Book Reviews

Reviews

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Frenk, Margit. Corpus de la antigua lírica popular hispánica (siglos XV a XVII). Nueva biblioteca de erudición y crítica. Madrid: Castalia, 1986. 1249 pp.

Labrador, José J., C. Ángel Zorita, and Ralph A. DiFranco, editors. Cancionero de poesías varias. Manuscrito N.º 617 de la Biblioteca Real de Madrid. Madrid: El Crotalón, 1986. 669 pp.

Labrador, José J., Ralph A. DiFranco, and María T. Cacho, editors. Cancionero de Pedro de Rojas. Prologue by José Manuel Blecua. Colección Cancioneros Castellanos, I. Cleveland: Cleveland State U., 1988. 349 pp.

In scholarly research pertaining to early Spanish literature, one dilemma confronting the modern researcher is whether to analyze and study texts on the basis of available editions, or, if these are unavailable or deemed unsuitable, whether to edit the text itself, and then proceed with the analysis. If one opts for the former course, then, one either trusts available editions, or at least corroborates their contents against the manuscript source. Such an effort can be extremely time consuming, but may, depending on the edition used, determine the seriousness and validity of the analysis produced. Such is the course Margit Frenk has chosen in the large tome she has compiled, the result of efforts begun nearly fifty years ago and requiring some forty years in compilation. On the other hand, the nucleus of Labrador and DiFranco with different collaborators (identified hereinafter as Labrador-DiFranco) have chosen to edit the text, in this case, entire, hitherto unpublished cancionero collections, so that they may be made available for scholarly analysis. The importance and usefulness of this kind of scholarship is obvious. Frenk’s having at her disposal the Labrador-DiFranco editions would have obviated consulting the manuscripts of these two works. A s it is she includes eight entries (1170) from Biblioteca Real ms. 617, the Cancionero de poesías varias, and twenty-three (1171) from Biblioteca Nacional ms. 3924, Cancionero de Pedro de Rojas. For purposes of this review, however, this is fortunate, for the high degree of correspondences between the information regarding these codices that Frenk and Labrador-DiFranco provide independently corroborates the reliability of their work.

If thickness of text and quantity/quality of knowledge comprised go hand in hand, Margit Frenk’s tome is appropriately ample. This work, the happy result of years of painstaking research that began in 1944, as the author admits (i), has as its fundamental purpose to offer «la presentación cuidadosa de las canciones, con su aparato crítico y su documentación complementaria» (xxiii). The collection consists of «breves cantares populares, y popularizantes, de aquellos que los poetas de los Siglos de Oro gustaban de glosar, de volver a lo divino, de intercalar en sus ‘ensaladas’ y romances; que los dramaturgos hacían cantar a sus personajes aldeanos; que los eruditos incorporaban en sus colecciones de refranes, sus diccionarios y sus tratados sobre gramática, poesía, música, juegos infantiles; que la gente citaba en sus conversaciones y en escritos de toda índole» (viii).

The work is divided into Preámbulo (i-iii), Prólogo (v-xxvi), Bibliografía (xxvi-lviii), followed by four plates, the Corpus de la antigua lírica (1-1062), two appendices -«Fragmentos» (1063-81) and «Breve antología de seguidillas y coplas tardías» (1083-1132)-, «Adiciones y correcciones de última hora» (1133-37), and five indices: «Autores y Obras» (1141-66); «Cancioneros y Pliegos sueltos» (1167-82); «Ensaladas y Romances que contienen cantares» (1183-91); «Primeros versos» (1193-1244); and «Índice General» (1245-49).

The corpus itself is divided into twelve sections: «I. Amor» (1-349), in turn with 3 subsections: «Amor gozoso», «Amor adolorido», and «Desamor»; «II. Lamentaciones» (351-98); «III. Del pasado y del presente» (399-440); «IV. Por campos y mares» (441 519); «V. Labradores, pastores, artesanos, comerciantes» (521-79); «VI. Fiestas» (581-687); «VII. Música y baile» (689-743); «VIII. Otros regocijos» (745-82); «IX. Juegos de amor» (783-850); «X. Sátiras y burlas» (851-960); «XI. Más refranes rimados» (961-86); «XII. Rimas de niños y para niños» (987-1062).

Besides dividing the corpus into thematic units, an arbitrary if not facile task, Frenk has had to contend with myriad complex variables. She does so by means of an elaborate critical apparatus which she divides into six sections «Fuentes, Variantes, Texto, Glosas, Antologías, Contextos» (xiii). Other minor information may follow divided into the following sections: «Otras Fuentes, A Lo Divino, Imitaciones, Menciones, Correspondencias, Supervivencias, Paralelos Románicos y Otros» (xxi). Frenk’s discussion of her modus operandi and rationale in each of these sections takes the reader into a labyrinth of detail that cannot be summarized meaningfully without providing abundant textual examples to elucidate what is meant. Suffice it to say that few without the expertise and stature of Frenk could have controlled the variables as admirably as she has. Although the manner of control may be arbitrary, it is not random. Rather it exemplifies a judicious marshalling of detail backed by years of erudite experience, and one might add, straightforward intelligence.

Frenk’s prologue makes clear that not only how to document a problem, but also what to include proved problematical. Her research revealed that as popular lyric was adopted through the years, it was also adapted; that it was not simply a question of «copiar» but rather one of «utilizar»; that the influence between popular and learned lyric was minimally bilateral. And thus, what she had once planned as «el Corpus acabó siendo un corpus, o si se quiere, una extensa antología» (viii). Her attempt throughout, however, remains to present, to the degree possible, the most authentically popular lyric.

The tremendous amount of information amassed in

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this volume and the extraordinary insight with which it has been made accessible to the user makes this work indispensable for lovers of the «antigua lírica popular». To Frenk’s credit, one could easily preface the title of her exemplarily scholarly corpus with «El arte de establecer un corpus...».

The editions by Labrador-DiFranco manifest essentially and expectedly the same division of content: Introductory remarks, «textos», «notas», «bibliografía», «índices», and «láminas». Their stated purpose in each is to make cancionero poetry accessible to abroad audience: In the Cancionero de poesías varias «a un público más amplio que el de especialistas» (xv) and in the Cancionero de Pedro de Rojas «al lector moderno» (xxxiii). The latter volume inaugurates the new «Colección de Cancioneros Castellanos» whose ostensible purpose is to make available entire cancionero collections. This will allow individual poems to be studied within their own complete contextuality. The long life they hope for this series may be cut short only by the tremendous energy and enthusiasm they bring to the project. Already they have three other volumes of cancioneros published, cancioneros contained in Biblioteca Nacional codex 531 (Cartapacio de Francisco Morán de la Estrella, 1989), codex 3902 (1989), and codex 2803 (1989), the latter two titled Cancionero de poesías varias. Biblioteca Nacional codex 1587 may have already appeared in print and more are forthcoming.

The introductory remarks contain similar kinds of information including extensive codicological descriptions, description of content, and other information such as the kinds of poetry included within each, the authors, the history of both manuscripts, and so forth. The Cancionero de Pedro de Rojas presents some of this material in indices as it contains five to the three of the Cancionero de poesías varias. These indices (with an asterisk indicating indices shared by both) are: *«de autores»,«de obras en que se cita el Ms. 3924», «de poemas que el Ms. 3924 comparte con otros códices», *«onomástico», and *«de primeros versos» (xi). The Cancionero de poesías varias includes first lines of poems under the names of the authors in its «Índice de autores». A section in the prologue entitled «Historia del manuscrito» (xxi-xxxii) presents studies that deal with its codex, ms. 617 of the Biblioteca Real. This treatment is much more informative than the list found in the «Indice de obras en que se cita el Ms. 3924» of the Cancionero de Pedro de Rojas. It is a pity that the fascinating detective-bibliographic work in the section «Historia del manuscrito» is not included for the Cancionero de Pedro de Rojas. Still, with the index the editors provide, anyone wishing to reconstruct its history has the bibliographic wherewithal to do so. The relationship of ms. 617 to other codices is also dealt with in its introduction -«Cotejo con otros cancioneros» (xxxvi-xxxvii), whereas the same information is treated in the «Índice de poemas que el Ms. 3924 comparte con otros códices». The onomastics index of the Cancionero de poesías varias also contains the first line of the poems under the name of the poet. The latter information is lacking in the Cancionero de Pedro de Rojas although here the poets are themselves examined in more detail in the introduction under the heading «Los poetas» (xxvii-xxxii). The index of first lines is standard in both. All these indices create eminent accessibility for anyone interested in quick access to the poetic treasures contained within these two collections.

The editors reveal the interest these works have held for notable scholars throughout the years. They also make clear the relationship of these cancioneros to others. Part of the importance, the uniqueness, of the Cancionero de poesías varias lies in the chronological range of the poems it contains: c. 1392 to c. 1568. It constitutes a veritable poetic convivencia of medieval and renaissance modes of expression. Although, based on paleographic evidence, this Cancionero de poesías varias was thought to be a product of the seventeenth century -«error en que también participaron J. Massó Torrent, R. Menéndez Pidal, E. Cotarelo y J. Artiles» (xviii)-, the editors offer 1568 and 1571 as termini a quo and ad quem for the completion of the tome, since one poem treats the imprisonment of Prince don Carlos (1568) and no poem mentions Lepanto (157 1) nor the disaster of the Invincible Armada (1588) (xxi). While the a quo date seems reasonably founded (assuming that no other historical references demanding a later terminus a quo have been overlooked), the ad quem date lends itself to debate. The compiler, too, remains elusive.

The editors argue that the Cancionero de poesías varias is not a haphazard collection since the first 149 extant folios contain fifteenth-century poems, folios 224r to the end offer sixteenth-century poems, and the middle portion presents a mixture of poems from both centuries (xxxiii). Still, they admit that this «mencionado orden es muy laxo, no sólo por la mezcla de la parte central sino porque en todas las tres partes, dentro de cada una de ellas, la cronología se rompe con facilidad» (xxxiii).

The Cancionero de Pedro de Rojas, in contrast, «está fechado... 1582» (xx), and has a specific compiler: «Pedro de Rojas Niño de Ayala, segundo hijo del primer Conde de Mora y de doña Francisca de Portocarrero y Guzmán...» (xix).

Errare humanum est and the bibliographies in both editions, while laudable for their general completeness, are prone to some unnecessary duplication of entries -included one under title and again under name of author or editor. In this instance, it i s still better to err by commission than omission, but not so for the few errors of date and pagination appearing in the bibliography.

The Cancionero de poesías varias lists four plates but does not indicate their folio number. The two listed in Cancionero de Pedro de Rojas are identified. Both works contain unannounced plates appropriately collated within the texts. The Cancionero de poesías varias offers three more constituting pages 312, 394, and 510. The Cancionero de Pedro de Rojas at page

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3 presents what appears to be the title page of codex 3924 and is useless for checking accuracy of transcription. The other plates are useful. Although my examination reveals some errors of transcription, they are so minor and infrequent that they do not vitiate these editions as bases for literary study.

The plates of codex 617 also allow one to witness the poor legibility of some of the script where ink from one side has bled through to the other.

The reader has to question certain editorial practices such as in the Cancionero de poesías varias in the first line of poem 338 which reads: «La estrella da [de] Citharea» (352). Why add «[de]» but not delete «da», instead of having an editorial de letion followed by an editorial insertion as seen in poem 431, line 56 «y a dónde por tu caussa me an lle(g)[v]ado»? In the same work, the last line of the sonnet numbered 259 reads: «con sola la caussa de mi poder [padecer]» (306). One assumes that «padecer» should replace «poder» for enhancement of meaning. But even if it enhanced the meaning in poem 259, and «poder» were deleted, the substitution of «poder» with «padecer» converts an appropriately hendecasyllabic line of a sonnet to an inappropriately dodecasyllabic one. In the Cancionero de Pedro de Rojas, poem thirteen, why introduce the stanzas after line 30 as «o[c]tauas» (25) or poem 101 as an «O[c]taua» (140) when the form which assimilates the implosive velar -«otaua»- must have been an accept able variant? In villancico 85 the refrain is presented as: «Mirad en que [he] dado / si es donosa cosa: / que me namorado / d[e] una melindrosa» (114). Why insert «[he]» before «dado» in the first line, but not before «enamorado» in the third? The six-syllable perfection in the fourth line enabled by an original «duna» is somewhat distorted by the insertion of «e» in «d[e]una». There are others. In short, the text could have been handled somewhat more consistently.

More important than these perceived inconsistencies, however, is that the editors have been straightforward, have shown their hand, and thus, allow their readers to quibble with their editorial interpretations. No edition can satisfy everyone.

The editors have indeed reached their goal of making these cancionero texts accessible to a wider audience. And while they do make them palatable to «el lector moderno» -their punctuation, for example, is extremely useful-, this reviewer, at least, would have appreciated more lexical notes which appear to be largely, but not entirely, absent.

It is worth emphasizing that these observations of what the editors have done with the texts in no way intend to, nor can they, diminish the great service that Labrador-DiFranco have done for study of the Spanish lyric. Because they duly notify scholars of editorial intervention, and because of the overall accuracy of transcription, scholars can proceed to treat the poems as they see fit. The energy and dedication required to carry on the thankless but ever-so-important task of editing must not go unnoticed nor unappreciated. Labrador-DiFranco, too, have amassed tremendous amounts of information concerning these cancioneros which will allow others to build on the solid foundation they have laid. Even with minor blemishes seen from the perspective of one reviewer, their work has invaluably benefited, and added to the study of the Hispanic lyric.

Thus, to Margit Frenk for her Corpus, to José J. Labrador, Ralph A. DiFranco, to C. Ángel Zorita and María T. Cacho for their editions, we appreciatively doff our hats.

Anthony J. Cárdenas
University of New Mexico

Lomax, Derek W. and David Mackenzie, Editors. God and Man in Medieval Spain: Essays in Honour of J. R. L. Highfield. Warminister, England: Aris and Phillips, 1989. 168 pp.

One of the problems frequently encountered in the typical collection of essays found in Festschriften and similar collections is the lack of coherence or of a unified focus. In most instances, the only unifying factor is the person to whom these works are dedicated. It was a pleasant surprise, however, to discover that God and Man in Medieval Spain is an atypical collection, characterized by contributions which seem mutually interdependent, well written and well researched. These writings commemorate the career of Hispanist and history professor J. R. L. Highfield, since they are the fruits of his former students and colleagues and are devoted to his areas of specialization, Medieval Spain, its history, literature and customs. The volume contains ten essays which seem varied, but which are indeed complementary in their scope.

The foreword to the volume by Derek Lomax presents a brief biographical sketch of Highfield, his impact on his students and scholarship as well as a bibliography of his life’s works. Roger Collins’s study, «Doubts and Certainties in the Churches of Early Medieval Spain», provides a chronology and an overview of church-building based on surviving documents and learned speculation. Raymond McCluskey’s «The Genesis of the Concordia of Martín of León» sheds new light on the minor Spanish writer and causes us to ponder whether Martín was really «minor». Derek Lomax’s «Heresy and Orthodoxy in the Fall of Almohad Spain» traces the evolution of religious views and intolerance in Almohad Spain and shows the role of Fernando III and Jaime I in the Reconquest.

Angus MacKay’s contribution, «The Virgin’s Vassals», treats Gonzalo de Berceo’s Milagros and Alfonso X’s Cantigas as a sociological representation of the lord/vassal relationship in a religious context. Mary is the señora natural to the ladrón devoto as Alfonso VI is the señor natural to the Cid. Peter Linehan’s «The Accession of Alfonso X (1252) and the Origins of the War of the Spanish Succession» takes up the controversy as to whether Alfonso had ever knighted himself and draws on both tradition as well as on historical materials.

Alan J. Forey’s «The Beginning of Proceedings

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Against the Aragonese Templars» shows Jaime II’s hesitations in his dealings with the Order of the Temple and some of his possible motivations. Anthony Lluttrell treats another order, that of the Hospital, and its religious-military functions and organization in «Hospitalier Life in Aragon 1319-1370». Aragon-Cataluña also figures into the following article by Peter Rycraft, «The Late Medieval Catalan Death-Bed», which discusses death-bed rites, wills and the role of Vincent Ferrerin Eastern Spain. John Edwards’s «Religion, Constitutionalism and the Inquisition in Teruel, 1484-5» shows the social and legal impact of and reaction to the arrival of the Inquisition in Teruel in the fifteenth century; special emphasis is given to the Inquisition’s effect on the converso population of the region. The volume concludes with Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s «Cardinal Cisneros as a Patron of Printing». This final article, which deals with more «recent» Medieval history, shows Cisneros as a patron of letters and reveals how very little is really known about the cardinal-statesman-humanist.

