Drafts by REBECA GUALBERTO VALVERDE
At the dawn of 'ecocriticism' as a discipline of study within the Humanities, Glotfelty and Fromm... more At the dawn of 'ecocriticism' as a discipline of study within the Humanities, Glotfelty and Fromm (1996), in the first general reader in the matter, defined it as the critical practice that examines the relationship between literary and cultural studies and the natural world. In general terms, during the past two decades, ecocriticism has denounced the anthropocentric and instrumental appropriation of nature that has for so long legitimized human exploitation of the nonhuman world. Exposing the logic of domination that articulates the very power relationships that both connect and separate human culture and natural life, recent trends in ecocriticism have raised awareness of the 'otherisation' of nature (Huggan and Tiffin, 2015), pointing out the need of assessing insurgent discourses that—converging with counter-discourses of race, gender or class— realize the empowerment of nature from its subaltern position. But such empowerment of nature first requires that the sundering of human and nonhuman realms is overcome since, as Kate Rigby explains, only by regaining " a sense of the inextricability of nature and culture, physis and techne, earth and artifact—consumption and destruction—would be to move beyond (…) the arrogance of humanism " (2002, p. 152). Yet, recognizing such inextricable relationship between human and natural while overcoming the arrogance of anthropocentrism entails the ecocritical admission that all cultural discourses are in fact exploitative of nature. Rigby states it clearly while explaining, " culture constructs the prism through which we know nature " (p. 154). We comprehend nature when we apprehend the world through language and representation, but nature precedes and exceeds words; it is therefore " real " (1992, p. 32) and separated by an abyss from the symbolic networks of culture that write, master, assign a meaning to and attempt to set nature in order. From this perspective, culture is not exactly the end of nature as much as it is an appropriation and colonization of nature. Culture masters, dominates and instrumentalizes the natural world. However, in a time when the " end of nature " that Bill McKibben prophesized in 1989 has been certified, when we know for a fact that it is indeed a different Earth we are living in—because by changing the climate there is not a corner of the planet that has not been affected by our actions—the evidence of global ecological endangerment compels the ecocritical debate to install environmental ethics and concerns at the crux of humanistic research. The critical enterprise is far from easy though. The argument that cultural representations of nature establish a relationship of domination and exploitation of human discourse over nonhuman reality is extendible to the critical task. As humanist critics, our regard of nature in literary and artistic representation is instrumental and anthropocentric. But the time has come to
Papers by REBECA GUALBERTO VALVERDE
Anglo Saxonica, 2023
Most critics of Bernard Malamud's The Natural (1952) have focused their analysis of the novel on ... more Most critics of Bernard Malamud's The Natural (1952) have focused their analysis of the novel on probing the obvious mythical allusions in the text that combine Arthurian mythology and baseball folklore. More recent discussions, however, have raised the issue of the novel's symbolic ambiguity which for so long has vexed Malamud scholars. As a response to this debate, the aim of this study is to address such indeterminacy by revisiting and bringing up to date a myth-critical interpretation on the novel, exploring how the mythical artifacts in Malamud's text construe mechanisms of uncertainty and ambivalence that express an unsettling vision of postwar American society, which in turn deserves renewed critical attention.
Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, 2021
This article explores, from the standpoint of socio-political myth-criticism, the processes of re... more This article explores, from the standpoint of socio-political myth-criticism, the processes of revision and adaptation carried out in Gary Owen’s 2015 play Iphigenia in Splott. The play, a dramatic monologue composed in the rhythms of slam poetry, rewrites the classical Greek myth of Iphigenia in order to denounce the profound injustice of the sacrifices demanded by austerity policies in Europe—and more specifically, in Britain—in the recession following the financial crash of 2008. Reassessing contemporary social, economic and political issues that have resulted in the marginalisation and dehumanisation of the British working class, this study probes the dramatic and mythical artefacts in Owen’s harrowing monologue by looking back to Euripides’s Iphigenia in Aulis, the classical play which inspires the title of Owen’s piece and which serves as the mythical and literary background for the story of Effie. The aim is to demonstrate how Owen’s innovative adaptation of the sacrifice of ...
