AUTHORITY & TEXT
Postgraduate Conference in Hispanic & Lusophone Studies
12th & 13th January 2007
Abstracts
Keynote Speakers
Professor Lúcia Nagib – Director, Centre of World Cinemas, University of Leeds
Panaméricas Utópicas: Entranced and Transient Nations in ‘I Am Cuba’
(1963) and ‘Land in Trance’ (1967)
This paper examines the astonishing similarities between two political films, Land in Trance
(Glauber Rocha, 1967) and I Am Cuba (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1964). Both address the subject of
revolution through the enactment of trance. Both reject all forms of naturalistic account,
adopting a series of anti-realist devices, such as poetic language, synecdoche,
personification, parable and allegory, as a means of expanding the concept of the nation
beyond territorial borders and conveying the meaning of revolution through the film form,
rather than its content. Because there is no evidence that Glauber Rocha had seen I Am
Cuba before he shot Land in Trance, these coincidences are treated as an intellectual ‘transit’
between filmmakers whose art was fuelled by cinephilia and the belief in the reality of the film
medium.
Dr Rodrigo Cacho – Lecturer in Spanish Golden Age, University of Cambridge
Hide and Seek: Lazarillo de Tormes and Autobiography
The Lazarillo de Tormes has often been considered as one of the precursors of the
modern novel. According to this interpretation, picaresque fiction introduced a first person
point of view which echoed the ambiguities and complexities of the human mind. Lázaro
evolves and shares with the reader his personal degradation in a corrupt society.
Nevertheless, this reading of the text depends on anachronistic approaches that assimilate
the picaresque with realism. The aim of this paper is to review the theoretical background
which motivated such readings of the Lazarillo, by analysing at the same time its
autobiographical style.
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“Authority & Selection”
Paloma Peréz Valdés – University College Dublin
Reconocimiento literario
How does an author in contemporary Spain reach literary recognition? Is there any authority
that dictates what authors are writing novels that deserve to be considered literary? Due to
the waiting time that the academic world and the literary critics seem to need before making
any judgement on this regard, the reader finds him or herself having to choose the authors to
read using information acquired from other institutions different from the above. In Spain
today, literary prizes count among the best publicity for the author, would they exercise any
sort of authority over the reader when it comes to the selection of his or her readings? An
answer to this question would imply an enormous amount of data from surveys to the readers,
but we can try to examine the prizes themselves, because there are a few conclusions that
we can reach, not so much on the actual authority they exercise, but on how they aim to
control the reader. Since there are two blocks of prizes, namely, the national and the editorial,
I suggest a brief analysis of both in order to decide what are the differences among them,
what are the differences in their tendencies, and if a sexual bias exists with regard to the
influence they are attempting to exert overt the reader.
Cheyla Samuelson – University of California Santa Barbara
Authority Lost, Autonomy Gained: new writers in post-boom Mexico
The ubiquitous fictional character of the writer in the production of a group of emerging
Mexican authors can serve as a vehicle for understanding certain shifts in the perception of
the social function of literature and the authority of the author endemic to the current literary
debate in Mexico. For most young writers working in Mexico today, the revolutionary aspect of
narrative fiction, the politically empowered sense inherent in the even the most formally
experimental of Boom or escritura writers, is noticeably absent. For these writers, the overtly
revolutionary national project of Carlos Fuentes and Octavio Paz is no longer a viable, or
desirable, activity for the writer. I posit that the current literary production of Mexico is
diminished in political power, but enriched in artistic freedom of expression. The portrayal of
writers in the work of these young authors shows a multiplicity of subject positions possible for
the author in Mexico, and allows us to see the ways in which some these seemingly apolitical
works serve to reflect and comment on the place of the creative artist in a society in a state of
rapid transition.