The volume reads well and contains relatively few typographical errors. Those points which border on the controversial are well documented and merit no negative criticisms in terms of context or content. The only defect of note in the entire work is the inconsistent usage and forms of Spanish proper names throughout the work. Lineman, in particular, inconsistently refers to the Spanish kings in both their English as well as Castilian names (e.g., Philip II, but Felipe V). This objection is stylistic only and does not detract from an otherwise scholarly and well-balanced work which treats Spain from the perspectives of history, literature and society. This compilation of essays is an important contribution to modern scholarship and should form part of the nucleus of any serious collection of Spanish civilization and Medieval studies.

Michael G. Paulson
Kutztown University

Arenal, Electa and Stacy Schlau. Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works. Translations by Amanda Powell. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989. 450 pp.

With the exception of Santa Teresa de Jesús and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, whose works have been included in the literary canon, little has surfaced from the untold treasure of religious essays, poetry, plays and letters written by Hispanic nuns during the late 15th through the 18th century. The product of years of extensive research in libraries and convent archives on three continents, Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works presents such writings which, until now, have been lost or forgotten. Within the conservative context of Hispanic literary criticism, Arenal’s and Schlau’s methodology is as insightful as it is unorthodox. The authors cross several barriers to look at historical, psychological, social and religious attitudes in the selected works of over a dozen writers from Spain and the New World whose primary predecessor, in spiritual and literary terms was Santa Teresa. Substantial excerpts from the original texts are included and each is accompanied by a translation in English.

Given the problems of censorship and inquisitorial threats facing nearly all the writers included in Untold Sisters, it is not surprising that evasion, encoding, and clever verbal camouflage abound in the religious writing of these women. Arenal’s and Schlau’s critical decoding of the works is both technically skillful and rich in revelations beyond the literary. In their own words: «While the purported objective of their work is always the praise of God and the promotion of both the author’s and the audiences’s fidelity to the Church, we have discovered much more: rare glimpses into daily life, relationships of strife and affection with other women, flashes of insight, assertions of individual power, and daring leaps into the submerged inner world of imagination and feeling. In fact, these texts contain almost the only record we have of the consciousness of early modern women in Hispanic lands» (p. 12).

Recognizing the range of difficulties and limitations facing women living within a cloistered community, Arenal and Schlau point out the paradoxical reality of these writers who lived in a subculture free of the restraints and possible violence of marriage, the perils of childbirth, the toil and tedium of family. Free to manage their convent home for themselves, nuns could enjoy freedoms within their religious family and cultivate talents denied their female counterparts in the outside world. The writing of plays, music and poetry to celebrate important holidays was a highly respected activity. The writing of Lives, both a religious exercise as well as a means of recording and validating the saintliness of one’s spiritual experience, was encouraged by peers and superiors. Since nearly all of this literary activity in addition to a great body of correspondence was meant to be read by other women, much of the material gathered in Untold Sisters reflects an intricate weaving of affection, literature and spirituality within a community of women.

Of major interest to Peninsular scholars is the discussion of Discalced Carmelites Ana de San Bartolomé (1549-1626) and María de San José (1548-1603), both close personal friends and direct spiritual and literary inheritors of Santa Teresa. No teworthy is Arenal’s and Schlau’s treatment of the ways the two very different nuns (Ana was of humble, peasant origins; María was from a highly cultured family of converted Jews) assimilated the Teresian vision and then stamped it with their own peculiar style and perspective. Of equal interest is Marcela de San Félix, author of a number of loas, coloquios espirituales, and romances. The authors examine her value as a writer in her own right and as a gifted individual dealing with the problems and benefits of being the illegitimate daughter of Lope de Vega.

Writing nuns led very different lives from their female counterparts in the outside world and, at the same time, differed dramatically from their religious male counterparts. Where Michel Foucault identifies

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the 17th century Church edicts that transformed sexuality into discourse, Arenal and Schlau go one step further and examine some of the implications for women who employed religious discourse to channel sexuality: «Quite unlike men who hunted down and expunged desire, women, instead of engaging in self exam and abnegation as they did before becoming nuns, created, interpreted and translated sex into religious discourse... In becoming a nun, a woman became a Bride of Christ. The religious symbolism for men was very different. Sublimating sexuality in the real world but giving it free rein in the spiritually erotic imagination, nuns submitted to church but paradoxically won for themselves a self knowledge, pleasure, independence and recognition that of her women never achieved» (p. 17).

The situation of New World nuns was markedly different from that of their European counterparts. Living within a less homogeneous environment, these women partook of and contributed to a multi-ethnic, colonial culture that was, by turns, rigid, fluid, ever dynamic. Collected in Untold Sisters are writings by nuns from the middle and aristocratic classes and works by Indian nuns. Writers studied include the Apóstolas of Perú, Josefa de la Providencia and Antonia Lucía del Espíritu Santo, and Mexicans María Anna Águeda de San Ignacio, Mariana de la Encarnación and Madre María Marcela.

A fault, if there is one to be found in Untold Sisters, is the seeming imbalance between the sections dedicated to Spanish and Spanish American writers. Although four chapters of the book concern Peninsular writers, only two chapters deal with New World writers. Offsetting this apparent imbalance is the fact that a nearly equal number of writers from both areas are considered in Untold Sisters. Not to be overlooked is the consistently high quality of criticism and style in this co-authored work as well as the grace and intelligence of the translations by Amanda Powell. This is a landmark work in Hispanic studies, of great interest and use to Hispanists as well as scholars in the fields of women’s studies, religion and spirituality.

Barbara Dale May
University of Oregon

Fothergill-Payne, Louise. Seneca and ‘Celestina’. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. xvii + 172 pp.

With a mixture of adages, proverbs, aphorisms and pithy sayings interwoven into a story of young love, sex and greed, Fernando de Rojas produced a work for the ages, and a structural precedent for the direction of both the modern novel and the modern drama. In Celestina, Fernando de Rojas gives abundant but incomplete clues to his diverse sources for the proverbial sayings (Solomon, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Cota, Mena and others) amongst whom was Seneca, the moralist, frequently filtered through the sententiae of Petrarch, the poet, who oddly enough, is not mentioned by Rojas. Since the publication of Rojas’s work, it has been an interesting and challenging undertaking to locate the original contexts of his sources, and hence to verify a portion of Rojas’s inspiration, as well as his method of composition. Rojas produced, on the one hand, an intentional parody of courtly love and an ironic rendering of the pseudophilosophy popular in his day, while on the other hand, he wove a tale of unwitting ambiguity, whose burlesque expressions were taken literally by much of his audience and interpreted as a profound treatise on the joys and burdens of life.

María Rosa Lida de Malkiel (La originalidad artística de la Celestina) has listed the scholars who have commented on the Petrarchan sources of the Celestina (Farinelli, Menéndez y Pelayo, Cejador y Frauca, Bonilla y San Martín, Castro Guisasola, and likewise Deyermond and Gilman, among others). Although in her marvelous work Lida de Malkiel referred to Seneca for his dramatic influence on Rojas, she did not note the sources of the sayings in Seneca that were passed by Petrarch to Rojas.

Castro Guisasola had proposed that Rojas’s sources were found directly in Petrarch, while Gilman suggested that they probably came instead from Rojas’s first-hand readings of the works by Seneca, Terence, Cicero, and others. As proof, Gilman cited books that formed part of Rojas’s personal library, including Seneca’s epistles (La España de Fernando de Rojas, 431). From Fothergill-Payne’s research one can deduce that both Gilman and Castro Guisasola were right in that Rojas did utilize Senecan originals, but as he progressed with his writing, he also relied more heavily on Petrarch’s distilled versions of the Senecan sententiae (105).

It behooved Fothergill-Payne to probe deeply into the pertinent works and thus to specify the elusive Senecan sources. She organizes her work along the following lines: a) Senecan tradition in the medieval period, b) commentators of Seneca, Alonso de Cartagena and Pero Díaz de Toledo, c) a view of Celestina through the eyes of the ‘antiguo auto’, d) prevalence of Senecan thoughts in Rojas’s continuation of the original one act story, and, finally e) a scrutiny for Senecan ideas of all the acts of the Celestina. As a result of this study, Fothergill-Payne’s considered judgement is that the Celestina is neither a pessimistic nor a serious work (as others besides Rojas would have it), but a parody from beginning to end. Moreover, Fothergill-Payne concludes that beyond the first act, Rojas is the sole author of the work, including the interpolations and the added acts.

Her research presents a clear picture of the specific sayings of Seneca that appear in the Celestina and this offers at least a hazy glimpse of the method by which the masterpiece was composed. It would seem to this reviewer that Rojas first wrote the basic stream of the action with a love story parodying courtly love. After this basic plot was completed, he took the index of Petrarch’s works and the sententiae along with the epistulae of Seneca, and as he went through the collections, he would recall the precise point in his play at which the truisms would fit into his plot, and

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there he would inject the items of popular philosophy to reiterate the irony of his ideas and simultaneously to advance the action of the drama.

After the summarizing conclusion, Fothergill-Payne provides a selected bibliography. The format of the text is impeccably neat with notes at the end, enhanced by quotations from Seneca, and concluded by a general index. All in all, this is the type of book one likes to consult. Fothergill-Payne’s investigation is impressive both for its originality and thoroughness, its admirable scholarly scruples and its smooth integration of facts from a variety of studies.

John Lihani
University of Kentucky

Dunn, Oliver and James E. Kelley, Jr. The Diario of Christopher Columbus’s First Voyage to America, 1492-1493. Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989. 504 pp.

Columbus’s Diario exists only in a manuscript of Bartolomé de Las Casas who partly summarized and partly quoted the manuscript available to him. The present volume in the American Exploration and Travel Series is intended to make available an accurate and complete transcription of Las Casas’s manuscript of the Diario. Dunn, a specialist in Spanish, and Kelley, long involved in the study of the history of European cartography and navigation in late medieval times, have given us much more. The volume contains an introduction describing the editor’s method, a transcription of Carlos Sanz’s 1962 facsimile edition of Las Casas’s manuscript, a translation into English, notes, a concordance of the significant words of the transcription, a bibliography of the sources cited in the notes and an index. Completing the volume are an unusual modern portrait of Columbus by Leonardo Lasansky and two pages reproducing folio 8 r and v of Las Casas’s manuscript from the National Library in Madrid.

The transcription reproduces the details of the Diario manuscript including special characters, cancelled text, interlinear insertions and Las Casas’s marginal notes. The editors have facilitated reference to the manuscript by retaining folio numbers, adding recto and verso designations and putting folio numbers at the top of the transcription pages. The lines of the transcription have been numbered to correspond to their position in the manuscript, a practice not followed by other editions.

The translation, which was made from the computer-printed version of the transcription, is literal but not awkward. Sentences tend to be longer than in normal English usage and the English grammatical constructions parallel the Spanish. Some Spanish words, especially of a technical nature (e.g., toneles, quintales, isleo) were left untranslated but explained in the notes. It is easy to follow the transcription and the translation together because they are printed on facing pages and page and folio b reaks are closely coordinated. Las Casas’s notes and cancelled text are not included in the translation, but the reader familiar with Spanish can easily find them by looking across at the transcription.

The notes document peculiarities of the Diario manuscript not apparent in the transcription, identify significant differences between the transcription and translation and those of other editions, most notably those of Alvar, Morison and Jane Vigneras, and provide background information and interpretation. The geographical and navigational emphasis of the notes reflects the editors’ interests and the issues they hope their transcription will clarify (such as the «double accounting» of distances and the effects of ocean currents on course bearings).

The concordance contains individual words, tagged with their folio and line numbers, The words are listed in English alphabetical order so ch and ll appear with words beginning with c and l, respectively, but c with cedilla is placed between c and d and ñ between n and o. No reason is given why Spanish alphabetical order was not observed. The editors’ order helps the English language user but anyone who is going to handle the concordance would have to be familiar with Spanish. The index of topics and names appearing in the transcription and translation is comprehensive, and combined with the concordance, is a valuable resource for the researcher.

The meticulously prepared edition will be useful to scholars in several fields. Especially noteworthy is this first concordance to the Diario ever published. No previous edition offers transcription, translation and concordance in one volume. Hispanists can study more thoroughly the role of Las Casas in transmitting Columbus’s manuscript because Las Casas’s cancellations, insertions and marginal notes are presented so clearly. The nonspecialist can certainly enjoy the accurate English translation.

James C. Murray
Georgia State University

Lowe, Jennifer and Philip Swanson, editors. Essays on Hispanic Themes in Honour of Edward C. Riley. Edinburgh: Department of Hispanic Studies, University of Edinburgh, 1989. 388 pp.

This festschrift, a fitting tribute to Professor Riley, is a summary of his intellectual interests and his influence on friends and students. D. Adams’s essay on J. Ruiz’s influence on Pero López, after examining some twenty points, finds no evidence of direct influence of the Libro de buen amor on Ayala, confirming my contentions that we overstress the knowledge of J. Ruiz by other medievals. A. Mackay studies the anti-Jewish legends dealing with the profaning of the Host and their use in Lope’s El niño inocente de la Guardia. Although interesting, it does not explain clearly why Lope propagated these legends (other than for extolling the Sacrament’s virtue or for entertainment), although it is suggested that he mistrusted the converses. D. Rogers’s study of the ballad Bien podéis, ojos, llorar considers how various authors used the theme of grown men crying, analyzing the use of identical verses. His query about the history

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of men crying is perhaps answered in J. King’s essay (371).

It is proper that Cervantes should have an important place. In «Comic Exemplariness in Cervantes’s Comedias», A. Close relates the comic themes to the prose works and demonstrates that the comic characters are not a series of disparatados but are well integrated into the plots. E. Williamson’s «Cervantes as Moralist and Trickster. The Critique of Picaresque Autobiography in El casamiento engañoso y El coloquio de los perros», is one of the best articles I have seen on the most challenging of the novelas. Cervantes is shown to be opposed to the moralizing ends of the Guzmán and counter-reformation literature. The stories are «fiction in the raw: a groundless, unjustified text of unfathomed origins». Williamson explains satisfactorily the function of Peralta and the interrelation of the two stories and is clearly on the right track. This article may well serve as an antidote to much nonsense which has been written about these tales.

J. Lowe compares the miser-protagonist of Bennett’s Riceyman Steps (1923) with the Galdosian misers Torquemada and Bringas. While not establishing any direct connection she proposes a paradigm for the fictional character of the miser. In «The ‘Cubin’ of Language in Antonio Machado’s Juan de Mairena (1936)», James Whiston posits how the linguistic consciousness of Machado began to look outward, using an aphoristic style which is «nothing less than ‘nuevos poemas de to eterno humano’».

Lorca forms the next cluster of studies, and J. Herrero sees him as one of the great religious poets of the 20th century, stressing his interest in social questions, especially in El poeta en Nueva York. Although very religious, Lorca felt alienated from organized religion, in part because of its disapproval of homoeroticism, and identified God the Father with the oppressor and God the Son with oppressed minorities. In the same vein, D. Shaw examines the use of the word «tragedy» when referring to Lorca’s last three plays and concludes that he wished to portray humans beings caught by forces over which they have no control. This article meshes well with Herrero’s and its discussion of Lorca’s vision of God influenced by a homoeroticism which he had not wished upon himself.

Sigrún Astridur Eriksdóttir studies the Nordic sources of Undr and other stories, relating them to recurring themes in Borges’s works. P. Gallagher analyses the central episodes of El Jarama, isolating the moon (a symbol of death) and the vortex as unifying images. He also documents several actual events which he believes suggested to Sánchez Ferlosio the basis for the plot.

E. Rogers’s «Can the Camera Lie? Image and Memory in Juan Goytisolo’s Señas de Identidad», discusses the use of «cinematic» techniques and concludes that «the ultimate effect of the cinematic elements, then, is to demonstrate the superiority of language as a means of communicating realities which escape the camera lens, or even the individual’s power of recall... Goytisolo depends on linguistic rather than ‘visual’ means of representation». He is very convincing.

Cinema, the unifying element in the final essays, is a welcome inclusion, since movies form not only a subject for «literary» studies but are also used in the classroom, where the teacher needs to be able to discuss them as an art form. John King has an introduction to Argentine female directors, followed by analyses of Amalia and Miss Mary (Bemberg) and La amiga (Meerapfel). R. Fiddian analyses elements of Borau’s Los furtivos and La Sabina, with emphasis on how Spain’s patriarchal traditions repress and disorient women. F. Dorward deals with Réquiem por un campesino español, concluding that although the film follows the novel, the political emphasis has been altered, as well as the study of Mosén Millán. This is an excellent article for those wishing to assign both works to a class as is P. Swanson’s study of El beso de la mujer araña. García Sarriá discusses the subtext of Ese oscuro objeto del deseo with explanations of the image of the sack [saco de estiércol = mujer] and an analysis of terrorismo with its relation to the film’s climax. The editors are to be congratulated for assembling a superior collection.

Eric W. Naylor
University of the South

Dille, Glen F. Antonio Enríquez Gómez. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988. 194 pp.