Brno Studies in English, 2019
This study engages with recent postcolonial and new-historicist readings of William Shakespeare's... more This study engages with recent postcolonial and new-historicist readings of William Shakespeare's The Tempest to reassess its exploitation and subversion of romance conventions, exploring an intertextual reading of Shakespeare's play and T.S. Eliot's modernist classic The Waste Land. The aim is to probe into the romance ideology enacted and arguably undermined in the play, going one step further from examining the interplay of the play with artistic, political and historiographical discourses and counter-discourses of the time. Taking as example and point of reference the prominence and reinterpretation of The Tempest in The Waste Land, this article aims to explore the arguably subversive dramatization of romance in the early-modern play as belonging in a continuum of meaning that has not only inspired but actually maintains an ongoing dialogue across literary tradition.
Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies
The aim of this study is to suggest a new assessment of Katherine Anne Porter’s semi-autobiograph... more The aim of this study is to suggest a new assessment of Katherine Anne Porter’s semi-autobiographical account of her near-death experience with the 1918 flu, Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), considered by many as the paradigmatic American narrative of that pandemic. Following the trend set by most critics of Porter, this article explores the intersections of memory and fiction in the novella, but shifting attention to our present-day response, assessed as a critical tool that provides renewed insight into the mysteries of Porter’s late-modernist text. Revisited in a context in which cultural memories of the 1918 influenza have been awakened by our own traumatic experience with COVID-19, this article seeks to probe the uncertainties in Porter’s aestheticized trauma narrative. The aim is to investigate the hypothesis that our contemporary reading of Pale Horse, Pale Rider illuminates the modernist obscurities in the text and, in consequence, raises the possibility of transcending the li...
Selim Journal of the Spanish Society For Medieval English Language and Literature Revista De La Sociedad Espanola De Lengua Y Literatura Inglesa Medieval, 2010
Revista De Estudios Norteamericanos, 2011
Reassessing the notions of transnationalism, diaspora, and transmigration, this article explores ... more Reassessing the notions of transnationalism, diaspora, and transmigration, this article explores the process of mythologization in Paule Marshall's novel The Fisher King (2000) as a strategy to orchestrate transnational reconciliation. Beyond allowing for new considerations on diasporic transmigrant experience and new breakthrough perspectives on myth-criticism research, such mythologizing, as this paper argues, brings about a very eloquent and poignant metaphor for the plight of the mixed African American and Caribbean American community in the United States, whose inner feud is portrayed and eventually resolved in the novel. Effectively, once recreated as quest myth, the transatlantic journey of the African diaspora becomes in Marshall's text the space for the reconciliation of diversity and kinship as inextricable traits of the African hybridized transmigrant identity.
Ángulo Recto. Revista de estudios sobre la ciudad como espacio plural, 2011
Por cuanto la experiencia urbana no puede desligarse de la cultura occidental contemporánea, el e... more Por cuanto la experiencia urbana no puede desligarse de la cultura occidental contemporánea, el estudio de las representaciones literarias de la ciudad resulta crucial para analizar el Zeitgeist cultural e ideológico de una determinada época. De manera específica, este artículo tiene como objetivo explorar la retórica de la enfermedad en la representación urbana que lleva a cabo Manhattan Transfer (1925), de John Dos Passos, desde una perspectiva simbólica y mito-crítica. Debe para ello tenerse en cuenta la existencia de un fuerte sentimiento de hostilidad hacia el espacio urbano en la literatura modernista estadounidense, sobre todo en textos ambientados en la ciudad de Nueva York-"that most mythical of cities, [which] tends to emerge in recent literature as hellish, or at any rate murderous" (Oates 1981: 30). En la novela de Dos Passos, Nueva York aparece representada como el espacio enfermo de la modernidad. Tal representación da cuenta de una relación de continuidad entre el espacio y la comunidad que lo habita, pues no debe ignorarse que el espacio urbano funciona como sistema de organización de un conjunto de relaciones sociales entre individuos y, en consecuencia, como correlato simbólico de todas aquellas instituciones comunitarias que articulan las relaciones entre el individuo y el conjunto de la sociedad. Así, un espacio (mítico) enfermo-la megalópolis moderna-se configura en el texto modernista como la extensión metafórica de una comunidad enferma.
Journal of English Studies, 2018
The aim of this paper is to reassess John Steinbeck’s presence and significance within American m... more The aim of this paper is to reassess John Steinbeck’s presence and significance within American modernism by advancing a myth-critical reading of his early novel “To a God Unknown” (1933). Considering the interplay between this novel and the precedent literary tradition and other contextual aspects that might have influenced Steinbeck’s text, this study explores Steinbeck’s often disregarded novel as an eloquent demonstration of the malleability of myths characteristic of Anglo-American modernism. Taking myth-ritualism—the most prominent approach to myth at the time—as a critical prism to reappraise Steinbeck’s own reshaping of modernist aesthetics, this article examines recurrent frustrated and misguided ritual patterns along with the rewriting of flouted mythical motifs as a series of aesthetic choices that give shape and meaning to a state of stagnation common to the post-war American literary landscapes, but now exacerbated as it has finally spread, as a plague of perverse remyt...