Chandra Morrison – University of Cambridge
Rules of Exchange: Sampling across the North/South divide in 'world music'
In my paper, I'll examine the exchange of musical text - verbal, vocal, rhythmic - in the
process of sampling within the newly constructed genre of 'world music'/ 'world beat'.
Questions of authority surface in relation to who can use what textual sources within the
contemporary international music industry, and under what terms. The often irregular liabilities
of source recognition arouse the convoluted dilemma of denoting authorship, ethics of
intellectual/cultural ownership, and the added complexities of monetary/economic beneficiary
recognition. Utilising examples from Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa, I'll problematize
musical transactions across the North/South divide in particular, to explore the cultural
authority of who makes and decides these rules of exchange.
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“Authority & Selection”
Ricardo Vasconcelos – University of California Santa Barbara
How anthologies work: the discourse of authority in contemporary anthologies
of Portuguese poetry
The model of literary anthologies inevitably makes use of the discourse of power, inasmuch
as it implies choices that try to conform to either prevailing tastes, or even tastes of minorities,
and at the same time tries to define criteria for the relevance not only of its own options, but
moreover of what is supposed to be literary or not. It is revealing to analyze how, in most
cases, in order to avoid criticism of plain relativism or even biased choices, anthologies are
built upon notions of representativeness, which often have little in common.
What, in fact, defines the authority of organizers? How easily do these organizers deal with
the apparent need to justify their criteria? In what way do the concerns that the somewhat
contradictory urges of both building history and canon, or simply getting their choices right in
the eyes of those to come, affect not only the options taken but also the discourse of
legitimacy?
This work aims to discuss these issues namely concerning anthologies of poetry, as elements
of cultural authority in the context of Contemporary Portuguese Poetry, by analyzing recent
publications and referring to the social impact some of them had.
João Paulo Martins Silvestre – University of Aveiro
The Portuguese literary corpus and the establishment of a linguistic norm in
the eighteenth century
This paper presents an approach to the evolution of lexicographers’ and grammar composers’
discourse with reference to the relationship between linguistic norm and the authority of
Portuguese writers. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Portuguese language displays
a wide variety of forms authorised by printed texts, by the absence of institutional documents
sensitive to standardisation and by the lack of models to form a canonical corpus.
A reading of the principle grammatical texts of the time reveals divergent solutions for the
construction of an authorised orthographic system:
- Observance of the authority of writers, resulting in description of the variety of uses,
- Emergence of the author-linguist figure who critically evaluates the authority embodied by
tradition, according to “rational” criteria,
- Minute selection of a corpus of canonical authors, thus disavowing any uses not authorised
by written texts and reducing the range of admissible orthographic varieties.
The comparative analysis of contemporary grammatical texts reveals, in addition, the authors’
strategies to affirm an authoritative status regarding orthography. The selected authors and
works are as follows:
- Jerónimo Argote, Regras da lingua portugueza (1725)
- Luís Caetano de Lima, Orthographia da lingua portugueza (1726)
- João Madureira Feijó, Orthografia (1734)
- Rafael Bluteau, Vocabulario (1712-1728)
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“Authority in Visual & Performance Arts”
Maria Sofia Pimentel Biscaia – University of Aveiro
Stripping Authority: the aesthetics of excess in Fernando Botero’s and Paula
Rego’s painting
Paula Rego and Fernando Botero occupy today a privileged position in the universe of the
visual arts. Their unique styles enhance the satirical and subversive intents of their work.