Glen Dille’s study of the life and works of Antonio Enríquez Gómez is particularly timely, coming at a time when marginal issues are becoming central to criticism and when canon formation is being scrutinized. Enríquez Gómez’s biography, as Dille reminds us, can be seen as «the distillation of all the trials that society reserved for the Jew or, in this case, a person of Jewish descent» (1). Not only was he marginalized in Christian Spain, but his works, in spite of their relative popularity during the seventeenth century, were omitted from the canon by critics who did not see them as reflecting the dominant ideologies of the Golden Age. Dille, for example, does not hesitate to pinpoint the anti-Semitism of certain nineteenth century critics that made negative pronouncements about Enríquez Gómez’s writings (32).

Dille makes us aware of how prolific and versatile a writer Enríquez Gómez was, but at the same time warns us that his nine chapters on this fascinating writer can not possibly constitute an exhaustive and definitive study. They ought to be viewed as an introduction. As such, it is an excellent book, one that suggests numerous possibilities for further study. Beginning with a chapter on the Jews and New Christians in Iberia, the book continues with a biography of the author, utilizing the findings of Amiel and Revah. As a descendant of «the few Spanish marranos that managed to survive until the

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seventeenth century» (10), Enríquez Gómez and his family were no strangers to the Inquisition. In fact, much of his life and works are perceptively studied in this volume as ways of reconciling the opposition converso/Catholic. Dille divides the works of Enríquez Gómez into three periods. From circa 1624 to 1636-37, the author resided in Madrid where he wrote poetry and a number of plays. Then, fear of the Inquisition probably forced him into self-exile in France. The second period is constituted by the exile years of 1636-37 to 1649. Residing principally in Bordeaux and Rouen, Enríquez Gómez published a number of works mainly in nondramatic genres. The third and final period finds him back in Spain where he wrote plays under the alias of Fernando de Zárate y Castronovo and where he was eventually imprisoned by the Inquisition, dying in jail in 1663. In evaluating the third period, Dille adopts the controversial position that «during the final decade Enríquez Gómez was resolving his religious dilemma in favor of Catholicism» (20). This is evinced, according to Dille, by the religious zeal of later plays where «the doubts, fears and confusion that are such a part of the French works are settled...» (150). Dille argues that the surprising leniency of the Inquisition is proof of the sincerity of Enríquez Gómez’s final espousal of Catholicism.

Faced by the vast dramatic production of Enríquez Gómez, Dille chooses to discuss six of his more than fifty known plays, three from the early years and three written under the alias of Zárate. A lo que obliga el honor is perhaps the masterpiece of the early period, and Dille carefully (but briefly) studies the play, explaining Elvira’s death as a «perfect mirror of the circumstances that led to it» (34). His analysis of the play would have been greatly enriched if he had been able to discuss more thoroughly the intertextual links between his honor drama and Calderón’s El médico de su honra. While Dille claims that «we can only assume» that it follows Calderón (35), I believe that the relationship of this play with Calderón’s and with Claramonte’s Desta agua no beberé, and the question of priority, deserve careful scrutiny. Of the three plays chosen for discussion as representative of the third period, La presumida y la hermosa -a delightful comedia de capa y espada where the gracioso Chocolate poses as a nobleman so as to help his master’s amorous pursuits- is by far the most interesting, although the others deal with the religious question central to Enríquez Gómez’s thought.

In addition to the detailed discussion of six comedias, Dille also presents a very useful overview of some of the salient characteristics of Enríquez Gómez’s dramas. He notes, for example, the spirit of forgiveness that runs through these comedias where most transgressions are forgiven and where there is often «reintegration of contending factions» (24). There are many aggressive heroines in Enríquez Gómez’s plays, while a streak of antifeminism is softened in the Zárate plays. Throughout the three periods of his production, heroes often evince a perplexing dose of self-interest. Curious indeed are the flawed monarchs: Iberio in Engañar para reinar, the King of Tartary in Fermín Méndez Pinto, and the «self-centered libertine» King (146) in Los hermanos amantes.

A careful study of many of Enríquez Gómez’s nondramatic works show them to be as important as his comedias. El siglo pitagórico (1644) utilizes the Pythagorean doctrine of the transmigration of souls to portray hypocrisy and false pride and to explore the notion that the immortality of individuals serves to undermine the State. La torre de Babilonia (1649) utilizes the dream instead of transmigration as vehicle for satire. While El siglo pitagórico included the interpolated story of Don Gregorio Guadaña this text includes a tale derived from one of Quevedo’s sueños. Finally, in Las academias morales de las musas (1642) and Sansón nazareno (1656) Dille foregrounds Enríquez Gómez’s contributions as a poet. While the former is a satire of human life that constantly shifts in tone and vehicle, the latter adopts an epic form to defend through analogy the plight of his contemporaries: «a converso or a marrano reading the epic could easily identify with a Judaic hero moving in a hostile milieu» (114).

Glen Dille has provided us with a scholarly, careful and thoughtful overview of Enríquez Gómez’s life and works that invites us to pursue some of the many topics presented such as the sleeping beauty motif, the opposing views of Democritus and Heraclitus, the relationship of the king to honor, the intertextual links with works of Góngora, Quevedo and Calderón, the relationship between transmigration and the Cabbala, and, of course, the converso/conversion question. Dille’s book clearly shows that by delving deeper into certain marginal figures and non-canonical texts we gain a deeper and richer understanding of the textures of the times.

Frederick A. de Armas
Pennsylvania State University

Lehrer, Melinda Eve. Classical Myth and the «Polifemo» of Góngora. Potomac, MD: Scripta Humanistica, 1989. 99 pp.

Melinda Eve Lehrer’s book, Classical Myth and the «Polifemo» of Góngora, makes an interesting examination of the classical expressions of the Polyphemus myth on which Góngora drew in writing his controversial poem. It offers as well an analysis of the ways in which Góngora’s Polyphemus differs from those classical sources. Indeed, the title of the dissertation from which the book was adapted (with only minor changes), Góngora’s «Polifemo» and its Classical Predecessors (Brandeis, 1986), is probably more descriptive of the book’s scope.

The introductory chapter lays out the purpose of the study -to analyze the changes that Góngora made in his adaptation of the myth and to account for his motivation in doing so- and examines three shorter works by Góngora whose themes are related to the changes he made in adapting the Polyphemus legend to his own ends. Of particular interest is Lehrer’s

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analysis of the canción, «¡Qué de invidiosos montes levantados...!» in terms of sexual voyeurism. Chapter 2 catalogues and discusses briefly selected classical examples of the Polyphemus-Galatea myth in greater depth than does Dámaso Alonso’s study, Góngora y el «Polifemo» (vol. 1, ch. IX). The works described and compared with Góngora’s poem are Polyphemus’ song in Theocritus’ «Idyll XI», Corydon’s song in Virgil’s second Eclogue, and Ovid’s version of the myth in Metamorphoses (all three of which are translated into English by Lehrer in an appendix). The third chapter discusses the innovations Góngora made in recasting the story in a baroque mode, replete with the tension of contrasts and oppositions. Chapter 4 departs somewhat from the direction the book has taken to this point, turning aside to compare Góngora’s Polifemo to Carrillo y Sotomayor’s earlier Fábula de Acis y Galatea (before 1610). The comparison itself is valuable to one unfamiliar with Carrillo’s work, but the chapter could be improved with a less hostile attitude toward his poem and poetics. Statements such as «these lines use a high level of rhetoric for no apparent purpose» (39) disregard Carrillo’s poetics as expressed in his Libro de erudición poética. «The Acis-Galatea Interlude», one of Góngora’s additions to the Polyphemus legend, is the subject of the fifth chapter, which provides a thorough analysis of Góngora’s sexual imagery. Chapter 6 consists of a close reading of Góngora’s version of the song Polyphemus offers to Galatea, with attention to his introduction of contrasting elements and the tension that is in play between them.

If there is a weak point in the book, perhaps it is the concluding chapter. The attempt to account for Góngora’s innovations and his poetics in the Polifemo in terms of his personal psychology -his penchant for gambling, his experiences with «the process of the Inquisition and its overwhelming effect on people’s lives» (80-81), and sexual frustration due to his vows of chastity- is presented very tentatively, and the connection is not convincingly made. The comparative aspect of Lehrer’s study is, nonetheless, a valuable addition to the criticism of this most important poem.

Ted E. McVay, Jr.
Texas Tech University

Calderón, Héctor. Conciencia y lenguaje en el «Quijote» y «El obsceno pájaro de la noche». Madrid: Pliegos, 1987. 231 pp.

According to its prologue, this book is a translation, done by Daniel Iglesias and Héctor Calderón, of Calderón’s doctoral thesis entitled «Self and Language in the Novel: Reading of Cervantes’s Quijote and Donoso’s El obsceno pájaro de la noche». The text consists of a series of essays, organized into five chapters, in which the author analyzes how, because of the distinct cultural context within which each of the novels was conceived, consciousness and language work together in Don Quijote and in El obsceno pájaro de la noche to demand different responses from the reader.

Chapter 1, summarizing what will be the conclusion of the study, begins with a discussion of J. L. Austin’s theory of speech acts and of Wolfgang Iser’s theory of aesthetic response, concluding that communication through reading is a private interaction between text and reader. There follows a discussion of the ideologies that formed the cultural milieu in which Cervantes wrote Don Quijote, focusing on the importance of the writing of Juan Huarte de San Juan and Alonso López Pinciano. The significance of the work of Henry James and Sigmund Freud in determining the postmodern world in which Donoso wrote is detailed in the second part of the chapter. Calderón explains how, beginning with James, the author or reliable narrator disappears from the novel, just as with Freud the Greco-Christian concept of a single, unified consciousness is shattered. This disintegration of the characters, along with the lack of a narrator to tell us the story in an easily comprehensible manner, leads to the reader’s having to reconstruct a fragmented text.

Chapter 2 explores the psychology of the Renaissance and the origins of the novel, during the period when evolution from an oral tradition to reliance on the printed word diminished the importance of memory in recording the past, thereby freeing writers’ creative and inventive powers. In Chapter 3, Calderón explicates the role of the reader as interpreter of the text and discusses the dual purpose of literature in the Renaissance: to entertain but also to stimulate the implicit reader to participate actively through use of critical faculties belonging to a higher order. Calderón concludes this part of his book by emphasizing that Cervantes was one of the first writers to take advantage of the novel as a means of communication between author and reader, thus setting forth a principle fundamental to the novel of the future. In Chapter 4 Calderón traces the effect of Henry James and Sigmund Freud on the contemporary novel. Chapter 5 deals with the problems of consciousness in El obsceno pájaro de la noche, with its multiple protagonist and its incomplete plot, relating it to Freud’s view of the fragmented human personality.

Calderón is persuasive in his analysis of the cultural background that gave rise to Don Quijote and the psychological evolution that took place before Donoso’s novel. There are lamentable vestiges of the dissertation format, however, in the excessive number of quotations and references and in the repetitious quality of the prose. A more concisely written and cohesive study would have been more effective and accessible to the reader. It would have been useful, also, to include the English originals of quotes from such writers as Walter Ong, J. L. Austin and Northrop Frye, along with the Spanish translations apparently done by Iglesias and Calderón. There are few misprints in the text, although occasionally errant commas impede immediate comprehension. Overall, Calderón’s volume is a useful contribution to the corpus of work on aesthetic reception and the novel as an expression of the self. Furthermore, it gives us some interesting insights into the evolution of the

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post-modern novel of the Third World and directions for its future development.

Jean S. Chittenden
Trinity University

Round, Nicholas G., editor. Re-reading Unamuno. Glasgow Colloquium Papers, 1. Glasgow: University of Glasgow, Department of Hispanic Studies, 1989. 152 pp.

Nicholas Round is to be envied for the group of colleagues who gathered to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Unamuno’s death, for the seven papers collected here are literate, clear, and display serious reflection and originality. Moreover, all are devoted to areas of Unamuno’s work that merit further careful study.

Unamuno’s early writings are examined in three articles, with diverse results. John Butt returns to the inadequacies of Unamuno’s Socialism to stress both the importance of evolutionary determinism in his early thought, and the «anti-idealist» bias that made it impossible for Unamuno «to receive the influence of Hegel» (4), thereby leaving him exposed instead to «the arch anti-Socialist Herbert Spencer» (5). The result, Butt argues, is that even when he most nearly resembled a Socialist, Unamuno fell short of the mark, because of his «unpurged liberalism» (9).

Whereas Butt sees a disjunction between the first Unamuno and that of En torno al casticismo and Paz en la guerra, Nicholas Round, on the other hand, in «Without a City Wall: Paz en la guerra and the End of Realism», suggests a more subtle evolution, rooted in «dialectical humanism». Free of the need to defend an ideology, Round carries out a sensitive re-reading of a decisive novel that has suffered because it cannot be explained away by the prevailing critical prejudices. He recognizes the dialectical pattern of Unamuno’s thought, and shows the novelist straining at the very limits of Realism, much as Galdós was doing in Misericordia. More important, Round is able to link Unamuno’s aesthetic technique to his characteristic notion of Socialism, and its implication for individualism.

Determinism appears again in Derek Gagen’s «Unamuno and the Regeneration of the Spanish Theatre». This skillful commentary reestablishes Unamuno’s well-known article on the subject within the context of 1896 and the debate on the creation of a «Spanish equivalent to Antoine’s Théâtre Libre» (60). Likewise, Richard Cardwell’s «Modernismo frente a noventa y ocho: el caso de las Andanzas de Unamuno» is an imaginative addition to a neglected field. Closely following Ramsden, he, too, finds traces of determinism in Unamuno’s spiritualization of the Castilian landscape, but also residual Romanticism, and the Symbolist transformation of mere physical reality into the experience of a preconceived psychological state.

In «Unamuno’s Opposition to Primo de Rivera and his Sense of Mission (1923-1924)», Stephen Roberts draws astutely on uncollected journalism to define and place Unamuno’s «liberal republicanism» (83) within the context of his metapolítica. He is notably successful in showing how both the journalism and the poetry of the first nine months of the exile must be seen as being inseparable from the great spiritual statement that is La agonía del cristianismo.

The question of influences is addressed in two articles. Margarita Tejerizo draws on Soviet critics in order to expand on the relationship between Unamuno and Tolstoy in «Unamuno and Russian Literature», and considers briefly Unamuno’s enthusiasm for Dostoyevsky. Regrettably, Gogol is merely mentioned, as is Lev Sjestov, whose stylistic and spiritual influence in La agonía del cristianismo deserves consideration. In «Concepts of Tragedy in Unamuno and Kierkegaard», Alison Sinclair applies Kierkegaard’s concept of the three stages of life, as well as his definition of ancient and modern modes of tragedy, to Niebla, Abel Sánchez, and La tía Tula, with results that cast light on Unamuno’s techniques of characterization in his «middle period». Thanks to the struggle engendered by both their inescapable awareness of their potential other selves, and their unrealized sense that they must move into another stage of life, Augusto Pérez, Joaquín Monegro and Tula all acquire richer shading.

While the book has been carefully edited, a reproach must be uttered regarding the woeful syllabication of Spanish words, as in «fu-erzas», or «Araq-uistain», for example.

Victor Ouimette
McGill University

Bernardo Pérez, J. Fases de la poesía creacionista de Gerardo Diego. Valencia: Hispanófila, 1989. 155 pp.

Critical efforts on Gerardo Diego’s Creationist verse have been sketchy and antithetical. However, J. Bernardo Pérez provides a systematic theoretical framework for Diego’s Creationist works within the context of a historical backdrop and illuminates those elements within the poems representative of the diverse phases they span.

A brief introductory chapter lays the foundation for an initial understanding of Gerardo Diego’s place within the vanguard and those influences which made an impact upon his permanent philosophical approach to poetry. Those roots are attributed to his association with such formidable European contemporaries as Pierre Reverdy, Vicente Huidobro, Juan Gris, and Diego Larrea. In addition, characteristics of the Creationist movement are elaborated with the basic poetic method, according to Diego, being one modeled after the deductive theories of the Cubist painter Juan Gris. The poet produces «rapports de palabras y de imágenes desde el núcleo abstracto al poema concretizado y humanizado» (20) by utilizing intuition and a play on analogies and contrasts.

In a more detailed manner, chapter 2 describes the theoretical background of the Creationist movement and distinguishes Diego from other Ultraists by

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examining his unique position as artist and critic. Through an interweaving of Diego’s ideas with those dominant within the European artistic community, Pérez draws a clear picture of the poet’s creative process whose intent is to produce a new artistic reality. That «genesis» is based on the cultivation of the image as the primordial cell and the purity of the word, whereby it casts off the shackles of a referential dimension and reverts back to its most simple meaning. What gives the poem its final unity and cohesion is its architecture, one simulating a musical composition form. The recognition of music as the maximum aspiration of absolute poetry links Diego to the Symbolist movement, while imprinting a discriminative and permanent aspect onto his poetic works.

