis, impotencia e inestabilidad en la masculinidad de los hombres desplazados. El autor también examina como tendencia compensatoria que el exilio y la emigración pueden ofrecer a estos hombres una mayor sensación delibertad y una mejora de su situación económica. Cada uno de los siete capítulos analiza una variedad diferente de las masculinidades en el exilio o la emigración: el adolescente, el hombre en crisis, el hombre ocioso, el hombreque retorna a España, el hombre trabajador, el hombre onanista y el hombre académico. Los autores estudiados son asimismo diversos: Luis de Castresana, Juan José Domenchina, Juan Gil-Albert, Max Aub, Francisco Ayala, Patricio Chamizo, Víctor Canicio, Terenci Moix, Antonio Muñoz Molina y Javier Cercas.

  Men in Motion: Spanish Masculinities in Exiles and Emigrations, 1939-1999 by Iker González-Allende delivers the first sustained study of how the Spanish masculine identity, of both homosexual and heterosexual men, is impacted when men are compelled to leave their country. In it, González-Allende examines the literary output of Spanish male authors over three periods of emigration and exile: the long Republican exile from Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), the emigration to Europe during the Spanish economic crisis of the 1960s, and the recent period of emigration of intellectuals to the United States through the end of the twentieth century. Revealing and unpacking recurring patterns of isolation, insecurity, discrimination, and feminization in the host country, González-Allende argues that exile and emigration cause a crisis of powerlessness that can have a destabilizing effect on one's masculinity. González-Allende also examines a countervailing trend among Spanish exiles and émigrés of these periods; that from the same crisis some achieve a greater sense of freedom and improve their socioeconomic standing. Each of the seven chapters analyzes a different Spanish male exile or émigré: the adolescent, the man at a crossroad, the idle man, the returning man, the working man, the onanist, and the academician. Works studied are likewise from a range of authors: Luis de Castresana, Juan José Domenchina, Juan Gil-Albert, Max Aub, Francisco Ayala, Patricio Chamizo, Víctor Canicio, Terenci Moix, Antonio Muñoz Molina, and Javier Cercas.

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  La pasión esclava: Alianzas masoquistas en La Regenta

  Nuria Godón

  La pasión esclava aborda la discursividad masoquista en La Regenta (1884-1885) de Leopoldo Alas, Clarín, como una estrategia subversiva de dominio y sumisión mediante la cual se rebaten los fundamentos del pensamiento liberal sobre la educación, la agencia y la libertad del sujeto moderno. Frente a las investigaciones que priman el enfoque psicoanalítico de tradición freudiana y vinculan el masoquismo a conductas perversas y pasivas, este estudio brinda una aproximación pluralista -donde destaca la perspectiva cultural, histórica-clínica y literaria- gracias a la cual es posible reubicar el masoquismo en el amplio terreno de las pasiones y subrayar la agencia y creatividad sobre las que se conforma el sentido discursivo del masoquismo transgresor en la narrativa finisecular. Nuria Godón muestra cómo la novela cumbre de Alas problematiza las propuestas de compañerismo en la sociedad moderna presentando una reformulación del contrato masoquista que parodia el contrato matrimonial, satiriza el contrato social rousseriano y cuestiona el engranaje del sistema educativo krausista. Asimismo, explora el impacto del catolicismo en la dinámica masoquista en otros textos de autores contemporáneos entre los cuales figuran Emilia Pardo Bazán y Armando Palacio Valdés, sin olvidar a Leopold von Sacher-Masoch-autor sobre el que se acuña el término de masoquismo-para explicar posteriormente cómo la influencia religiosa da forma al despliegue de la dialéctica del masoquismo femenino y filial en el contexto español trazado en La Regenta. En este sentido, La pasión esclava invita a una reconsideración del masoquismo como herramienta que hace saltar los mecanismos de sujeción genérica, susceptibles de ser observados no solo en el ámbito literario español que el libro presenta sino también dentro de otras producciones culturales.