Mario Vargas Llosa has described Botero’s world as “sumptuous, unusual, cheerful, tender,
innocent, sensual, in which knowledge and reason, spurred on by nostalgia, are continually
delving into memory to rectify life by appearing to reproduce it”1, a description well-suited to
Rego’s work as well. Whilst revisiting their historical memories and affirming the social
engagement of their perceptions, the artists continually find themselves constructing a
discourse against (in contrast and in opposition) the forms of Authority which condition/ed
their native countries, Colombia and Portugal, as well as, more recently, against the
panorama of international politics. Thus in this paper I propose to look into the theme of
authority in these painters’ work in the following manner (the order presents firstly topics
specific to Rego and then to Botero):
National politics: the Portuguese dictatorship; violence in Colombia
International affairs: the Iraqi conflict; torture in Abu Ghraib
Colonialism and neo-colonialism: the Ultramar war; representation of politicians and military figures
Religion: Biblical figures, themes and the abortion problem; representation of biblical figures
and of the Church
Gender politics: animalisation of female figures and interaction of women with animals; private
lives and inflated bodies
Inês Alves Mendes – University of Oxford
Engaging with the canon: Subverting authority through its embodiment
The Portuguese Hélia Correia, in her 1991 play Perdição: Exercício Sobre Antígona, reveals
a close relationship with Sophocles’ Antigone. The Portuguese drama legitimises and
subverts its canonical legacy since, on the one hand, Hélia Correia recuperates similar
passages and, on the other hand, she grants them different meanings. This research explores
how the balance between tradition (authority) and innovation (marginality) generates an
original and subversive meaning for Antigone in Hélia Correia’s play. Furthermore, this work
investigates how Antigone’s configuration represents the feminine in contemporary literature
and performing arts.
Marcelo Moreschi – University of California Santa Barbara
Commonplaces of the avant-garde: describing the self-constructed authority
of Brazilian and Portuguese Modernist manifestos
Martin Puchner, in Poetry of Revolution, suggests that the manifesto is a writing genre that
has an essential tension in its very core. For Puchner, such tension would be produced by a
conflict of between the performativity and theatricality implied in these texts. On one hand, the
manifesto is a kind of text which attempts to be a particular and powerful “speech-act” and
thus its own performance per se is intended to intervene in the world and establish a new
state of affairs. On the other hand, the illocutionary authority to do that is only simulated, since
such kinds of texts and their authors do not usually have the effective power of intervention
and changing, at least not at the time of the performance. In fact, this power is what the
manifesto ultimately pursues. In other words, what supports and authorizes the manifesto is
something that it actually seeks, and therefore, does not have. Keeping this suggestion in
mind, I will present an overview of ten of the most important Modernist manifestos written in
the Portuguese-speaking world. My purpose is to describe the commonplaces found in these
texts (“commonplace” here understood both in the ordinary way – i.e., overused clichés – and
in the rhetorical sense – i.e., the topoi employed or implied) and sketch how they rhetorically
pursue their own authority.
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“Conceptual Authority”
Juan Herrero Senés - Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Time-Authority in interwar literary Spain (1918-1936)
We tend to think authority in personal terms: authority is something embodied. But there are
other forms of authority, for instance Time. We could divide Time Authority in the authority of
the Past (classicism or tradition), of the Present (modernism) and of the Future (utopism).
My contribution aims at studying some aspects of this authority in a particular convulsed timedetermined epoch: Interwar Literary Spain (1918-1936). We will see how at the beginning
Time as Current Times dictates the kind of literature that needs to be written. The Present is a
source of Legitimation, and therefore functions as both Authority and Kairos (opportunity).
But as the years go by a shift occurs from homocronia to heterocronia (situating the center in
the very same times or in other temporal space). The Present is disregarded as Authority, and
the Past and the Future occupy its space. In the case of Spanish interwar literature, we can
see this progression in three phases: modernism, classicism and romanticism. From the
substitution of tradition by individual talent, and of history by “The New”, to the rehabilitation of
the Past as basis of order and power.