In the last chapter, Pérez proceeds into the application of theoretical constructs to what he posits are five phases of Diego’s Creationist works. The first is launched by an iconoclastic volume of poetry, Evasión (1918-1919). It purports to «evade» or to liberate itself from traditional conventional isms through typographical games, syncopated and blank verse, and ironic humor. A transitional period follows where Diego adopts the theories and models of Juan Gris and Vicente Huidobro. Examples are cited from Imagen múltiple and Estribillo, both included in the 1922 Imagen, and Limbo (1919-1921). Culminating the Creationist art is Manual de espumas (1922). In it, Diego’s obsession is to make art and poetry equivalent by suppressing the anecdotal, sentimental, and mimetic elements, thus necessitating a change to confront the task of attaining the ideal of beauty by a constant cycle of renovation amidst continuous variations. Subsequently, Pérez cites Diego’s Fábula de Equis y Zeda (1927) and Poemas adrede (1926-1943) as an eclectic period. Fábula, he states, is a product of the historical moment initiated by a renewed interest in Góngora. The Creationist impulse is maintained but harmonizes traditional rhetoric with modern imagery. Finally, Biografía incompleta (1953) and Biografía continuada (1974) illustrate the last stage. Although these works remain faithful to essential Creationist poetics, they aid in the transition to a post-Creationist era.

Despite some repetition and overlapping of ideas in the last chapter, the book is very useful for those wishing a clearer understanding of early twentieth century vanguard Creationist poetry. A strong bibliography and prolific footnotes amplify the text, thus providing a springboard for the reader who desires to pursue the topic further.

Kathryn G. McConnell
Point Loma Nazarene College

Feal Deibe, Carlos. Lorca: tragedia y mito. Ottawa: Ottawa Hispanic Studies, 1989. 157 pp.

In this very commendable book, Carlos Feal discusses, primarily, the nature of tragedy and the mytho-poetic foundations in Lorca’s major dramatic works. The study of tragedy (from Classical Greek and modern perspective) includes not only the rural trilogy (Bodas de sangre, Yerma, La casa de Bernarda Alba) but also Mariana Pineda and select aspects of Así que pasen cinco años, El público, Doña Rosita la soltera and La zapatera prodigiosa. It also subsumes the theme of honor, in its Calderonian manifestation, and in this regard, discusses Amor de don Perimplín con Belisa en su jardín.

In its structure, the book is neither linear nor symmetrical, being at once a study of individual works and a thematic approach to Lorca’s theater. This facilitates a constant and dynamic interplay of ideas and approaches in the development of insights and conclusions, of which the major ones are the following: 1) Lorca’s heroines are cast in the image of the Great Mother of antiquity or the Virgin Mother; 2) women are seen as both destructive and powerful, associated with death or the moon image, at once pure and impure, socially and psychologically isolated, and victimized by a male-dominated society, exemplified in the Calderonian honor code and its bourgeois values, against which Lorca’s heroines fight to establish their personal inviolability; 3 ) Lorca’s attitude toward men is ambivalent, his men are both weak and seemingly strong, both rebels and the upholders of tradition perish; 4) there is a relationship of dominance between men and women, which heroines like the Novia, in Bodas, and Yerma, challenge; 5) in the trilogy, Lorca criticizes bourgois society, and in El público, in particular, he proposes a sexual revolution; 6) the power relationship between the sexes is related to the possession of the symbolic phallus, the power of the word or silence; 7) the meaning of Lorca’s theatre is that nothingness is the only true reality, and in El público, in particular, multiple masks are a means to hide the desperate loneliness and emptiness characters experience; 8) death is pervasive in Lorca’s theatre, and in El público, it is not simply the death of the characters, but also, the death of the entire theatrical enterprise; 9) in El público, Lorca deconstructs the notion of the theater as an artifice that provides catharsis; 10) the absence of anagnórisis in Lorca’s theater leaves the audience anxious and obliged to supply the wisdom that the characters have failed to achieve.

These conclusions are based on careful and well articulated analysis, and give only a general indication of the depth of insights and provocative interpretations, the intricate connections, and the critical perspectives (archetypal, existential, psychoanalytical, intertextual, deconstructionist, feminist, mytho-poetic) that Feal uses. Infrequently, he includes too much plot summary, making access to primary documentation laborious. This might be due, in part, to an attempt to make the book both of general interest and a specialized work of criticism. Very infrequently, also, there is a detracting over-zealous assimilation of insights (as in the inclusion of certain characters and images as Christological).

The author establishes a judicious and meaningful dialogue with major Lorca critics, and deepens his

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work with pertinent scholarship in supporting fields, In short, this book is an engaging and stimulating journey through Lorca’s theater. It keeps Lorca criticism alive and sharp, and thus joins the already solid body of Lorca scholarship.

Cedric Busette
Santa Clara University

Benson, Ken. Razón y espíritu. Stockholm: University of Stockholm, 1989. 227 pp.

Ken Benson’s title is itself the key to Benet’s literary code, for all of Benet’s oeuvre can be analyzed through the duality of reason and spirit. Benson draws on Ricardo Gullón’s 1975 study of Un viaje de invierno, which identifies a metaphoric al interpretation based on reason versus imagination, and applies it to Una meditación and Saúl ante Samuel, both rich in ideological discourse. By relating Benet’s reflections in these novels with his essays, Benson uses the code to decipher the narrative.

Benet’s literary experiment deals with the capacity of men to perceive reality. His discourse (the body of his writings and ideas) represents the tension between the perception of the world through reason, which is neglected and treated with irony, and the perception of the world through emotion, which coincides with the poetics of the author. Consequently, Benson deduces that we should interpret the text based on signs which allude to the spiritual. Benet’s ideological discourse (his ideas in reflexive segments) is mixed in with the narrative discourse (the narrative segments of the text in opposition to the ideas). Benson’s study is the first to approach Benet’s discourse from an ontological perspective, and indeed yields a coherent interpretation of the discourse.

Benson compares the dynamic, myth-projected macrostructure of Una meditación to the static, circular structure of Saúl ante Samuel. Yet both are based on the dichotomy of reason and spirit, with its multiple variations, such as time and memory. Reason’s concept of time is highly ironized while the spirit’s sense of time is continuous and full of vitality. Memory recalls only events with emotional charge, but they are remembered through reason; thus the puzzle can never be accurately pieced together. And while repetition in Faulkner often provides various perspectives about the same story, increasing the reader’s knowledge, Benet uses repetition to dissipate the story, producing enigma rather than clarity. Proust conjures up past remembrances from present sensations, but Benet evokes only the past sensation: thus the story can never be fully disclosed. Much of the difficulty in comprehending Benet’s work is due to the high level of abstraction.

The duality of the macrostructure is also present in the microstructure of the paragraph. The verbal fluidity of the paragraph is akin to the natural flow of the spirit. Language and grammar reflect the rational systematization while internal and reflexive thought represents the spirit. Even the narrative shows the duality: «estampas» reflect spirit and «argumentos» show reason. The dichotomy is also seen in the title of Saúl ante Samuel, where the letters for Saul (symbol of reason) are included in the name Samuel (symbol of spirit). The «ante» places the symbol of action and war (Saul) BEFORE the symbol of the universe of reflection (Samuel).

The motifs of war, waiting and love are other variations of the duality. War is the metaphor of the tension between reason and spirit; waiting symbolizes spiritual contemplation, and love alludes to the emotive capacity of man which can only be perceived through the spirit.

While the premise of Benson’s theory is not original, his book is thought-provoking and insightful, thoroughly researched and written in precise Spanish. The graphs, diagrams, syntheses, and even the «outline» format of his book with its endless divisions and subdivisions, help the reader immensely. However, Benson might have fruitfully explored other motifs, such as violence and perversions. Ironically, Benson analyzes Benet’s work rationally and systematically in order to arrive at the conclusion that Benet’s world cannot be decodified through intellect, but only through a sensitive and creative perception of the text. Benson acknowledges that many interpretations are possible at the metaphorical level, based on this duality. Thus the «lector ingénuo» can benefit from Benson’s analysis to become Hector Umberto’s «lector modelo» who must now put away his «unnatural» analytical approach (according to Benet), and roam free in the spiritual realm of Benet’s cosmos.

Jana Sandarg
Augusta College

March, Kathleen N. Festa da Palabra. An Anthology of Contemporary Galician Women Poets. New York: Peter Lang, 1989. 244 pp.

One reason that writers, especially women, haven’t published more throughout the ages is that sometimes, perhaps most of the time, everyday chores take precedent over literary activities. At least that’s often my excuse since my family cannot live by bread alone (even though my husband’s ahóa taught me how to make her «secret» pan do pobla), forcing me to make frequent trips to the grocery store. On one such outing, the teenager who was pushing my heavily laden cart through a Colorado snowstorm puzzled over the bumper sticker of my four-wheel-drive truck. «Yo love GALICIA» he queried, «is Galicia your daughter?» «No», I replied, «Galicia is that little corner of Spain above Portugal. But I guess you could say that I’m sort of an adopted daughter of Galicia, since my husband was born there».

Likewise an adopted daughter of Galicia, Kathleen March demonstrates her love and reverence for its current crop of women poets in the anthology Festa da Palabra, a work that will be warmly embraced by the ever-expanding colony of Galician scholars here in the U.S. As the founder of the first Galician Studies Conference, held on the campus of the University of Maine at Orono, March has already established herself

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as a most steadfast supporter of Galician letters. Festa da Palabra merits consideration for a serious Galician reference library; however, if you expect imitation corinthian leather, high rag -content paper, and typesetting for forty-one dollars and fifty cents, then don’t purchase it for your decorator library. Srictly utilitarian, it boasts a shiny laminated hard paper cover with a two-tone color scheme in bright lime green and white and camera- ready elite type, which reads easily if you don’t mind the bleedthrough from the other side of the page. Do keep your students’ budgets in mind before assigning it as a text for a Women’s or Galician Studies seminar.

The poetry itself makes Festa da Palabra worthwhile. A short «disclaimer» precedes the selection, stating that, «undoubtedly readers will note variations in style and may feel that differences in experience or expertise separate some poets from the rest», a nice way of saying that the poems represent uneven quality, which they do. As well, an uneven number of poems per author -from one to twenty-three- appear in the original Galician, with none of the verses translated into English as the library cataloguing guidelines suggest. Their diverse sources -published books, magazines, and even heretofore unpublished works- amply testify that every avenue of discovering poetry by contemporary women has been pursued. Brief (one paragraph to one page) biographical entries in English introduce each author, emphasizing thematic tendencies and women’s issues.

Part of the introduction focuses on four major poets: María do Carmo Kruckenberg Sanxurxo, Xohana Torres, Luz Pozo Garza, and Pura Vázquez. In terms of organization, it might have been more helpful to group these four «must-reads» into a separate chapter, incorporating their introductory essay along with their biographies and poems, rather than presenting them and requiring the reader to search elsewhere for remaining facts and poetry examples.

Numerous editing problems (typos, misspellings, missing quotation marks, section headings separated from their text) and an over-reliance on the verb «to be» -especially the present tense «is»- interfere with pleasurable reading, though the informative quality remains. No doubt the «sisterhood» vocabulary will alienate some of the readership it most seeks to persuade, those raised on what she calls the «male literary tradition». Make no mistake, it is just as sexist to insist that Rosalía was a «foremother» of Galician letters as to say the troubadour Martín Códax was a «forefather»; let’s just use the nonsexist «forebears» and let our Galician brothers feel like part of the family.

Joy B. Landeira
University of Colorado

Himelblau, Jack J. Quiche Worlds in Creation. The Popol Vuh as a Narrative Work of Art. Culver City, California: Labyrinthos, 1989. 67 pp.

Many questions about the Popol Vuh, an important religious book of the Quiche-Maya, remain unanswered and Jack Himelblau addresses some of these in his book. Chapter 1 contains a welldocumented discussion of the problems concerning the text, the copyist, and the possible dates of the Popol Vuh’s transcription. Chapter 2 presents a repudiation of Rene Acuña’s position that the Quiche manuscript is an apocryphal work that is continued in a segment of Chapter 4 which criticizes Acuña’s methodology of analyzing the indigenous work.

In Chapter 3, Himelblau uses a paradigmatic structural analysis of this deity and other characters and motifs associated with him to prove that Storm (Tohil) is a war god, not a rain god. Himelblau argues that Storm’s origin stems from the Mexican war gods and that he is either the Quiche version of them or a synthesis of the two. The author believes that the Quiche’s world view resulted in «the promotion of a warrior class and a ruling class that was committed to an active militaristic and imperialistic expansionist policy» (66). In «Final Observations», Coe’s religious interpretation of the episodes of the Hunter Brothers and Hero Twins in the underworld, a rite of passage, is stated to be complimentary to this view; but the correlation with the above policy of the descent to Xibalba remains nebulous.

The methodology that Himelblau employs is rigid, carefully executed, and results in a presentation that comes across as being a definitive identity of Storm as a war god. Himelblau states that two approaches can be used to identify Storm and that each gives a different result. The first approach is the traditional linguistic one, which «posits an etymological correlation between the god’s name and his attributes» (32). The second approach is literary and «defines the god in terms of his activities» ( 32).

At least one another approach that can be used to identify Storm: the process of mythoanalysis developed by Juan Adolfo Vázquez («An Outline of Mythoanalysis», Myth and the Imaginary in the New World, edited by Edmundo Magaña and Peter Mason [193 -210]; Amsterdam: Foris Publications, 1986), which not only presents the correlation between the god’s name and his attributes and defines the god in terms of his activities, but incorporates a complete, step-by-step exegesis of all the components analyzed in each myth. If this method is employed for analyzing Tohil, we find that, in addition to his military role, Storm assumes four others: cultural, judiciary, political, and religious.

Using Propp’s morphologic structural approach to narrative literature in Chapter 4, Himelblau analyzes the Tale of the Hero Twins and concludes that (1) due to the high level of organization and interrelationship between the tales in the Popol Vuh, the copyist was not only a recorder but also a first class writer; (2) Propp’s methodology can be successfully used to analyze not only the Popol Vuh but can be used

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universally; and (3) that Propp «has discovered, if not the syntagmatic deployment of narrative functions, then one of the basic morphologies of the narrative» (67).

The first conclusion is solidly substantiated and a welcome insight into the copyist, but the second conclusion requires more concrete, detailed evidence.

Studying literary texts from different perspectives can be helpful in increasing our knowledge and understanding, but we must be assured that our approach brings forth the primary goals of the literature. In this case, we must keep in mind the fact that the Popol Vuh is a mythological text, that is, it reveals the sacred to its believers and is transmitted for that purpose. Therefore, the sacred philosophy underlying its contents must be kept in perspective in our interpretations.

Mary H. Preuss
Pennsylvania State University, McKeesport

Lavrin, Asunción, editor. Sexuality & Marriage in Colonial Latin America. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. 349 pp.

Following an introduction by the editor, the remaining nine original essays are divided into two sections: «Sexuality» and «Marriage». The collection of articles written by historians and anthropologists focuses on the sexual behavior of Spanish American men and women who lived between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Topics infrequently explored in Latin American social history such as premarital relations, illegitimacy, consensual unions, sexual witchcraft, spouse abuse and divorce are examined in this volume. Each well-written and informative chapter is followed by copious notes. There are also numerous graphs and tables throughout the book as well as many sexually explicit drawings taken from the Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City and the well-known drawings found in the Nueva crónica y buen gobierno by Felipe Guzmán Poma de Ayala.

During the conquest, violence and lawlessness prevailed and few legal or moral proprieties were observed-indigenous women were either taken by the conquerors or given to them. However, the settlement of the New World posed special problems in that European traditions had to interact with often very different indigenous cultures. This plagued officials throughout the long colonial period because «... the New World lacked a rigorous morality due to its vast numbers of marginally christianized and Hispanicized peoples» (156). While sexuality and marriage among indigenous societies is a little-studied area, it can be concluded that sexual mores of pre-Columbian peoples varied greatly. In general, however, virginity was not always important but adultery was. These differences conflict with European values because the doncella was highly valued before marriage while adultery was a constant problem.

One of the more interesting chapters treats the tour by Bishop Martí of his bishopric between 1771 and 1784. He visited Indian doctrinas, plantations filled with African slaves, small Spanish villages and also large cities which gave him a good cross-section understanding of Venezuela. Martí kept a private journal throughout the trip and the two lengthy volumes of Libros personales are the primary source of the chapter. Among more than fifteen hundred individuals mentioned, almost all were accused of sexual misdeeds, including adultery, fornication, concubinage, incest, rape, bigamy, prostitution, lust, homosexuality, bestiality, abortions, and infanticide. Here we learn about the sexual behaviour of eighteenth-century Venezuelans, some explanations for their actions and what one official did to punish such indiscretions.

Women in Mexico, and elsewhere in Latin America, developed ways of resisting, punishing and even controlling the men who dominated them through sexual witchcraft. «Women frequently used menstrual blood or the water that had cleansed their ‘intimate parts’ to make up the ensorcelled food or drink that they served to their husbands» (180) in order that their men be dummied, tamed, rendered impotent or wasted away depending on whether the man was recalcitrant, violent, or unfaithful. Sexual witchcraft was common in pre-Hispanic America as well as sixteenth and seventeenth century Spain, but few women took the option and those who did often quickly recanted. Nevertheless, it was one avenue open to challenge the structures of inequality in colonial America. Another chapter provides a most informative section where, among several topics, the reader can follow the breakdown of a colonial marriage in Mexico.