  La pasión esclava addresses the masochist discursivity of La Regenta (1884-1885) by Leopoldo Alas, Clarín, as a subversive strategy of dominance and submission through which the foundations of liberal thinking on education, agency, and freedom of the modern subject are refuted. Differing from studies that prioritize the Freudian psychoanalytic focus and link masochism with perverse and passive behaviors, this book offers a pluralist approach, where cultural, clinical-historical, and literary perspectives are essential to relocate masochism to the area of passions, while emphasizing the agency and creativity upon which the discursive meaning of transgressive masochism in fin-de-siècle narrative is articulated. Nuria Godón shows how La Regenta challenges the models of partnership in modern society by displaying a reformulation of the masochist contract that parodies the marital contract, satirizes Rousseau's social contract, and places the wheels of Krause's educational machine under scrutiny. Likewise, she explores Catholicism's impact on the masochist dynamic in other contemporary texts by authors such as Emilia Pardo Bazán and Armando Palacio Valdés, without excluding Leopold von Sacher-Masoch-the Austrian writer from whom the term masochism was coined-to further disclose how religion's influence shapes the dialectic of female and filial masochism in the Spanish context represented in Alas's masterpiece. In this sense, La pasión esclava invites one to reconsider masochism as a tool that tears apart the mechanisms of gender subjection, which are observable not only in the Spanish literary texts analyzed in this book, but also in other cultural productions.

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  Anatomía del desencanto: Humor, Ficción Y Melancolía En España (1976–1998)

  Santiago Morales Rivera

  Tras la derrota de los soixante-huitards, el colapso del comunismo europeo y la caída también en torno a 1989 de varias dictaduras y revoluciones en América Latina, el acercamiento sentimental a la historia vuelve a cosechar éxitos entre las humanidades y las ciencias sociales y políticas. En el ámbito hispánico, este "giro afectivo" lleva camino de reproducir otro fin de siècle como el que ya protagonizaron los intelectuales de 1898. Un siglo después, tanto en las universidades españolas como en las anglosajonas nociones como desencanto, trauma, memoria, y empatía informan prácticamente todos los análisis de la cultura española moderna, desde la sanguinaria guerra civil y los casi cuarenta años de fascismo hasta la decepcionante transición a la democracia. Santiago Morales interviene en este acercamiento sentimental a la historia y a la novelística de la transición, recuperando los vínculos y tensiones que mantiene la noción de melancolía con la estética del humor negro en un corpus de obras de ficción escritas entre 1976 y 1998. Mediante una metodología que alterna entre el análisis cuidadoso de novelas de Javier Marías, Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, Cristina Fernández Cubas y Juan José Millás, y el distant reading o el encuadre que coloca estos textos en una historia más amplia, Anatomía del desencanto hace una crítica del lugar equívoco que ocupan en nuestra modernidad sentimientos en otro tiempo tan nobles y obstinados como el duelo, el miedo, la culpa, y la compasión. Mientras que otros estudiosos de la transición abundan en denunciar la persistencia ominosa del franquismo y la posguerra, Santiago Morales ve en el humor negro de la melancolía una fórmula profundamente irónica: un catalizador en el crecimiento creativo y moral de la narrativa española y una herramienta crítica fundamental para cambiar la educación sentimental contemporánea. Escrito en espanõl.

  After the failure of the soixante-huitards, the collapse of European communism, and the fall around 1989 of various dictatorships and revolutions in Latin America, the sentimental approach to history is again reaping successes among the humanities and the social and political sciences. In the Hispanic world, this "affective turn" is on its way to repeating another fin de siècle like the one led by the intellectuals of 1898. A century later, in both Spanish and Anglo-Saxon universities, notions such as disenchantment, trauma, memory, and empathy inform virtually all the analyses of modern Spanish culture, from the bloody Civil War and the nearly forty years of fascism that followed it to the disappointing transition to democracy. Santiago Morales intervenes in this sentimental approach to history and to the novelistic production of the transition by recovering the links and tensions that the notion of melancholy maintains with the aesthetics of black humor in a corpus of fictional works written between 1976 and 1998. Through a methodology that alternates between the careful analysis of novels by Javier Marías, Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, Cristina Fernández Cubas, and Juan José Millás, and the distant reading or framing that places these texts in a broader history, Anatomía del desencanto constructs a critique of the equivocal place held in our modern age by feelings that were, in another time, so noble and persistent, such as grief, fear, guilt, and compassion. While other specialists who study the transition today agree in denouncing the ominous persistence of Francoism and the postwar ethos, Santiago Morales sees a deeply ironic formula in the black humor of melancholy: a catalyst in the creative and moral growth of Spanish narrative and a fundamental critical tool to change contemporary sentimental education. Written entirely in Spanish.