Jacobo Zabalo Puig – Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Authority and Ambiguity. Miguel de Unamuno, a Kierkegaard Reader
The concept of authority [Myndighed] was introduced in Søren Kierkegaard´s writings by the
end of his lifetime, after realizing that his literary strategy (developed by means of several
pseudonyms) was not effective enough to promote the idea of the authentic, particular self. In
order to communicate coherently this notion, i.e. without imposing a universal meaning, he
had to recognize himself as an author “without authority” [uden Myndighed]. The passionate
ambiguity of this movement, supported by Kierkegaard´s own life, would be assumed some
decades later by Miguel de Unamuno, in whom he posthumously found one of the most
faithful followers. Symptomatically enough, he used to call him “brother Kierkegaard” [el
hermano Kierkegaard]. As the Dane, he developed a literary corpus tout autre: combining
fiction and non-fiction, he drew authors inside novels, wrote novels about how to write a
novel, and developed philosophical thoughts in touch with poetical resources. Of course,
apart from this methodological brotherhood, Unamuno inherited Kierkegaard´s interest in
human subjectivity, and with it the main problem of how it was to be raised. Along this paper
we will expose Unamuno´s challenge in improving literary forms of “authority”, the paradoxical
topic induced by Kierkegaard´s existential dialectics that, from a contemporary perspective,
leads us to a broader critique.
Luís dos Santos – Université Libre de Bruxelles
El compromiso lingüístico de Juan Goytisolo
Las dos etapas que los críticos suelen identificar en larga obra novelística de Juan
Goytisolo, se corresponden en realidad con concepciones muy distintas del compromiso
literario. Mientras que las primeras novelas del escritor español, al adoptar una estética
testimonial y objetivista cuyo principal objetivo es denunciar el autoritarismo del régimen
franquista, obedecen a la definición tradicional del compromiso literario, Reivindicación del
Conde don Julián (1970) reacciona contra ese lenguaje transparente al introducir el
compromiso en el mismo lenguaje, visto ahora como el principal medio de alienación, pero
también y por consiguiente de liberación.
Cabe preguntarse hasta qué punto esa “violencia del lenguaje” (J.-J. Lecercle) traduce la
tentativa de conciliar el ethos crítico que caracteriza a los representantes de la “generación
del medio siglo” con la necesaria autonomía del lenguaje (P. Casanova) definida por los
centros literarios (en particular París y los preceptos del nouveau roman). Cabe también
preguntarse en qué medida el acatamiento de la concepción central de “modernidad literaria”
(aunque como medio de luchar contra el aislamiento cultural del régimen y la resultante
heteronomía del espacio literario español) oculta la “violencia simbólica” (P. Bourdieu) que
experimentan en aquél entonces las (semi)periferias literarias.
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“Authority in a Medieval & Premodern Age”
Antonella Liuzzo-Scorpo – University of Exeter
Alfonso X of Castille: subject, master and figure of authority
The right to command or give an ultimate decision, the moral and legal supremacy, the
intellectual influence, the power to inspire belief: these are some of the connotations related
to the idea of “authority”. What this paper will investigate is how the figure of Alfonso X of
Castile matchs perfectly all these semantic definitions, being simultaneously a powerful
sovereign and an illuminated practitioner and promoter of several arts.
Particular attention will be dedicated to two of the works produced in his scriptorium: the
Siete Partidas and the Cantigas de Santa Maria, two instruments supporting Alfonso X’s
socio-political aims to consolidate his authority as ruler, emperor, magister and champion of
Christianity. Both works, faithful mirrors of the thirteenth- century Iberian society, are also
different examples of didacticism, aimed at controlling while educating all its members.
Alfonso X acts as the epicentre of a phenomenon of authority which involves all the temporal
categories. As a scholar he uses the classical authorities of the past as main sources, as a
king he represents the temporal and cultural authority over his subjects, as an emblem of
erudition and power both he still plays a central role in the history and literary history of Spain.
Naomi Hoogesteger – University of Durham
The medieval Spanish ballad: an authoritative text?