Despite the solid scholarship, the book would be stronger with a concluding chapter. The content of the work is well-prefaced in the introduction but an equally strong conclusion would be appreciated. Also, in a collection of this nature, and as is to be expected, some chapters are better than others. However, this welcome addition to the exciting and fertile field of Colonial Latin American history and literature makes a significant contribution to understanding Latin American social history and any one who deals with Latin America, and especially the colonial period, needs to read the book.

Lee A. Daniel
Texas Christian University

Gómez-Martínez, José Luis. Bolivia: Un pueblo en busca de su identidad. La Paz, Bolivia: Los Amigos del Libro, 1988. 384 pp.

Bolivia: Un pueblo en busca de su identidad sigue la travesía del pueblo boliviano desde el año de su independencia, 1825, hasta los 1970. Consta de una introducción y cinco capítulos, titulados, «Presupuestos teóricos», «En busca de lo boliviano», «La generación del Chaco o la toma de conciencia de la realidad boliviana», «Desvanecimiento de una utopía y apertura hacia la modernidad», más un apéndice sobre la pintura en Bolivia. En estos capítulos se considera que la guerra del Chaco (1932) y la Revolución Nacional de 1952 constituyen los dos eventos cruciales que llevan a los intelectuales bolivianos a

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preguntarse y tratar de definir quién es el boliviano, definición que incluye a las mayorías indígenas hasta entonces relegadas políticamente debido a la mentalidad feudal prevalente en este país.

En «Presupuestos teóricos» el autor define la «morada vital boliviana» -las ideas y creencias que influyen en el boliviano- la que está determinada por tres «mitos profundos», según Guillermo Francovich (36-38). El primer mito comprende la sacralización del altiplano boliviano, aspecto religioso/telúrico que va perdiéndose paulatinamente de la psiquis del boliviano. Segundo, el mito del Cerro de Potosí, asociado al del Dorado, que representa la vaga ilusión de conseguir realidades inalcanzables con poco esfuerzo. Y, tercero, el franco repudio por lo autóctono debido al carácter europeizante del boliviano (51-53).

En los capítulos siguientes se analiza (a) el repudio de lo autóctono por los bolivianos europeizados (los que viven como extranjeros en su propio país desdeñando a las mayorías indígenas, a las que se les acusa de ser la causa del retraso del país), y (b) la integración política de estas mayorías a la vida política del país. A principios de siglo se empieza a estudiar la realidad boliviana, su pluralidad racial, cultural y lingüística así como su diversidad geográfica. En realidad, los bolivianos recién llegan a conocerse al luchar juntos en la guerra del Chaco, la que inicia el proceso del mestizaje cultural boliviano.

En el fragor de la lucha se prueba la falacia de la «superioridad» del blanco y como consecuencia se siente la necesidad de abolir el sistema feudal, causa del retraso del país y se plantea por primera vez la posibilidad de incorporar a los indios a la política nacional. De esta manera la guerra del Chaco cambia la morada vital del boliviano, razón por la cual los intelectuales que sobreviven la conflagración rompen con la generación anterior y dejan de imitar a Europa para formar una cultura propia, producto de un autoexamen. Este proceso político culmina con la Revolución Nacional de 1952, la cual reporta algunas ganancias para el indio y el proletariado. Simultáneamente los bolivianos adquieren un gusto por el arte autóctono.

Si bien los diferentes partidos políticos que se forman después de la guerra del Chaco desean modificar las instituciones del país para beneficiar al pueblo, ellos pretenden gobernar sin las masas, excluyendo a las mayorías una vez más. Por otra parte, el gobierno no cuenta con un plan para hacer de Bolivia una nación moderna, y mientras se implementan programas utópicos desvinculados de la realidad boliviana, el pueblo se empobrece día a día debido a la corrupción y la desorientación de sus mandatarios. Pero a pesar de que este país sigue encarando una serie de problemas, Gómez-Martínez sostiene que como consecuencia de la revolución la población boliviana se halla menos fragmentada que antes, más madura políticamente, más consciente de su morada vital, adelantos que el pueblo boliviano ha ido adquiriendo a pesar de las acciones de su gobierno.

Según Gómez-Martínez, para que Bolivia logre una auténtica identidad, necesita reconocer que los indios son una parte constitutiva de la nación. Sin embargo, e irónicamente, encuentro que la voz de las mayorías postergadas bolivianas se encuentra ausente de su texto. Cuando Gómez-Martínez realizaba su tarea de investigación, las películas de Sanjinés y los libros de Domitila Chungara ya habían dado la vuelta al mundo. En estos textos, el cineasta boliviano y Moema Viezzer, la transcriptora de las grabaciones de Domitila, ponen sistemas discursivos al servicio del pueblo, de manera que ellos hablan con voz propia. Mientras que en el texto que reseñamos se habla de ellos desde una posición cultural descentrada; o sea que ellos todavía son el objeto del discurso, no su sujeto. Lo que le falta a este texto es precisamente el testimonio de las mayorías; aquí hubiera radicado lo novedoso de este libro. Por otra parte, el autor parece que no ha pensado en la ideología contenida en las teorías que utiliza como fuentes. Por ejemplo, «los mitos profundos» de Francovich están codificados desde una perspectiva hegemónica, hecho que induce al filósofo boliviano a afirmar que el espectro español hizo que «los bolivianos repudiáramos primero, negáramos después y finalmente ignoráramos totalmente nuestro pasado, haciendo que nos sintiéramos huérfanos de éste» (53). Francovich parece indicar que la bolivianidad es el patrimonio exclusivo de la minoría blancoide, y no de la indígena, la que no dejó de practicar sus costumbres ancestrales, que no dejó de hablar su propio idioma, por lo tanto no ignoró su pasado. Si bien Francovich no pretende excluir a los indios de la sociedad boliviana, la costumbre de considerarlos como pertenecientes a una cultura desvinculada de la realidad boliviana le hace caer en contradicciones discursivas, desfaces que debían haber sido analizados por Gómez-Martínez para establecer el origen y la praxis de la ideología de los productores de significado.

Por otra parte, el texto es repetitivo, especialmente en el tercer capítulo. Se podría suprimir parrafadas sin alterar el producto final. El autor mismo se da cuenta de su estilo reiterativo (198), pero prosigue imbricando citas que en vez de adelantar su tesis vuelven a recalcar lo ya establecido. Inclusive a veces la misma cita aparece en dos lugares, como en pp. 72, 99, 200, 237-38.

A pesar de la amplia documentación contenida en Bolivia: Un pueblo en busca de su identidad, el estudioso que esté medianamente enterado de la realidad boliviana encontrará que este texto añade muy poco a lo que ya se ha escrito sobre este país. Esto se debe a que el autor parece escribir exclusivamente para los lectores extranjeros, para los que se acercan por primera vez a las letras bolivianas. Para estos lectores el libro de Gómez-Martínez viene a ser una excelente introducción, un acertado mapa de futuras lecturas sobre el ensayo, la literatura y el arte bolivianos.

Willy O. Muñoz
Kent State University

Jaksic, Iván. Academic Rebels in Chile. The Role

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of Philosophy in Higher Education and Politics. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989. xiii+259pp. SUNY Series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture.

This well researched book has the unique characteristic of being written by a scholar who has a view from the inside. Iván Jaksic, now Director of the Center for Latin American Studies and Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, was a teacher in a Chilean secondary school and a student in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chile during the first years of the Pinochet military rule. He saw first-hand «the tension between what one thinks the truth is and a repressive government’s ultimate power to define truth as it wishes» (xii). He learned from his students their experiences and feelings about military rule, and from his professor of philosophy, Juan Rivano, how standing up for your own convictions leads to imprisonment and exile.

This started Jaksic thinking about the historical context by which to account for how Chilean philosophers reacted to the military coup of 1973. Inspired by Rivano, he set out to study Chilean philosophy from the standpoint of the discipline’s connection with the larger national events of religion and politics and how they related to education.

In six chapters we are taken from (1) the era of Chile’s independence (1810), through (2) the half century of the influence of positivism (1870-1920) with (3) the consequent reaction that led to the founding of what is more properly called philosophy in this century (1920-1950). Then we proceed (4) to philosophy’s professionalization (1950-1968), and (5) relation to the university reform movement (1960-1973), (6) to the present fate of philosophy under military rule (1973 onward). The result is an informative book that is also fascinating reading.

The outstanding individuals who played a role in the history of philosophical ideas in Chile include José Joaquín de Mora (1783-1864) and Andrés Bello (1781-1865), who went to Chile as educators at a time when education was beginning to be secularized without offending Catholic beliefs, and José Victorino Lastarria (1817-1888) and Francisco Bilbao (1823-1868), both former students of Bello but heirs to a Chilean liberal tradition that was antagonistic to Catholicism as a social force. Also Valentín Letelier (1852-1919), who carried on this task by looking to science, rather than to metaphysics, to help Chilean society achieve «order and progress», and Enrique Molina (1871-1964), who came to the defense of the spirituality that positivism had neglected. Finally, a number of individuals played a role in the last quarter century or so, whose fame may increase with time and international exposure, including Jorge Millas (1917-1982) and Juan Rivano (b. 1926), Jaksic’s professor. While reading this study I kept recalling what I consider the essence of Ortega’s footnote to the thirteenth chapter («El mayor peligro, El Estado») of his La rebelión de las masas, namely, that for philosophy to influence the ruling of a people it is not necessary either for philosophers to be rulers or for rulers to be philosophers (as Plato thought), but simply for philosophers to be permitted to be philosophers. That is, if philosophers are faithful to their calling as reflective critics of human living, using clarity as their ultimate weapon to expose what is going on, this is sufficient. No authoritarian government, of course, can permit this and hence the inevitable conflict between philosophy and politics, both ecclesiastical and secular, throughout history. Jaksic has shown this strikingly, especially in his last chapter, and by so doing forced us to reflect on what occurred in Franco Spain, Hitler Germany, Stalin Soviet Union, and other totalitarian societies, and is still occurring in Gorbachev Soviet Union, Castro Cuba, post-Khomeini Iran, South Africa, and elsewhere. In such systems, philosophers -along with writers of literature- must be silenced or trained as ideological parrots. The perversion of philosophy into ideology by the «officialists» in Chilean academia to suit a dictatorship, Jaksic shows, should awaken anyone with the attitude of «it can’t happen here» to the major danger of our time in any country: statism.

Antón Donoso
University of Detroit

Benavides, Adán, Jr. (compiler and editor). The Bexar Archives (1717-1836): A Name Guide. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989. 1179 pp.

Benavides intends his book «...for researchers, historians, and genealogists to readily locate particular information about thousands of individuals, those who wandered and trekked their way across Texas, and those who never saw Texas but affected its administration and daily life» (xx). Thus in layman’s paraphrase he describes his guide that through surnames, accesses 30.000 manuscripts from a geographical area incorporating the Spanish province of Texas and the Mexican state of Coahuila and Texas. Chronologically the documents cover the years preceding the founding of the mission of San Antonio to the founding of the republic of Texas.

The topics collectively relate to political and military activities, frontier life and community development. A perusal of the inclusive subject index refines these general labels to more usable denominators: academic degrees, barbers, Blacks and slaves, cockfights, diaries, murders, Quakers, saints and martyrs, widows, women and right to work, all subjects that belie the dullness conjured by the title of the work.

This carefully crafted guide with its numerous topics and subtopics is based on document description from the calendar. Naturally the 8.200 surnames and a description of the various topics under each one comprises the body of this reference. Yet the scholarly apparatus that enhances it is worthy of note. An introduction clearly defines Benavides’s purposes and methods. Following the 1.110 pages of names, various appendices furnish both mandatory and supplemental data: inventories from the Bexar Archives,

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list of reels by date, contemporary names of cited places whose names have changed, list of abbreviations, and computer applications. A six-page glossary of Spanish colonial terms, assorted illustrations, figures and tables complete this reference.

In other words, through surname entries, Benavides has refined access to a historically significant collection of documents. The value of his work goes beyond that of historians, the obvious users. Surely the guide will bean asset to linguists in search of original documents both from the colonial and national periods of Mexico. Furthermore, the compilation is a marvelous source for the study of Spanish surnames: their variant spellings, their compound forms, and the baptismal names that indicate attachment to Catholicism. Finally, two relatively new fields, social history and popular culture, will be the beneficiaries of this guide when their practitioners try to reconstruct every-day life of the indicated period.

Benavides, in his thoroughness and persistence, has compiled a reference useful to several fields of Latin American Studies and his book should be an impetus to research on Mexico, the border and Texas.

Richard D. Woods
Trinity University

Lagos, Ramona. Varia Colección. Ensayos sobre literatura hispano-americana. New York: Peter Lang, 1989. 310 pp.

More original and perceptive essays would be hard to find. Most were written in Lagos’s native Chile, the others in the United States. In «El incumplimiento de la programación épica en La Araucana», Lagos demonstrates how the author-narrator, disenchanted with the unheroic and unchristian conduct of the struggle, breaks with his enunciated plan to extol the victory of Spain in a just and legitimate war. Ercilla destroys his initial concept of what his epic poem is to be and includes such material as the apparently digressive tales of love (Dido-Siqueo), the Spanish wars in Europe and New World discoveries. Lagos convincingly argues that these inserts, far from being extraneous narratives of loyalty, heroism, and Christian virtue, serve as a counterpoise to the barbarous war waged by the Spaniards. For Lagos, a fundamental aspect of La Araucana is the obliteration of the poem’s epic values and the transformation of the once exultant narrator into a disillusioned one who deprecates these bellicose events and eschews relating them.

In «Alturas de Macchu Picchu: Las manos destinadas a la luz», Lagos structures her thesis on the multivalued symbolic representation that Neruda ascribes to the hand in its capacity to decode the greatness and perdurability of the Inca ruins. Lagos leads us through the dense text with rare acumen to show how the poet reveals the hand as an instrument to ferret out the meaning of pre-columbian civilization.

In «María, una poética de ocultamiento», Lagos offers a new reading of the novel that may disturb our traditionally held views. For Lagos, the essence of María is Efraín’s evolution to manhood, his becoming independent of surroundings and family. The work never comes to grips openly with the basic conflict between Efraín and his colonial-minded father and hides the son’s process of maturity as it does social and cultural changes that impinge on the love story.

In a brilliantly reasoned essay, «Las tierras flacas: Capitalismo agrícola e ideología», Lagos sees the three male protagonists as representing three distinct phases of «caciquismo» and the struggle to control the land and repress the Indian-Teódulo, Epifanio, and Jacob Gallo, who bring technical modernization to the land under a capitalist system. Lagos upbraids Yañez’s limited, «costumbrista» and false vision of rural Mexico whereby he focuses the problem from his own perspective of the citified, intellectual bourgeoisie.

«¿Quién mató a Palomino Romero?: Farsa y verdad novelesca» probes into the complex relationships that existed among the characters before the crime and the even more enigmatic relationships that develop during the investigation by Silva and Lituma. In explicating the elusive narrative structure, Lagos also examines the collective voice that furnishes the multiple interpretive possibilities of the events, and the dual role that Lituma plays as narrator and reader of the incidents related. Lagos faults the novel on one major point, that Vargas Llosa, in focusing the perception of reality the reader receives on that perceived by Lituma as one individual, deprives the reader of any internal knowledge about the social and political sector of Peru that Palomino represents. Lagos presents a persuasive case to support her position, but I do not feel the absence of this knowledge vitiates the work to the extent she suggests.

The relationship between political ideology is central to «Las marcas del poder y la escritura en La casa de los espíritus». Lagos explores the way Allende meshes real reality and fictional reality through the selection of the circumstances and events surrounding the characters, as well as through the ultimate destiny she accords them.

Space permits only a listing of the remaining essays, but, like the others, they reveal a critical stance that, above thematic and regionalistic concerns, seeks to uncover the underlying textual strategies that inform the ideological basis of a literary work. The titles are «La ruptura: Ley estructural de Preguntas a la hora del té de Nicanor Parra», «Los Textos cautivos de Borges en la encrucijada de su obra en la década del treinta», «Inconsciente y ritual en Coronación de José Donoso», «Magia y tecnología en Cien años de soledad: Una antropología política», and «Alberto Romero: Del soliloquio al realismo».

Lagos is a first-rate critic whose intellectual independence and sharp insight into the literary process have produced these outstanding essays, all of them models of rigorous scholarship and profundity of thought.

Myron I. Lichtblau
Syracuse University

Galaz-Vivar Welden, Alicia. Alta Marea. Introvisión crítica en ocho voces latinoamericanas: Belli, Fuentes, Lagos, Mistral, Neruda, Orrillo, Rojas, Villaurrutia. Madrid: Editorial Betania, 1988. 109 pp.