Amaltea. Revista de mitocrítica, 2015
This article aims to reassess F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic The Great Gatsby (1925), taking into ... more This article aims to reassess F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic The Great Gatsby (1925), taking into consideration the myth-critical hypotheses of philosopher René Girard. Specifically, this essay will analyse the concepts of mimetic desire, resentment and reprisal violence as emotional components of myth, paying close attention to how the reinterpreted mythical pattern of the novel influences the depiction of such emotions as social traits of corruption. Finally, this article will challenge interpretations that have regarded Gatsby as a successful scapegoat-figure, examining instead how the mythical meanings and structures of the text stage an emotional crisis of frustrated desire and antagonism that ultimately offers no hope of communal restoration.
En la ultima decada hemos asistido al creciente protagonismo de los estudios transatlanticos, dia... more En la ultima decada hemos asistido al creciente protagonismo de los estudios transatlanticos, dialogos criticos sobre un variado numero de disciplinas entre academicos de ambos lados del oceano. Este volumen recoge la XI edicion de las Jornadas Internacionales de Estudios de la Mujer que abordaron la existencia de cuestiones de genero desde el caracter pluridisciplinar de los estudios transatlanticos, en la creencia de que el interes etico de la igualdad trasciende, tambien, fronteras y oceanos.
Nordic Journal of English Studies, 2020
The aim of this article is to probe instances of dramatic self-construction through the performan... more The aim of this article is to probe instances of dramatic self-construction through the performance of disobedience as enacted by the female protagonists of Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam, critically exploring, in close relation to one another, Mariam’s changing self-presentation from public loquacity to purposeful stoic silence, and Salome’s transgression of the sex-gender system. As will be argued, these two performances of female subjectivity trigger a current of social change by destabilizing the naturalized patriarchal authority that sustains political order. For, as it will be explored, the public self-construction of feminine identities in Cary’s play—mostly through the utterance of a public speech—creates a dramatic and textual space in which rebellious and transformative notions of female selfhood can negotiate the timely tensions between moral permanence and political change.
El objetivo general de este proyecto de investigacion es explorar, a partir de la interpretacion ... more El objetivo general de este proyecto de investigacion es explorar, a partir de la interpretacion mitocritica de un corpus de obras seleccionadas, el proceso de representacion y reinterpretacion del mito arturico de la Tierra Baldia en diferentes etapas de la tradicion literaria en lengua inglesa. Con ello, este trabajo analiza criticamente las repercusiones ideologicas que tiene la utilizacion de los relatos miticos en la practica literaria. Asi, esta tesis doctoral somete a examen la hipotesis de que, en efecto, los mitos articulan ideologias de poder dominantes, las cuales operan como garantes del orden politico-social de una determinada comunidad. Frente a esto, la representacion literaria del mito puede analizarse como una representacion subversiva (o subvertida, al menos) de aquel, lo cual resulta en la formacion de narraciones que funcionan como contra-discursos que desafian y se oponen a los discursos dominantes en torno al orden social y a la estabilidad politica contenidos ...
espanolThe Turn of the Screw (1898) es un texto marcado por la ambivalencia, asi como por la conf... more espanolThe Turn of the Screw (1898) es un texto marcado por la ambivalencia, asi como por la confluencia de realidades aparentemente contradictorias. Se trata de un texto ambiguo a todos los efectos que ha generado un debate critico muy controvertido a lo largo de decadas. El objetivo de este articulo es revaluar la novella desde el paradigma de lo ‘fantastico’, tal y como este queda formulado por Tzvetan Todorov en 1970, para asi integrar puntos de vista tradicionalmente opuestos. En efecto, las caracteristicas de lo fantastico identificadas por Todorov se asocian generalmente a los rasgos mas comunes de la ficcion gotica; sin embargo, este articulo arguye que los elementos fantasticos que Todorov atribuye a The Turn of the Screw son simultaneamente goticos y modernistas, y por tanto establecen un continuo de significado que puede de hecho armonizar acercamientos criticos que, convencionalmente, se han considerado no ya divergentes, sino irreconciliables. EnglishHenry James’s The T...
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Drafts by REBECA GUALBERTO VALVERDE
Papers by REBECA GUALBERTO VALVERDE