The medieval Spanish ballad is a form that comes from the masses, rather than erudite
composers. It represents life as full of vitality and sexual innuendo. However, in the late
Middle Ages professional and religious poets simultaneously began to transcribe oral
versions, composing their own in the same style. The religious ballads contain devout women
who differ greatly from the libidinous protagonists of popular forms. This paper discusses
how religious ballads implicitly used a traditional medium to prescribe behaviour. In
particular, I look at three religious ballads from fray Ambrosio Montesino’s 1508 songbook:
Quien es este que en reguarda (Who is this so revered), En Betania estava sola (Alone in
Bethlehem), and Por las cortes de la Gloria (In the heavenly courts). The protagonists, the
Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene become paradigms of idealized female comportment. I will
prove that because of the popularity of the traditional ballad amongst the lower echelons of
society, religious composers hoped that their imitations would facilitate the dissemination of
the acceptable bounds of women’s behaviour. My analysis draws on the debates of current
scholarship on the evolution of the popular ballad into an erudite form, and thematic
differences between popular and erudite compositions which highlight the effect of authority. I
also consider contemporary literary attitudes towards women.
Kevin Brown – University College London
A proposal of Teresa de Avila’s rhetorical strategy in the twentieth chapter of
Libro de la vida
If we accept claims of her Jewish ancestry and her personal divine revelations, Teresa de
Avila had plenty to conceal from a dominant Church. In Libro de la vida the methods she uses
to avoid any threat to her orthodox status within the Roman church are many and varied.
Exemplified by the chapter in which she discusses her definition of the possibly heretical
rapture (arrobamiento) and borrowing two epistemological terms from the philosopher Richard
Rorty, we can trace those moments where Teresa employs ?conversational justification? of
belief in her status as a non-heretic contrasted with those where she uses an
?epistemological justification.? The epistemological justifications include those moments of
first-person statement, when she speaks of inner states and relies on the supposed validity of
a first-person claim. Conversational justifications involve the named or assumed readers and
invite social reflection on her words, the coming together of two or more people?s points
of perception. Teresa manages to assimilate into conversation what would otherwise be a
personal statement; she shifts the privileged representation of rapture from her own account
to the readers? shared understanding.
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“Authority in Gender & Sexuality”
Maria Lopes da Silva – University of Cambridge
O Testamento do Sr. Napumoceno da Silva Araújo: empowerment and
disrobement of self-authority in the feminine
Before the independence from Portugal in the 1970s, the literature of Cape Verde was of
particular importance in Lusophone literary studies in that it exhibited a feeling of Cape
Verdeaness rather than one of the prevailing negritude. Post-independence, it continues to
occupy a role of predominance in both qualitative and quantitative terms, of which Germano
de Almeida is one of the most illustrious examples. In his novel “O Testamento do Sr.
Napumoceno da Silva Araújo”, I will be pondering on the relationship between the male
protagonist and important women in his life, focusing on several dichotomies: mother /
daughter, sexualisation / dessexualisation, and empowerment / disrobement of authority,
Through them, I aim to offer a portrait of Mindelo’s (capital city of the island of S. Vicente)
social state of affairs for women pre and post-independence.
Yolanda Melgar – University College Dublin
Autoridad y texto en las “novelas de formación” de Carmen Boullosa
(mexicana) y Sandra Cisneros (chicana)
In this paper I will comparatively analyse the female ‘Bildungsromane’ of two contemporary
women writers, the Mexican Carmen Boullosa and the Mexican-American ('Chicana') Sandra
Cisneros in relation to the broad issue of ‘Authority and Text’. From the point of view of
authority of the text, both writers exercise their author-ity in a very different way from their
male counterparts, putting an end to the version of the great Latin American and Chicano
(male) myths, which reached their apotheosis with the Latin-American ‘Boom’ and the
Chicano ‘Movimiento’. From the point of view of authority within the text, I will examine the
differentiated ways in which the female characters portrayed in these first-person narratives
use their author-ity in order both to challenge Mexican and Chicano patriarchy and depict the
identity of Mexican and Chicana Woman as embedded in a particular historical background.