Tras el largo título, de imprecisa significación, se reúnen ocho breves ensayos sobre otros tantos narradores y poetas hispanoamericanos contemporáneos seleccionados aparentemente sin otro propósito que la variedad representativa. Como los textos se ordenan siguiendo la secuencia alfabética de los autores tal como se los cita en el título, queda desechada toda posibilidad de una ordenación concebida críticamente. Se trata, en efecto, de una serie abierta de análisis independientes centrados, en cada caso, en un aspecto específico de la obra de un autor, o de un texto en particular: el lenguaje paródico en la poesía de Germán Belli; lo mítico y sagrado en Aura, de Carlos Fuentes; el carácter testimonial de la poesía de Ramiro Lagos; la continuidad entre dos libros extremos de Gabriela Mistral; la voz testimonial en un texto de Canto General de Neruda; lo esperpéntico hispanoamericano en las novelas de Winston Orrillo; la búsqueda de una armonía de opuestos en la poesía de Gonzalo Rojas; y lo arquetípico en la novela Dama de corazones, de Xavier Villaurrutia.

Son todos ellos análisis de enfoques intencionalmente reducidos que presuponen un público lector al tanto de las obras comentadas, aunque no necesariamente especializado en la crítica, ya que se espera de éste la aceptación de comentarios, juicios y observaciones categóricas de difusa significación. Más bien notas de lectura que ensayos acabados, estos estudios de «ocho voces latinoamericanas» no responden a ese «indudable rigor analítico» que les atribuye quien en el prólogo explica el significado de «introvisión crítica» -esa aparentemente original aproximación a la literatura- como «un análisis riguroso que surge desde el interior mismo de los textos con el propósito de sacar a luz la estructura dinámica que los sostiene» (viii-xix). No está claro cómo Alta marea pueda ser el resultado de tal ejercicio analítico; tampoco está claro que, como lo indica el mismo crítico, el libro lleve «implícita la hipótesis de que por diversas vías, o a través de variadas formas de expresión, ‘lo hispanoamericano’ se identifica de una u otra manera con esa actitud polémica y dinámica del espíritu que llamamos manierista» (xi). El uso del término «manierista» en dos o tres ocasiones en los análisis no justifica tal lectura, menos aún cuando no hay el menor intento por parte de la autora de explicar lo que se quiere significar con dicha terminología aplicada a la literatura contemporánea.

No están ausentes en estos textos las observaciones críticas válidas, las interpretaciones desveladoras, las observaciones correctas que evidencian un lector sensible e inteligente; faltan, sin embargo, tanto en la organización del texto como en el estilo, la claridad y el rigor expositivos que hacen de una serie de adecuados comentarios de lectura un texto auténticamente crítico. Más que artículos, estas ocho notas son borradores que, en un estilo a la vez esquemático e impresionista, recogen generalizaciones, listas, análisis incompletos y repeticiones que concluyen en breves y no siempre aclaratorios párrafos finales como el que cierra el artículo sobre Aura: «Carlos Fuentes nos entrega en Aura la persistencia del mito que se mezcla con la magia y la hechicería por virtud del amor, el sentimiento motor más fuerte y creativo» (25). Más que una interpretación y un juicio crítico iluminador, se tiene en estas líneas una simple descripción que el lector entiende como insuficiente conclusión al análisis.

Insuficientes son, en general, los contenidos críticos de estos trabajos que, sin faltarles tesis válidas y de indudable interés, se limitan a rozar en sus comentarios cuestiones que bien merecían mayor ahondamiento analítico y una más pausada elaboración expositiva. Afirmar, por ejemplo, sin mayores comentarios, que en Dama de corazones, de Villaurrutia «se menciona, entre otros, a Rimbaud, Cocteau, Reverdy, Apollinaire, Mallarme (sic), Proust, Giraudoux», o incluir como cita de otro crítico sólo las siguientes palabras: «Otro elemento temático de importancia se desarrolla en las composiciones que versan sobre la realidad y la irrealidad de los sueños...», son indicativas del carácter provisorio e incompleto de estas notas.

Una más cuidada elaboración de los materiales según principios críticos más sólidos que esta «introvisión» subjetiva y fragmentaria habría podido transformar estos trabajos preparatorios en más complejos estudios de mayor utilidad para el interesado en la literatura hispanoamericana. Como ensayos asistemáticos tal vez puedan interesar a lectores no especializados que no busquen tanto la justeza de una crítica bien desarrollada como las emociones de una reacción directa, y en gran medida subjetiva, ante la obra literaria. Pero incluso estos mismos lectores se habrían beneficiado no poco de las labores de ese editor cuidadoso y responsable del que este libro está tan necesitado.

S. Daydí-Tolson
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

DiAntonio, Robert E. Brazilian Fiction: Aspects and Evolution of the Contemporary Narrative. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1989. 221 pp.

Robert DiAntonio’s Brazilian Fiction: Aspects and Evolution of the Contemporary Narrative is a collection of thematically arranged essays focusing on major Brazilian narrative texts from the nineteen seventies and eighties. The title of the volume is, however, only partially appropriate, for while DiAntonio discusses many different aspects of contemporary Brazilian fiction, he does not deal with the historical question of the evolution of contemporary Brazilian narrative.

Although the quality of the chapters varies, the author’s effort to account for the diversity of contemporary Brazilian narrative is impressive. Not

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only does DiAntonio analyze eleven works by nine different writers, but he also comments on many other texts, thus revealing a thorough knowledge of contemporary Brazilian literature. In the process DiAntonio considers a wide range of topics, such as, among others, the use of mythic and biblical materials, the aesthetics of the absurd, dystopian fiction and the role of ethnicity. As he announces in the preface, DiAntonio uses a variety of critical approaches, including archetypal, reader-response, sociopolitical and psychological. Yet, while the author is to be commended for the breadth of his scope and for his openness to different critical orientations, these qualities are at the root of two major weaknesses in this book. First, the coverage of a large number of topics is accomplished at the expense of depth and focus. Second, the reliance on theorists as diverse as René Wellek, Johathan Culler, Terry Eagleton, Wolfgang Iser, Mircea Eliade, Robert Alter and others, often in the same chapter, ignores the fundamental and at times irreconcilable differences in their views of the status of literary text and of the nature of the reading activity.

This volume is also marred by many technical, theoretical and stylistic flaws. DiAntonio quotes excessively, a habit that serves hardly any purpose besides displaying the author’s erudition. The reader is bombarded with a plethora of epigraphs (which twice in the book are called epigrams) and gratuitous allusions (generally in passing) to works in the Western literary tradition, which add very little to the author’s argument. Even more disconcerting is DiAntonio’s tendency to quote out of context. For example, in his discussions of Ivan Angelo’s A Festa DiAntonio cites a passage from Jonathan Culler’s On Deconstruction dealing with the problematic relationship between text and reader in order to substantiate his own argument that A Festa has «a discernible design and purpose: greater reader involvement in the problems of the times» (26), hardly the view of the function of literature espoused by Culler’s text. Some of the author’s critical and theoretical generalizations, as well as his less than rigorous use of critical vocabulary, are also quite disturbing. To state that there is little critical material on the mythic structure of Laços de Familia (32) suggests a lack of familiarity with the recent bibliography on Clarice Lispector; to say that «Brazilian writing has been coming of age» (xii) ignores the historical fact that such recognized masterpieces as João Guimarães Rosa’s Sagarana and Clarice Lispector’s Perto do coração selvagem were published forty-five years ago, and Machado de Assis’s.

Dom Casmurro appeared nine decades ago; to affirm that the purpose of all narrative is to create «a cathartic reaction in the reader» (94) not only implies a rather myopic view of the role of literature, but also contradicts some of DiAntonio’s own readings. In addition, DiAntonio refers to Elizabeth Lowe’s The City in Brazilian Literature as a study of the myth (?) of the city, and, in the chapter on Márcio Souza’s Galvez, Imperador do Acre, he blurs all differences between the concepts of irony, farce, parody, burlesque and satire. Finally, the book contains a surprisingly large number of stylistic problems, including a pretentious abuse of jargon, such as in the description of Mad Maria as «an allegory of ontological import» (93), as well as awkward diction («He [Guedali] is one of the many original characters who narratively comprise Scliar’s... magic world» [117], or «Here the line between novelist, artist, journalist and propagandist coalesces» [136]) and syntax («Ribeiro’s novel fuses very real sociopolitical concerns, the aesthetic experience and his role as modern-day mythmaker» [46]).

Although Brazilian Narrative: Aspects and Evolution of the Contemporary Narrative is a useful introduction to contemporary Brazilian fiction and does contain some intelligent readings, it lacks cohesiveness, focus and scholarly rigor. Despite offering some perceptive insights, it is an uneven and ultimately disappointing book.

Luiz Fernando Valente
Brown University

Valjalo, David, editor. Canción de Marcela: Mujer y cultura en el mundo hispano. Madrid: Orígenes, 1989. 203 pp.

This collection begins with a quotation of Marcela’s words from the Quijote in which she defends her rejection of men in favor of a solitary life: «Yo nací libre, y para poder vivir libre...». The use of «free» is particularly appropriate to this book, given that it is one of the most loosely organized and incoherent gathering of essays one would likely encounter. And as is usually the case with this type of work, there are several individual essays that stand out for their lucidity and originality: the volume as a whole, however, fails to make a focused contribution to any of the immeasurable fields indicated in the subtitle («mujer» «cultura» «mundo hispano»). In her «Notas para una revisión de lo femenino en la literatura», poet Angeles Maeso formulates some pertinent theoretical questions concerning the degree of «transgression» undertaken by women writers today. Maeso renounces the literary distinctions that are established on the basis of gender, and concludes with this remarkable personification: «al texto lo mismo le da ser masculino, femenino, andrógino o angelical, que querer ponerle sexo va contra natura» (15). Perhaps a text «doesn’t care» whether it is gendered or not, but the question of writing and sexual difference is one that still concerns many feminist thinkers today, despite Maeso’s glib dismissal of these issues. Beth Miller’s «Por una autodefinición artística» looks at Rosario Castellanos’s essays in order to elucidate the Mexican author’s thinking on matters of «the femenine» and «the masculine». In this carefully argued essay, Miller shows how for Castellanos «feminine culture» did not exist: further, Miller explores -and demythifies- the ways in which Castellanos defined her artistic and sexual identity. The third essay, by Pedro Bravo-Elizondo,

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examines the influence of Spaniard Belén de Sárraga on the mining industry of Chile in the early part of this century by giving a brief biographical sketch and quoting newspaper articles about her. Antonio Campaña provides a general introduction to the life and works of poets Mistral, Storni, and Ibarbourou: this piece adds nothing to the criticism of these outstanding poets (except a few romanticized generalities on «love» and «maternal feelings»), but proves annoying in its insistence on calling Mistral by her first name only. In «La fragmentación: Principio ordenador en la ficción de Luisa Valenzuela», Patricia Rubio performs a rapid survey of Valenzuela’s fiction to demonstrate how the texts may be analyzed as puzzles and games at the level of discourse and structure. Surprisingly, Rubio does not use any of the many theoretical models through which one may study literature as a ludic activity or as a fragmented/ fracturing experience. José María Naharro-Calderón goes by the route of Barthes, Foucault, Lacan, Kristeva and Benveniste to study the work of Mercedes Escolano, a Spanish poet in her early twenties. If Escolano does emerge definitively from the group of «diosas blancas» (the title of a poetic anthology of young Spanish women), then this serious and intelligent example of literary analysis on Naharro’s part will have been well worth the effort. In his essay on Isabel Allende’s La casa de los espíritus, Marcelo Coddou works with the already extensive bibliography on the Chilean author to establish the novel’s link to history. Canción de Marcela also includes some examples of poetry (Uruguayan Concepción Silva Belinzón, Venezuelan Luz Machado, Ecuatorean Ileana Espinel) and short story (Chilean Ana Vásquez). The final sections look at music (a piece entitled «Claudio Arrau evoca a Teresa Carreño»); cinema («Las mujeres en el cine» by Inés Dölz-Blackburn); theatre (an essay on four Latin American women playwrights by Enrique Sandoval), and lastly, we find brief biographical sketches of six plastic artists. I am struck by the disparity among the entries in this collection: we go from detailed literary analysis of limited material to what appear to be sweeping overviews and random examples of a whole range of writers and artists from many time periods and countries. Further, no attempt has been made to systematize the documentation used in these pieces (indeed, many lack a basic bibliographic apparatus) nor to unify the writing style (there are speeches, articles from newspapers, and encyclopedia entries along with the traditional academic essay). In sum, this «free form» collection may prove of some interest for its individual contributions, but as a book, it has little to recommend it. Perhaps the time has arrived when the mere mention of the word «woman» no longer provides sufficiently narrow or novel territory on which to edify our critical collections, and instead demands that we reexamine the «woman» question with the historical, cultural, and theoretical specificity that we have every right to expect today.

Rosemary Geisdorfer Feal
University of Rochester

Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writings and Critical Readings. Edited by Asunción Horno-Delgado, Eliana Ortega, Nina M. Scott, and Nancy Saporta Sternbach. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1989. 268 pp.

Breaking Boundaries is a collective and very timely edition that attempts to account for and theorize the «boom» of latina writing which has taken place in the last ten years in the United States. The edition is divided into five main categories: a programmatic and theoretical introduction by Eliana Ortega and Nancy Saporta Stenbach; two comprehensive sections on chicana and puertorriqueña writers; and two less extensive sections on Cuban and Latin American women writers living in the United States. The weight given each section reflects the numerical representation of each particular minority residing in the United States. Each of the sections also contains testimonies by latina writers such as Denise Chávez, Helena María Viramontes, Nicholasa Mohr, Sandra María Esteves, Dolores Prida, Hessy Reyna, and Chiqui Vicioso.

The essays and testimonies have been written in English or have been translated from Spanish into English; the critics are both latina/o as well as North American. In this way, the editors attempt to overcome the lack of dialogue between mainstream North American feminism and latina feminism. Lastly, but not least importantly, Breaking Boundaries theorizes and situates a «minority» literature marginalized from academia in a university press. This important publication renders accessible critiques and a reconsideration of the writings of latina women to a wider public. Henceforth, the excuse that North American feminists and academics do not study latina writing because «we do not know Spanish» will no longer hold water.

If there is one single theoretical postulate at the heart of the edition it is that critics have to stop analyzing latina writing in terms of a «search for identity» (3). Rather, latina women have an identity and if «there is a search» in this writing, Eliana Ortega and Nancy Saporta Sternbach insist, «it must be defined as a search for the expression or articulation of that identity, but not for [that] identity itself» (3). The problem for the latina writer -as both the testimonies and the critics insist- is the search for a language, a literary mode, and a combination of cultural codes that will appropriately and adequately express and depict her reality and experience on the margins of two cultures. She inhabits what the Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa has elsewhere called a «borderland».

As the title suggests, Breaking Boundaries is a work that crosses established boundaries in a number of possible and impossible ways: it mixes modes and breaks with academic distinctions by setting critical essays and writer’s testimonies side by side; it breaks ethnic isolation by insisting that a bond of solidarity

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and mutual understanding unites all latinas, and at the same time it emphasizes the cultural differences that give each their own cultural specificity. The collection continues the effort initiated by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa in This Bridge Called My Back: Writing By Radical Women of Color, in the early eighties, to document and theorize the experiences of all minority women regardless of color. The emphasis on a feminism «of color» also points to the fact that most of the latina writers are either working class women or identify with the working class and this identification informs and shapes their writings in important ways.

The use of the testimonies and the focus on latina women writers inserts Breaking Boundaries within a critical, perhaps postmodern, tradition that attempts to create a space and a much-needed critical language to talk about those marginalized by our literary canon. Implicitly, it questions the assumptions upon which aesthetic judgments are made and which serve as a mechanism of exclusion of the literary production of minority writers. Furthermore, the editors assume a critical discourse that is politically engaged. Thereby they attempt to bridge the gap between theory and practice, art and life, the «real world» and academia. Their political commitment extends not only to a critical discourse that is engaged, but also to a literary practice that emphasizes collective production and which sets criticism and testimony side by side.

Silvia Spitta
Dartmouth College

Kanellos, Nicolás, ed. Biographical Dictionary of Hispanic Literature in the United States. The Literature of Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans, and Other Hispanic Writers. Westport, Conneticut: Greenwood Press, 1989. 357 pp.