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  Confronting Evil: The Psychology of Secularization in Modern French Literature

  Scott M. Powers

  Confronting Evil: The Psychology of Secularization in Modern French Literature holds that the concept of evil is central to the psychology of secularism. Drawing on notions of secularization as a phenomenon of ambivalence or dualism in which religion continues to exist alongside secularity in exerting influence on modern French thought, author Scott M. Powers enlists psychoanalytic theory on mourning and sublimation, the philosophical concept of the sublime, Charles Taylor's theory of religious and secular "cross-pressures," and William James's psychology of conversion to account for the survival of religious themes in Baudelaire, Zola, Huysmans, and Céline. For Powers, Baudelaire's prose poems, Zola's experimental novels, and Huysmans's and Céline's early narratives attempt to account for evil by redefining the traditionally religious concept along secular lines. However, when unmitigated by the mechanisms of irony and sublimation, secular confrontation with the dark and seemingly absurd dimension of man leads modern writers such as Huysmans and Céline, paradoxically, to embrace a religious or quasi-religious understanding of good and evil. In the end, Powers finds that how authors cope with the reality of suffering and human wickedness has a direct bearing on the ability to sustain a secular vision.

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  Toma y Daca: Transculturación Y Presencia de Escritores Chino-Latinoamericanos

  Huei Lan Yen

  En la segunda mitad del siglo XIX, decenas de miles de trabajadores chinos emigraron a Cuba, Perú, México y Panamá en busca de una vida mejor. En los países donde residieron, los chinos y sus descendientes optaron por asimilarse contribuyendo de manera significativa al desarrollo económico de la sociedad de acogida mediante su participación laboral en la agricultura, el transporte y otras industrias. Asimismo, en el ámbito literario, artístico, religioso y político también aportaron al devenir cultural de estos países.

  En Toma y daca: Transculturación y presencia de escritores chino-latinoamericanos, uno de los primeros estudios de la tradición literaria china-latinoamericana y uno de los primeros que trata obras de autores nunca antes estudiados, Huei Lan Yen examina cómo los escritores latinoamericanos de primera y segunda generación de ascendencias china y mestiza utilizan la literatura para reconstruir, reevaluar, y renegociar sus identidades culturales. Yen sostiene que es a través de esa producción literaria que conseguimos un mejor entendimiento de las complejidades y tensiones del proceso de la transculturación Oriente-Occidente en América Latina del siglo XIX. Explorando a gran escala la interrelación única entre los componentes de la cultura china, como el confucianismo y el taoísmo, y las culturas dominantes de América Latina, Yen demuestra que la literatura china en América Latina posee una tradición de compleja y sofisticada estética, pero siempre con sus propios rasgos distintivos culturales.

  In the mid-1800s, tens of thousands of Chinese workers migrated to Cuba, Peru, Mexico, and Panama in search of a better life. As they and their descendants assimilated into their new host countries, they contributed significantly to the economies of these countries through their work in agriculture, transportation, and other industries. However, through the years and throughout their work and assimilation, they also made distinguished literary, artistic, religious, and political contributions to the cultural heritage of the region. In this seminal in-depth study of the Chinese-Latin American literary tradition, Huei Lan Yen examines how first-and second-generation Latin American writers of Chinese and mixed-race Chinese descent relied upon literature to reconstruct, reevaluate, and renegotiate their cultural identities. Yen then argues that it is through the lens of their literary output that we can best understand the intricacies and tensions of the East-West transculturation process of nineteenth-century Latin America. Prior studies have treated Chinese-Latin Americans as characters. However, this is the first sustained study of the work of Chinese-Latin American authors. Explicating the unique interplay of aspects of Chinese culture, such as Confucianism and Taoism, with dominant Latin American cultures, Yen reveals Chinese-Latin American literature as having an aesthetically complex and sophisticated tradition with a specific cultural flavor of its own.

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  The Would-Be Author: Molière and the Comedy of Print

  Michael Call

  This book is the first full-length study to examine Molière’s evolving (and at times contradictory) authorial strategies, as evidenced both by his portrayal of authors and publication within the plays and by his own interactions with the seventeenth-century Parisian publishing industry. Historians of the book have described the time period that coincides with Molière’s theatrical activity as centrally important to the development of authors’ rights and to the professionalization of the literary field. A seventeenth-century author, however, was not so much born as negotiated through often acrimonious relations in a world of new and dizzying possibilities.The learning curve was at times steep and unpleasant, as Molière discovered when his first Parisian play was stolen by a rogue publisher. Nevertheless, the dramatist proved to be a quick learner; from his first published play in 1660 until his death in 1673, Molière changed from a reluctant and victimized author to an innovator (or, according to his enemies, even a swindler) who aggressively secured the rights to his plays, stealing them back when necessary. Through such shrewdness, he acquired for himself publication privileges and conditions relatively unknown in an era before copyright. As Molière himself wrote, making people laugh was “une étrange entreprise” (La Critique de L’École des femmes, 1663). To an even greater degree, comedic authorship for the playwright was a constant work in progress, and in this sense, “Molière,” the stage name that became a pen name, represents the most carefully elaborated of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin’s invented characters.