With this analysis I will show how both writers exercise their author-ity to reach very different
conclusions regarding the depiction of female identity, and I will explore the reasons behind
these differences, their relationship with the Mexican and Chicana feminist movements, and
their significance in the literary context of Mexican and Chicana female writing.
Nuala Kenny – University College Dublin
Authority and maternity in the novel La Enredadera by Josefina Aldecoa
What is Authority? According to Edward Said, authority suggests ‘a constellation of linked
meanings: a power to enforce obedience or a power to influence action, […] not only those,
but a connection with author – a person who originates or gives existence to something, a
begetter, beginner, father, or ancestor, a person also who sets forth written statements’. This
quote succinctly reflects the notion of male authority, if not superiority, that pervaded the
literary world.
In this paper, I wish to set forth a new perspective on authority. This approach will centre
on mother-daughter relationships and their portrayal in La enredadera by Josefina Aldecoa.
Initially, as feminism came to the fore, the importance of maternity was downplayed.
However, as daughters rejected the shackles that oppressed their mothers, they also silenced
them.
Josefina Aldecoa, an author of the mid-century generation, examines the impact of
patriarchal society on women’s lives in her first novel La enredadera, published in 1984. She
contemplates the profound effect; both negative and positive, motherhood has on a woman’s
life, providing mothers with a voice. The protagonists, Clara and Julia, despite living a century
apart, both face the burden of the feminine condition and struggle to reject male authority.
______________________________
“Authority & Censorship”
Jordi Mir Garcia – Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Reviews and publishers for a political and cultural transformation in Spain
during the 60s and the 70s
Spain on 1976, thirty years ago, first political and cultural reviews proposing a breaking-off
with the Francoist society were edited. There is, for example, El Viejo Topo (The old mole).
These proposals attempted to go beyond formal democracy and so-called “real socialism”.
Censorship had still not disappeared; these reviews and publishers had troubles with it. But it
was time for the protest movements aiming to participate in the new society after Francisco
Franco’s death, to emerge. During the Francoist period, publications and publishers that tried
to take advantage of the dictatorship’s narrow margins appeared. We can consider Nuestro
Cine (Our cinema), a review that brought out much more than cinema criticism or information
on films that could not be seen in Spain; or the publisher Ariel, which became a reference for
history, laws, sociology or philosophy, also by the publication of some foreign authors for the
first time. This paper presents some publications, from the sixties and the seventies, that were
the voice of a critical though and agents of its dissemination. They were references,
authorities, for a significant part of population.
Jacqueline Mulhall – Dublin City University
Exercising moral authority: Literary censorship and the double standards on
sexuality in Franco’s Spain
Censorship is invoked to exert control over public discourse and to suppress dissident voices.
It is a mechanism by which the dominated are silenced in the interests of sustaining the
presumed common good. When Church and State unite in exercising such authority,
censorship takes on a moral imperative.
In 1950s Spain, notions of womanhood operated within a Catholic, patriarchal, bourgeois
logic which judged women by their sexual decorum, stripped women of their sexuality and
eroded notions of female sexual desire. A vigorous system of state censorship strictly
controlled the dissemination of ideas which challenged this moral modelling of the female
persona. However, the subject matter of the novela neorrealista femenina proved to be fertile
terrain for the censor and was regularly censored on grounds of moral subversion.
Descriptions of female sexual desire, sexual relations outside the bounds of marriage and
female nakedness were all expurgated from the published copy for contravening prevailing
moral codes.
Paradoxically, in a society that based its moral codes on Catholic, conservative norms,
prostitutes and working-class women − it would appear − were exempt from the moral codes
imposed on their middle-class counterparts. Indeed, passages in which women of a lesser
social standing cross moral boundaries remained largely untouched by the censors’ thick blue
pencil.
Through an examination of the original manuscripts of Carmen Kurtz’ La Vieja Ley (1956) and
Mercedes Salisachs’ Una mujer llega al pueblo (1957) this paper will examine this double
standard on female sexuality.