Every entry in this dictionary indicates the literary genres and themes together with the analyses of the works by each author. A bibliography of works by and about the writer concludes each entry. A general bibliography of Hispanic literature written in the United States ends the dictionary to which thirty-six critics contributed. Of the forty-eight authors whose works are analyzed, thirty-one are Puerto Ricans or are of Puerto Rican descent. In numbers, Cubans rank second with thirteen. There are also two writers from Chile, one from Peru, and one from Costa Rica. Many of the Puerto Rican and Cuban authors who figure in the dictionary reside in New York City. They have written their works in Spanish or English or in both languages

Puerto Rican Authors

Puerto Rican literature during the nineteenth century manifested opposition to Spanish control and in the twentieth resistance to United States dominance and Yankee customs. Both the lumpen and professional classes have sought to retain the national identity. Luis Lloréns Torres (1878-1944) composed poetry rich in popular tradition as well as academic in style. He was a sort of minstrel known as The Poet of Puerto Rico because he sought to interpret in verse the people’s feelings. A strong ideal of independence is constant in his verse, which treats black and rural themes with a nativist flavor. Lyricism permeates his verse, which is his own and unique in Hispanic literature. Luis Palés Matos (1898-1959), the first Puerto Rican to make a lasting impact on the evolution of Latin American literature, developed a poetic style inspired by the rhythms and language of Africa and the black Caribbean. Critical toward the United States and Europe, his works are saturated with the poet’s own experiences. Most elements of his black poetry can be found in «Canción festiva para ser llorada» («Festive Song to be Cried»). José Agustín Balseiro (1900- ), born in Barcelona, Puerto Rico, studied in universities in Puerto Rico, the United States and Spain, has been invited to lecture in many countries and is a corresponding member of the Royal Spanish Academy. He has written three novels, seven books of poetry, nine volumes of essays and many articles for journals. His novel La ruta eterna (The Eternal Route) makes the reader aware of changes on the island due to the Spanish American War, United States influence, and World War I. Jesús Colón (1901-1974) wrote in English. Many of his essays are in A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches. Having come as a stowaway to the United States when he was sixteen years old, he wrote about lower-class Puerto Rican workers in New York, complaining of racial discrimination. For fifteen years he wrote for the Daily Worker (published by the communist party in New York City). Many of his articles, most of them unstudied, treat of the slums, violence, drugs, and racial discrimination in New York City. Puerto Rico’s most productive novelist is Nicholassa Mohr (b. 1935) who has won many awards. She pictures American society and creates characters who are not overly aware of identity crisis, displacement of cultural conflict, but shows that many Puerto Ricans in New York City are unskilled workers who hold menial jobs.

Cuban Authors

Cuban literature in the United States began in the nineteenth century when the patriots started to plot their independence from Spain. Twentieth-century Cubans have not been so obsessed with preserving the Spanish language and Hispanic culture as Puerto Ricans, perhaps because early Cuban immigrants were professionals and intellectuals rather than menial workers. Current Cuban literature attacks the Cuban revolution and Marxism and focuses on Cuban life and culture in the United states. The latest immigrants are conscious of the fact that Cuba no longer belongs to them and their language is markedly influenced by English. Cuban assimilation is treated in Óscar Hijuelos’s Our House Is the Lost World. Lydia Cabrera (1900- ), considered Cuba’s most famous female author, turned to Afro-Cuban folklore for her inspiration, integrating the material collected from interviewing blacks in Havana to authenticate her Afro-Cuban prose fiction. José Sánchez Boudy (b.

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1926) has published poetry, short stories, novels, plays and essays. His novels portray life in pre-Castro Cuba, the crisis of the Western World and Cuban life in the United States. His short stories are also portrayals of his Cuban past. Matías Montes Huidobro (b. 1931), a Cuban American, a prolific writer of plays, novels, short stories and poetry is a pessimistic observer of contemporary society. In his dramas he employs unusual theatrical techniques: choral elements, absurd situations and dialogues, depersonalization of the characters, and open endings.

Chilean, Costa Rican and Peruvian Authors

Fernando Alegría (b.1918), born in Chile, a resident of the United States since 1940, enjoys a highly deserved reputation as a researcher, and scholar. His first two literary works focus on Chile and the United States while his doctoral dissertation traces the history of Chilean poetry from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. His poems deal with Chilean historical figures, including Salvador Allende, whom he knew personally. Several of his novels feature the popular hero as protagonist. Marjorie Agosin (b. 1955), was born in the United States but spent her childhood and adolescence in Chile. Critics stress the feminist quality of her poems exposing injustices that victimize women in Latin America. Rima de Valbona (b. 1931), born in Costa Rica, is the author of novels, short stories and books of literary criticism. The major themes of her works are women’s demand for freedom, the search for religious faith, and the separation of fantasy from reality. Isaac Goldemberg (b. 1945), born in Peru, is the son of a Russian Jewish father and a Peruvian mother who has lived in New York since 1965. In a series of poems he stressed his search for personal identity; his novels treat the Peruvian Jewish community.

The dictionary presents a panorama of Hispanic literature written in the United States during the past 100 years, a well documented rendering of the thoughts and feeling of millions of people. It reveals the problems they faced: the uprooting of populations, the disintegration of families, unemployment, mastering a foreign language, adaptation to different customs and religions. The bibliographies are comprehensive, the biographies fairly detailed and the criticisms illuminating. The dictionary, the first of its kind in the field, is attractive in appearance and shows evidence of a skillful job of editing.

Harvey L. Johnson
University of Houston

Fernández Olmos, Margarite. Sobre la literatura puertorriqueña de aquí y de allá: aproximaciones feministas. Santo Domingo, República Dominicana: Editora Alfa y Omega, 1989. 136 pp.

En esta colección de ensayos críticos sobre escritoras puertorriqueñas contemporáneas, Margarite Fernández Olmos nos ofrece un análisis feminista de las obras de nuestras escritoras y, acaso de mayor importancia, una visión comparada que intenta establecer nexos y continuidades entre las autoras puertorriqueñas de la isla y las del continente. En la introducción la autora expone sus objetivos críticos: «alcanzar una mayor comprensión de la dinámica entre la realidad sociocultural y la literatura» (ix). De este contexto general se desprende la preocupación feminista: a saber, presentar la tendencia «anti-machista» en la narrativa contemporánea puertorriqueña; analizar los modos de desmitificación de los valores patriarcales y distinguir, si es posible, las respuestas anti-patriarcales de las mujeres escritoras de aquéllas ofrecidas por sus contrapartidas masculinas (ix).

Aunque estas premisas feministas exponen, a modo de introducción, la presencia indiscutible de la mujer en el actual contexto literario puertorriqueño, el análisis textual en los tres primeros ensayos consta mayormente de resúmenes de los cuentos estudiados. Se concibe, pues, al texto literario como documento que refleja directamente la realidad sociocultural puertorriqueña, sin tomar en cuenta las complejas funciones del lenguaje literario y las nuevas definiciones de texto y de literatura que proponen dichas autoras.

Sin embargo, los últimos cuatro ensayos del libro representan una nueva contribución al estudio de las literaturas puertorriqueñas. «Los cuentos infantiles de Rosario Ferré o la fantasía emancipadora», una de las piezas más logradas de la colección, recalca la importancia política y social del género infantil en la obra de Ferré, tema que merece atención crítica. Mediante un examen teórico sobre las estructuras del cuento infantil en el contexto europeo y su presencia histórica en la literatura puertorriqueña, Fernández Olmos defiende el valor profundo, serio y conscientizador de dichos textos. La lectura feminista del cuento «Arroz con leche» indica el poder que poseen los símbolos infantiles de transformar las ideologías dominantes.

Al incurrir en la problemática del aquí y del allá de la literatura puertorriqueña, es decir, en la dualidad geográfica, lingüística y cultural entre la isla y el continente, la autora resume de manera clara y consistente las dificultades de categorizar a los escritores puertorriqueños en los Estados Unidos. En «Exiliados lingüísticos: el dilema del escritor puertorriqueño en la metrópoli» y «En la metrópoli: el exilio, la emigración y la poesía de escritoras puertorriqueñas en Nueva York», se apuntan con claridad los dos aspectos divisorios que separan a los de la isla de los del continente: la clase social y la lengua. Bien reafirma Fernández Olmos que es muy «difícil lograr que la obra del escritor puertorriqueño de la metrópoli se sitúe dentro del contexto de la literatura nacional puertorriqueña dada la delicada y urgente causa del empleo del español en la isla como un mecanismo de defensa de la cultura nacional» (76). En ambos ensayos se trata de establecer una diferenciación entre el escritor puertorriqueño exiliado -el que vive en Nueva York por una temporada- y el emigrado, quien ha nacido en la metrópoli, se ha criado en el ambiente urbano y se identifica más con el inglés y con la cultura tercermundista en los Estados Unidos. Aun

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cuando dichos deslindes no se puedan aplicar tan fácilmente a la obra de cada individuo, hay que reafirmar que las diferencias de clase social, preparación académica y lingüística, y estancia en los Estados Unidos, explican ciertas diferencias de estilo, tema y actitudes culturales entre los escritores. Más aún, la autora indica que una poeta puertorriqueña exiliada como Etnairis Rivera ha sido influida por el estilo nuyorican durante su estadía en los Estados Unidos (95- 96), lo que reivindica el valor de los escritores de la metrópoli, quienes han sido marginalizados y rechazados por la élite intelectual de la isla.

Finalmente, como realización del diálogo crítico entre ambos grupos, Fernández Olmos logra un estudio comparado de la novela de desarrollo en Nilda (1973) de Nicholassa Mohr, y en Felices días, tío Sergio (1986), de Magali García Ramis. A pesar de las diferencias de contexto social en que se insertan las protagonistas, en ambas obras se filtra una crítica cultural de la sociedad puertorriqueña patriarcal, y una «afirmación de diferencia» (130) que constituye la variante femenina de la norma del bildungsroman, género en el cual el protagonista masculino tradicionalmente realiza su integración a la sociedad.

Al tratar de establecer «puntos de contacto y convergencias» entre las escritoras de aquí y de allá, Fernández Olmos a veces suprime las diferencias culturales y expresivas entre ellas. En su análisis de «Pollito Chicken» de Ana Lydia Vega, no se menciona la controversia suscitada por la selección de la protagonista nuyorican Suzie Bermúdez (controversia que dio a relucir precisamente los choques clasistas y académicos entre Nicholassa Mohr y Ana Lydia Vega). Si bien es importante recalcar las afinidades que poseen las escritoras contemporáneas en su objetivo común de desmantelar las estructuras patriarcales y opresoras mediante la imaginación artística y el valor testimonial de la literatura, asimismo debemos aceptar la diversidad y la naturaleza conflictiva de las voces que hoy día conforman las literaturas puertorriqueñas de aquí y de allá. Dada la heterogeneidad y la fluidez geográfica, social y artística de nuestros escritores, esperamos encontrar más estudios comparados sobre las literaturas puertorriqueñas, aquí, allá, o dondequiera que estén surgiendo.

Frances R. Aparicio
University of Michigan

Huerta, Jorge. Necessary Theater. Six Plays About the Chicano Experience. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1989. 368 pp.

Necessary Theater is a collection of plays which depicts various facets of the Chicano Experience. This in itself is not unique in that there have been many anthologies of Chicano plays which have served this same purpose. What distinguishes Necessary Theatre from other anthologies is that each of the plays has been produced by a professional company. The term «necessary theater» stems from its didactic nature, i.e., the plays are designed or intended to convey instruction and information as well as pleasure and entertainment. In essence, the plays are necessary because they educate their audience about the history of an oppressed people by dramatizing the Chicano’s struggle for cultural and sociopolitical survival.

With respect to the organization of the anthology, each play in the collection is preceded by a brief history of the work in question. The editor informs the reader as to the development of the dramatic composition, and also presents a concise commentary on the play. Each selection is also preceded by a biography of the author or authors. In addition to the history of the author’s life, the biography introduces the reader to other works by the playwright, and, in many instances, the editor also enlightens the reader about the relative position of the play included in the anthology with respect to the author’s overall artistic production. In general, the organization of the anthology is excellent.

The works in Necessary Theatre explore a wide range of experiences which characterize the Chicano’s existence and reality. Although each play treats a different topic or topics, all the works are bound together by a common strand, i.e., they each address the issue of survival. For example, Soldierboy by Judith and Severo Pérez, treats the psychosocial struggle encountered by Hispanic soldiers upon their return from World Word II. The struggle includes not only an inner conflict engendered by psychological turmoil related to the war experience, but also the conflict experienced by Chicanos involved in upward social mobility. The play Latina by Milcha Sánchez-Scott addresses the economic and cultural survival of Hispanic females employed as maids. This dramatic composition is unique in that it includes female immigrants from various Latin American countries, and explores a distinctly latina point of view. The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa by Luis Valdez examines the identity crisis which characterizes Chicanos who assimilate to the dominant social group. It also examines the survival of the Hispanic family during the process of assimilation.

There are two plays written by El Teatro de la Esperanza; namely, Guadalupe, a docu-drama which explores a struggle by an Hispanic community involved in educational issues and economic exploitation; and La víctima, another documentary that analyzes the immigration problem. The latter play examines topics such as illegal aliens and repatriation, economic and cultural survival. The final play, Money by Arthur Girón, presents a critical view of the way in which money is allocated to charitable projects by foundations.

The thematic variety explored is unquestionably related to the Chicano experience with one notable exception, and that is Money by Arthur Girón. This play written by a play wright of Guatemalan heritage, takes a critical look at the corporate foundation world, and thus is intimately connected to corporatism as practiced by members of the white power structure, being only tangentially related to Hispanic issues

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facing the majority of Chicanos in the Southwest. Although the setting is in San Francisco, the main topic of the play is extrinsic to the Chicano experience. There have been many Chicano authors who have produced literature that did not address Chicano issues per se, but their perspective was uniquely Chicano in nature. The drama by Girón includes two central characters who are Hispanic, but their comportment indicates an alien outlook: they do not reflect a Chicano perspective and their actions do not represent Chicano experience. This may be due to the fact that Girón is not of Mexican heritage, and a large part of his life was spent in a foreign environment. At any rate, Money represents a divergent drama and certainly not a part of «necessary» theatre.

In general, Necessary Theatre does explore the sociopolitical multiplicity which comprises the Chicano experience. All the plays are thematically bound by dramatizing the politics of survival. At the same time, each drama explores different topics, and the collection as a whole provides an excellent account of the Chicano experience. The only flaw in the anthology is the inclusion of Money, a deviant drama which detracts from the purpose of the anthology, but does not negate the value of Necessary Theatre. Overall, Huerta has produced an excellent anthology which provides the reader with both an enlightening as well as an entertaining experience.

Eliverio Chávez
Texas Tech University

Muñoz, Elías Miguel. Crazy Love. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1989. 167 pp.

Rodríguez, Joe. The Oddsplayer. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1988. 136 pp.

Arte Público Press has in recent years published a substantial number of high-quality works of fiction by Hispanic writers in the United States. The two novels to be reviewed here are part of this accessing to a broad reading public of the insight s of minority authors. Crazy Love is the first novel in English by United States Cuban writer Elías Miguel Muñoz, who has previously authored the novel Los viajes de Orlando Cachumbambé, as well as stories and poems appearing in literary magazines. A Bildungsroman set in the context of Cuban life in this country, it portrays three generations’ differing experience of life in the United States, with the younger generation’s struggle for identity against or for ethnicity, for incorporation into the mainstream yet self-definition within it. The novel’s organizing narrative consciousness is Julian, also known as Julianito and Nito, the middle child in a Cuban exile family in Los Angeles. Unlike the characters in Roberto G. Fernández’s remarkable 1988 Raining Backwards, Julian’s family must exist as a microcosm unto itself, a small minority within the Hispanic population of the Los Angeles area, far removed from the intense exile re-creation of Cuba in Dade County, Florida.

This novel has vital implications for Julian, his older brother Johnny, and his younger sister Geneia, for the mainstream beckons the more strongly for it. Johnny eases well into United States majority ways, becoming a model Jehovah’s Witness, then leaving the church for the Colombian girl he wants to marry, working hard, and raising two adored children. His conflict with his heritage seems as minimal as his insistence upon it. Geneia, a toddler when the family emigrated, is without question situated well within the mainstream. Julian, the middle child, anguishes overbelonging, both sought and fought against. Drawn into the mainstream which surrounds him, he is at the same time held in Cubanness by the strong pull of family ties, a pull made demanding and even brutal, in the exaggerated forms often particular to exile, by his loving, smothering Abuela Fernández and his impotently raging father Juan Toledo, who cannot adjust to ways so new and different. It does not help matters that Julian is musically inclined, a dreamer, and, more and more pronouncedly, bisexual.

The novel is made up of first -and third- person narration, as well as dialogue in distinct narrative segments which recall from different points of view episodes of Julian’s life from childhood into the novelistic present; the early years of the married life of Julian’s parents: the beautiful and sensual Gladys Fernández, of humble circumstances, and fancy, arrogant Juan Toledo, whose parents proclaim their links to Spain; the Fernández grandparents; and even the rural childhood of Abuelo Fernández. Unifying elements include Julian’s groping for personal and sexual identity and his alternating embrace and rejection of his Cuban heritage; letters to him from his younger sister Geneia, written from her childhood into her teens; Julian’s abiding interest in and practice of music; and the portrayal of various permutations of the «crazy love» evoked in the novel’s title. The title comes from the Paul Anka song of the same name, from the late fifties-early sixties period of Julian’s maturing. Indeed, the novel’s structure itself contains a musical analogy, with a dominant melody, insistently recurring themes, and variations upon them. The forms of «crazy love» with which Julian struggles are several. His chafing and explosive resentment of the family send s him fleeing across the continent to New Jersey, then across the ocean to Spain. Julian always comes back, only to rage again at his father’s macho brutality and what he sees as Grandmother Fernández’s grotesquely distorted sense of family.

