Adrian Kane

Blood in the Water: Salvadoran Rivers of Testimony and Resistance

Adrian Taylor Kane — Mon, 06 May 2013 14:25:15 PDT

From the 1970s to the early 1990s the dominant forms of literary production in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua were testimonial literature and literature of resistance. During this time period, all three of these Central American countries were embroiled in bloody civil wars, and the written word was employed on the cultural front as a means of denouncing and resisting various forms of oppression. For both historical and artistic reasons, rivers frequently play an important role in cultural production from and about this era and have thus become embedded in the complex web of ideological signifiers that comprises the discursive practices of Central American literature.

Blood in the Water: Rivers and Resistance in Central American Literature and Film

Adrian Kane — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 08:13:16 PDT

In the 1970s and 80s the dominant forms of literary production in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua were testimonial literature and literature of resistance. During this time period all three of these Central American countries were embroiled in bloody civil wars, and the written word was employed on the cultural front as a means of denouncing and resisting various forms of oppression. For both historical and artistic reasons, rivers frequently play an important role in cultural production from and about this era. This paper thus presents a hermeneutical analysis of the imagery of rivers in Central American poetry, film, and fiction from and about this period with the aim of better understanding the implications of such imagery in light of literary theories of resistance, testimony, and trauma.

In Mercedes Durand’s poem “Réquiem para el Sumpul,” the central image is of the river that became the site of the 1980 massacre of hundreds of villagers in the Department of Chalatenango, El Salvador. The Sumpul, she writes, is a “río testigo,” a witness to unspeakable crimes against humanity. In this poem, the conventional trope of a river as a source of life and a symbol of rebirth has been replaced by an association with violent death and loss of national innocence. In this essay, I assert that this is precisely the function that rivers take on in several Central American works that treat of the historical events of the dictatorships and civil wars in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua. Specifically, I will draw on passages from Arturo Arias’s 1979 novel Después de las bombas, Luis Mandoki’s 2004 film Voces inocentes, Ernesto Cardenal’s 1979 poem “Ecología,” and Elsie Rivas Gómez’s 2005 poetry collection Swimming in El Río Sumpul. The theoretical framework of my analysis is Barbara Harlow’s notion of resistance literature, John Beverley’s and George Yúdice’s concepts of testimonio, Max Horkheimer’s theory of the revolt of nature, and Cathy Caruth’s, Soshana Feldman’s and Dori Laub’s work on trauma narrative. By supporting my readings with these theories, I argue that through a variety of uses, including metaphor, mythology, personification, and symbolism, rivers play a central role in creating an aesthetic of resistance in contemporary Central American cultural production.

Surrealism in Miguel Ángel Asturias’s Leyendas de Guatemala

Adrian Kane — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 08:07:12 PDT

Humor, Irony and Surrealism in Luis Cardoza y Aragón’s Maelstrom: Films telescopiados (1926)

Adrian Kane — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 14:05:12 PDT

Guatemalan novelist and critic Arturo Arias has suggested that the disappearance of the socialist block and the crisis of Marxism at the end of the twentieth century have provided an opportunity to reevaluate with fresh eyes much of the forgotten production of the avant-garde era in Spanish American literature (La identidad de la palabra 18). Indeed, in his study of twentieth century Guatemalan fiction, Arias argues that Spanish American avant-garde production has a direct aesthetic link to postmodern fiction (19). This assertion supports the work of several literary critics who maintain that the avant-garde era inspired many of the subsequent innovations in modern and postmodern Spanish American fiction (Bustos Fernández 18; Martínez 116; Verani 69; Burgos 111; Osorio XXXV). Although Spanish American novels from the 1920s have received a considerable increase in critical attention during the last thirty years, Central American fiction from this period has been largely ignored.¹ Indeed, as Forster and Jackson note, critical work in all areas of the Central American avant-garde is "sketchy," and "much more careful work is needed" (178). Despite the relatively limited quantity of Central American avant-garde production, the lack of critical attention noted by Forster and Jackson stems from a larger problem noted by Arias in a 1996 article. He states: "Central American literature is still seen as peripheral to the rest of Latin American literature [. . .] in spite of the Nobel Prize awarded to Miguel Angel Asturias in 1967, and the presence of other first-rate Central American figures such as Augusto Monterroso, Ernesto Cardenal or Luis Cardoza y Aragón" ("The Magic and/of Eroticism" 182). Since the publication of Arias's article, the status of Central American literature has also improved in Latin American studies, but the necessity of this special issue is evidence that there are still many gaps to be filled due to decades of inattention in literary criticism to the Central American region. Critical analysis of Central American literature from the 1920s, in particular, will help provide a more complete picture of the continental project of the Spanish American avant-garde. The present essay focuses on Maelstrom: Films telescopiados, a lesser-known text by one of Guatemala's most prolific twentieth-century authors, Luis Cardoza y Aragón. My reading of this novel attempts to illustrate the relation between the use of humor, irony and Surrealism as elements of play, and the way in which the text undermines dominant intellectual discourses and literary conventions.

El Tigre de Flavio Herrera: Entre el Criollismo y el Vanguardismo

Adrian Kane — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 10:49:53 PDT

En su prólogo a la novela El tigre, Francisco Albizúrez Palma la describe como “una de las más conocidas obras literarias” de Guatemala, aseverando que resulta “fundamental para el conocimiento y exploración de la literatura guatemalteca” (1989: 8-9). Esta novela de Flavio Herrera fue publicada en 1932 y desde entonces ha sido leída por la crítica principalmente como una novela telúrica que forma parte del movimiento criollista. Si bien es cierto que esta obra demuestra varias tendencias de la novela telúrica, hasta el momento la crítica apenas ha comentado la evidente influencia del vanguardismo que se manifiesta en ella. Por lo tanto, en este estudio destacaré los elementos estéticos en El tigre que provienen de los movimientos vanguardistas de Europa y las Américas a principios del siglo veinte y resaltaré la importancia de esta estética para un análisis hermenéutico de la novela. Además, discutiré las implicaciones de tal lectura para el concepto de la vanguardia centroamericana que actualmente se maneja por la crítica.

The Natural World in Latin American Literatures: Ecocritical Essays on Twentieth Century Writings

Adrian Taylor Kane — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 10:49:51 PDT

This volume advances the ecocritical conversation among Latin Americanists, furthering insight into the relationship between humans and their environments, transcending national boundaries by addressing diverse regions. The forms of environmental criticism practiced converge with literary history, aesthetic theory, postcolonialism, and Marxism, broadening the ecocritical approach and providing a strong overview to this growing critical movement

A Subversive Alliance: The Avant-Garde Roots of Postmodern Fiction in Latin America

Adrian Kane — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 23:08:26 PDT

Ludics as Subversion in Arturo Arias’s Sopa de Caracol (2002)

Adrian Kane — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 23:06:20 PDT

Nature and the Discourse of Modernity in Spanish American Avant-Garde Fiction

Adrian Kane — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 23:06:02 PDT