Nicola Rooney – Trinity College Dublin
Challenges to authority from the Basque clergy during the Franco dictatorship
The Franco dictatorship based its claims to legitimacy primarily on a strict identification with
the Catholic Church, known as “National Catholicism”. In the Basque Country, National
Catholicism reinforced the divisions of the Spanish Civil War, asserting the dominance of the
victorious Spanish culture of the Franco regime over the defeated culture of Basque regional
nationalism. This paper will examine the various ways in which a section of the Basque
clergy, opposed to National Catholicism, challenged the authority of both political and church
leaders during the final decade of the dictatorship. Although Basque priests had been
involved in acts of protest since the end of the civil war, from 1965 onwards the situation
became more acute. The 1960’s saw the emergence of a new generation of priests that had
not participated in the war. Encouraged by the declarations of the Second Vatican Council
(1961-5) in favour of the mutual independence of Church and State and the duty of the
Church to defend human rights, these priests began to question the legitimacy of the Franco
regime in sermons, clandestine documents, and other forms of protest. The increasing
militancy of these protests, combined with the attention given to them in the international
media, created a worrying situation for both civil and ecclesiastical authorities and led to the
creation of a special prison for priests in 1968, a visual symbol of the disintegration of
National Catholicism.
Elisa Martín Ortega – Universitat Pompeu Fabra
The world of exile: an approach to the place of Sephardic language in
contemporary poetry
The literary influence of Hispanic Judaism –marked, since 1492, by stealth and silence–
has been broadly analyzed by 16th ant 17th century criticism, but occupies a marginal place
in contemporary studies. The aim of this paper is to highlight such an influence through an
approach to Clarisse Nikoïdsky’s works (Lyon, 1938-1996) –novelist in French and poetess in
Sephardic– and its influence in Juan Gelman’s poetry (Buenos Aires, 1930). The Sephardic
language offers a clear example of alterity in the sinus of Spanish itself. It allows an approach
to the most relegated territories of language.
Clarisse Nicoïdsky holds a peripheral position in Hispanic poetry from 20th century. In a
brief justification of her poems she declared that Sephardic was “la lingua de la familia, del
secreto, del susto y –quisas– de la vergüenza” [C. NICOÏDSKI 1992:36]. She made the
decision to use it for her writings after her mother’s death, perceived as the last bastion of a
declining tradition.
The discovery of her poems opened a new path in Juan Gelman’s poetry, deeply marked
by exile from his country. The meeting with Nicoïdsky pushed him to write a book in
Sephardic, Dibaxu (1994), in which the most forgotten linguistic territory –and, for him, also
alien– became the right way to express his own tragedy.
This paper will build a bridge between the uprooting forced by political authority, and the
study of linguistic and cultural borders (Sephardic culture in Hispanic world). Poetry becomes,
in this case, its confluence point.
Reviews and publishers for a political and cultural transformation in Spain during the 60’s and the 70’s
Spain on 1976, thirty years ago, first political and cultural reviews proposing a breaking-off
with the Francoist society were edited. There is, for example, El Viejo Topo (The old mole).
These proposals attempted to go beyond formal democracy and so-called “real socialism”.
Censorship had still not disappeared; these reviews and publishers had troubles with it. But it
was time for the protest movements aiming to participate in the new society after Francisco
Franco’s death, to emerge. During the Francoist period, publications and publishers that tried
to take advantage of the dictatorship’s narrow margins appeared. We can consider Nuestro
Cine (Our cinema), a review that brought out much more than cinema criticism or information
on films that could not be seen in Spain; or the publisher Ariel, which became a reference for
history, laws, sociology or philosophy, also by the publication of some foreign authors for the
first time. This paper presents some publications, from the sixties and the seventies, that were
the voice of a critical though and agents of its dissemination. They were references,
authorities, for a significant part of population.