In his music, too, Julian moves in and out of being Cuban, or even Hispanic, finally finding «his» style (which turns out to have been influenced significantly by his majority girlfriend) in a Hispanically-flavored amalgam. And finally, there is Julian’s bisexuality, a central metaphor for his margination. Indeed, the emphasis given to Julian’s relationships with male lovers is so great during the middle third of the novel that bisexuality appears to become the book’s central motif. Ultimately, Julian makes a relative peace with this aspect of his psyche. A peace with his family and Cuban roots comes at still greater cost. Finally, Julian reaches a grudging acceptance of his belonging both

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to majority culture and to his family, his Cuban roots. Their pull has to it a fatality with which it seems futile to do combat. «When did it start, this madness. Long before he was born, no doubt. Long before any member of his family existed. The is land. Spain. Africa. Who could trace it all the way back, and for what purpose?» (146). He would have to assume the Cubanness he carried within, for «it’s different with us. We’re Cubanos» (156).

There is little humor in Muñoz’s novel, for it is a turbulent tale of bitter struggle. Intensity pulsates through its pages, with the scenes set in Cuba and the directly family-linked California sequence as the most finely crafted. The novel belongs to the now venerable coming-of-age-in-America tradition, yet has an urgent newness to it as the narration of a Cuban voice speaking in the majority language of an adopted land.

The Oddsplayer is a deeply affecting, often lyrical novel about a distinctly unlyrical war which took a particularly savage toll among minority groups in the United States due to their disproportionate numbers in its combat ranks. Rodríguez sets the action in Viet Nam among a small unit of soldiers united in their detestation of the war yet divided from one another. Fragments rendered as pungent dialogue, first-person remembering of indirect free style narration of character’s thoughts and past experiences prove the ugliness of the war along with minority experience both of it and of life stateside as well. Hendrick is a street-wise Chicago black who has fried thousands of hamburgers to put himself through school. Isaacs is a deeply religious man, unwise in the ways of the world, whosedream is missionary life. Kirsch, a Navy medic assigned to the unit, talks often with Priest, a tense majority idealist groping for answers. Lieck, Priest’s primary adversary, is an obnoxious loudmouth whose thoughts seldom stray from sex. Pérez, a Chicano, has been shipped north to, the troops believe, almost certain death. The commanding officer who sent him there is the vicious Talbot.

Rodríguez builds his novel from a series of ironically matched paired opposites and fellows among these characters. Hendrick becomes close to the devout and innocent Isaacs; they are joined in their fundamental decency and their striving for a goal. At home, Hendrick’s mentor Rebo had told him to side with Rainbow; those at the bottom of the social structure, the minorities, had to watch out for one another. In Viet Nam, Hendrick comes to feel that all who suffer acutely are, in a sense, «Rainbow», too; of them all Isaacs is the one whom the war has put closest to the edge. Thus emerges another pair, minority Hendrick and majority Priest, joined in their plan to eliminate Talbot and to save Isaacs. There are other pairings as well. Priest, the tormented and alienated middle-class rebel, will ring true to all who lived the Viet Nam era stateside. His spur is the then-familiar dilemma: if I don’t go, someone will die in my place. The personal anguish occasioned by this choice for many was the more acute for its setting within the broader moral question of the war itself, so that one choice by conscience seemed to be cancelled out by the other, much like the two camouflaged helicopters in Rodríguez’s night sky in Viet Nam. «Only the rotors remained visible, blurs of light. Even these traces sometimes vanished, like paired linkages that cancel each other out» (51).

This kind of ironic doubling and joining is fundamental to Rodríguez’s evocation of the war as well. Several characters reflect (or their narrator for them) upon a sense of being both present and absent, both themselves and someone else, which has resulted from their experience of war. Most of Rodríguez’s characters learn to kill well, their newly-gained knowledge perhaps enhancing their chances of ultimately returning home yet moving them ever farther from that very home. In the expectation of attack, «hours measure nothing: light and dark are two sides of waiting» (52), and in a war economy, «destruction and production seem the same» (53).

Though each of the major character’s thoughts is followed by the narrator, it is Hendrick’s sense of things which most completely shapes the book, his perspective which includes most fully the diverse factors represented in his fellow characters. His is a posture of both stark realism and the reach for a dream and, very importantly, of minority experience. Hendrick reflects upon the parallels between a night walk in Chicago streets and a night patrol in Viet Nam. For minorities, think Hendrick and Pérez (who is directly encountered as a character later in the novel), the war is less a shock than for majority soldiers, since their stateside lives had prepared them to be aware of adversaries everywhere. In a sense, minorities were always «on the point», a phrase which Rodríguez’s novel extends beyond the designation of the lead man in a patrol to become a metaphor for the life of war, leading one ever closer to either death or madness. Rebo’s remembered words help Hendrick to maintain a sense of connectedness and sanity. How could Rebo’s advice be so fully on the mark, when Rebo had not experienced this ugly war? The sense is strong in Rodríguez’s novel that the answer lies in shared black experience. Rebo knew all about the game that had to be played, a game which becomes a central metaphor in the novel. Poker, craps, war, life: the metaphor appears again and again. Significantly, it is Hendrick who first is greeted as «Oddsplayer» (108).

Pérez is prevented from being central focalizer by his physical removal from the others. Segments concerning him contribute another motif important in the novel, «death by remote control» to an unseen enemy in the alienating war, and the insights of a Chicano who has groped painfully toward a sense of his identity. He and Hendrick have shared the minority frustration of having no control, of «being buried alive on the bottom» (50).

Rodríguez has a gift for aphoristic sentences which summarize aperception or an experience: «The future vanished like a trace of early snow» (76); «he heard

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again the wail for the dead and lifted his head so that he could hear his name» (94); «night sowed the earth with dragon’s teeth and unseen men rose up to attack and send rockets curving in upon the camp» (105). Sometimes such lyrical, often philosophical syntheses come as unassimilated narrative intrusions into the indirect free style rendering of characters’ thoughts or into dialogue. At these moments such intrusions may break the rhythm of a passage, since they offer phrasings which are either a few degrees out of character or unlikely in their context, or they may overburden a scene which could have carried itself convincingly without them. There is, however, much to praise in this powerful novel.

Mary S. Vásquez
Michigan State University

Egert, Gottfried. Die Sprachliche Stellung des Katalanischen auf Grund seiner Lautentwickluitg: Mit Berüeksichtigung des Altanguedokische, Aragonesischen, Gaskonischen and Spanischen. Frankfurt/Main: Haag and Herchen, 1988. 204 PP.

This thorough, yet concise study of the phonological evolution of Catalan clearly executes the author’s dual purpose. Egert reviews the political history of Catalonia in order to verify when and to what degree the Catalan-speaking regions break off from or turn toward the adjacent linguistic areas. He also examines whether Catalan phonologically aligns itself more closely with Ibero-Romance or Gallo-Romance and to what extent it goes its own direction.

In addition to establishing the goals of the study, the introductory material succinctly reviews various assessments of Catalan’s linguistic position. Among those recalled are the theories of such noted philologists as Meyer-Lübke, Amado Alonso, Antoni Griera, Badía Margarit, M. Sanchís Guarner, Gerhard Rohlf, Pierre Bec, J. Hubschmid, and A. Tovar.

The first section, a well-organized political history of Catalonia from pre-Roman times through the Renaissance, incorporates postulates of such historical linguists as Menéndez-Pidal, Lapesa, and Entwistle, skillfully intertwined; conflicting views are adequately cited and addressed by the author. The accompanying historical maps of linguistic areas are a valuable aid, although some geographic names are scarcely legible. At the end of each subdivision, Egert briefly summarizes the essential points covered, thereby lending a facile review of the material.

The second division provides explanatory information about the subsequent tables that are logically arranged in the following categories: stressed vowels, unstressed vowels -initial and medial, final vowel sounds, initial consonants, intervocalic consonants, double consonants, consonant groups, and final consonants. Each table treats a single Latin phoneme and its sound development in old and modern Catalan, Spanish, Aragonese, old Occitan (Provençal), and Gascon. Sound changes which require explanations or commentaries are footnoted. For clarity and facility in understanding the tables, a reduced version of Badía Margarit’s adaptation of the phonetic alphabet of Revista de Filología Española is included. Maps of the areas under examination are also provided.

The final section of Egert’s study treats old and modern Catalan, peculiarities of the Catalan sound system, and similarities in the phonetic systems of Catalan and Provençal, of Catalan and Spanish, and of the Pyrenean languages (Catalan, Gascon, and Aragonese). It also offers an impressive comparison of the phonetically more conservative East and West Catalan dialects to Central Catalan, which Egert defines as the norm. The final pages delineate conclusions and assert that Catalan is a language of Ibero-Romania which, due to a political, ethnic, and cultural kinship rooted in early history, implies an especially close relationship to Provençal (cf. 201).

This valuable treatise on the sound development of Catalan offers to the Romance philologist a wealth of thoughtfully-organized and carefully-synthesized data. While the German text may be somewhat limiting, the clearly-presented tables and charts lend credence to the author’s conclusions and accessibility to a wide audience of linguists.

Linda L. Hollabaugh Midwestern
State University

Cartas e Crônicas edited by Elisabeth P. Smith and Philip H. Smith, Jr., Washington, D.C., Georgetown University Press. 1990, 121 pp.

The most recent in a growing number of titles for the Portuguese language curriculum published by Georgetown University Press, this text is designed for the advanced learner. The editors have culled thirty-six selections comprising crônicas and letters to the editor from six newspapers. There are samples from the august Journal do Brasil and Sao Paulo’s A Folha, as well as selections from newspapers in the northeastern cities of João Pessoa, Fortaleza, Recife, and Salvador da Bahia. The topics, style, and tone span journalistic usage from intimate to erudite, and the selections are equally varied in scope ranging from a one-paragraph expression of appreciation to essays and accounts dealing with literature and current events. The editors provide copious footnotes explaining allusions and unusual expressions and include a respectable bibliography for further study. In addition, they have appended a useful list (Appendix 3) of Brazil’s states, territories, and regional capitals. Separate from the anthology there are questions for each selection to test the student’s comprehension and to facilitate classroom discussion. A very positive feature of this text is its lexical aspect: each section is followed by a Portuguese-English vocabulary, and the text ends with a nineteen-page glossary.

Given the variety of contents, it is not surprising that one finds considerable material for stimulating classes in conversation while enhancing the student’s appreciation of contemporary Brazilian culture.

Moreover, the editors hardly shy away from the controversial. The reader finds complaints about wretched social services, from poor water pressure and unpaved streets, to a botched delivery in an obstetrics ward and rude personnel in public health clinics. A particularly chilling letter is by a mother who wonders why her son, a runaway from a psychiatric center, has been found dead in circumstances that suggest a coverup by the authorities. Another concerned citizen writes to deplore violence by criminals and vigilantes with racist inclinations, while the well-known Roberto Drummond focuses on the popular frenzy for sensationalism as an antidote to social alienation. Students with an interest in business will find food for discussion in pieces concerning the U.S. dollar and Brazil’s recent tribulations at the mercy of inflation and the International Monetary Fund. One crônica, eloquently entitled «Os Mendigos Dão Esmolas» (53-55) concerns a national campaign to aid a flood-ravaged south. The author strikes a note of furious indignation as he rails against the federal government’s indifference to his own perennially ravaged North-east. To be sure, there are more hopeful moments as well, such as when a woman writes about her purse, left on a bus and returned with its contents intact, and a dog lover is described as doing her part to keep Rio’s streets clean. However, a letter from a self-described world traveler touting the blessings of Rio’s traditional social harmony compared to New York, Paris, Nairobi, and elsewhere smacks of officialdom’s rhetoric and rightly elicits a skeptical tone in Zamarin’s exercises.

Less successful, perhaps, are several selections concerning traditional topics like language and literature. Certainly students will be daunted by a well intended defense of Latin that requires more than one hundred vocabulary items to fathom. A similar experience may occur in discussing the subtleties of trendy jargon concerning modern fashion, which admittedly «não permitem... entender patavina» (12). The essay on literature, by Afranio Coutinho, contains the only typographical error (the subject, by the way, of an amusing crônica, «Grafias», on pages 8-10) when «de Euclides da Cunha» is italicized as part of Os Sertões (15). Also, footnote 6 to the redoubtable essay on Latin as a background for studying Portuguese erroneously faults the author for confusing «hoc with hic» where hoc is, in fact, correct.

With few edited conversational texts available, Cartas e Crônicas provides a useful choice. While one might have hoped for a compositional component, there is no doubt that the text provides an uncompromising look at the language and culture of to day’s Brazil.

Richard A. Preto-Rodas
University of South Florida

Spinelli, Emily, Carmen García and Carol E. Galvin. Interacciones. Orlando: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1990. xv + 610 pp.

Interacciones is an intermediate level college Spanish text that, as its title tells us, stresses communication. After the preliminary chapter, which offers only structures and oral practice, the fifteen regular chapters include material and activities for developing all four skills, with interesting cultural segments as well. At the end of the text are a Spanish-English vocabulary and three Appendixes. A Workbook/Manual, Instructor’s Manual, Situation Cards for Oral Evaluation, and Video Program accompany the text, although none of these was supplied to the reviewer.

Each lengthy chapter consists of three Situaciones. The first two present the Vocabulario activo, a list of expressions to make discourse sound natural, and a detailed drawing that serves as the basis for conversation. All segments of the lesson contain exercises for individuals, pairs, and groups. They range from asking for information to requiring critical thinking skills. A context is given for the great majority of the exercises, so that they are meaningful to the learner. In addition, under the heading En contexto, there are mini-dialogues at frequent intervals that use the new structures communicatively rather than in an isolated sentence.

Following the Presentación is a segment called Así se habla, introduced by either a drawing or photograph, with a dialogue on tape. Here, the types of exercises are listening comprehension and role-playing to practice the vocabulary of the dialogue. Estructuras presents only one aspect of a difficult structure in each lesson. In a spiral sequence, further facets of that topic are brought up in succeeding chapters. Several grammatical points are treated in each chapter. The Dudas de vocabulario segment clears up lexical problems in each lesson. For example, in chapter 10, one section deals with the various ways of expressing job and work, and another gives four ways of expressing to become, each with a different shade of meaning.

The third Situación of each chapter deals with small and large C culture, reading, and writing. Así se hace explains how to function in the target culture, for example, what to expect and how to behave at a party. In the Para leer bien section, useful reading strategies help the learner to decipher the meaning of the text. The Lecturers are taken from contemporary Hispanic magazines and newspapers, and are invariably interesting. Each Para escribir bien section offers a guide to the type of writing treated in the lesson (personal letters, business letters or formal composition), followed by a reading selection and contextualized topics for three compositions or letters. The Actividades section combines the communicative, cultural, and functional aspects of the entire chapter in a series of situational exercises for pairs or small groups.

Finally, every third chapter ends with a Contacto cultural segment to introduce the student to Hispanic visual and literary arts. It deals with the same country or region to which the three-chapter unit is devoted. El arte y la arquitectura is accompanied by questions on the content of the reading passage and by outstanding

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color photographs. Either a short story, poetry, or a brief drama is offered in the Lectura literaria, with questions to check comprehension.

A large number of beautiful color photographs, all but one with a descriptive line, enhance the cultural content of the text. Many authentic materials, such as forms, schedules, advertisements, and menus, also help to bring a great deal of cultural information to the student. Four maps -of Spain, Mexico, South America, and Central America and the Antilles- add geographical information to the cultural content. These maps appear in the units on those four areas of the Spanish-speaking world. To complete the picture, there is also a unit on the cultural contributions of Hispanics in the United States.

The exercises on structures, reading passages, writing, and cultural material are excellent and should maintain student interest. Another particular strength of this work is that all possible exercises have been put into context. English is employed only to explain the structures; Spanish is used for all other material. For the most part, grammatical explanations are clear, with good examples. An exception is the segment on spelling-change verbs. No mention is made of the reason for the changes; they are simply listed. Students might find it easier to remember when to alter the spelling of a verb form if they were told that it is done to maintain the sound of the infinitive. The number of typographical errors is probably average by today’s production standards.

In all, this is a complete text with some rarely found features, such as the excellent guides to reading and writing. Interacciones follows the current trend of stressing communication activities, but does not neglect the other skills. It should serve well for a one year college course in intermediate level Spanish.

Ruth L. Bennett
Queens College, CUNY

Crawford, James. Bilingual Education: History, Politics, Theory, and Practice. Trenton: Crane Publishing Company, 1989. 204 pp.

James Crawford offers the profession a clear and thorough discussion of current issues surrounding bilingual education. Every educator in American schools ought to have already assimilated the material contained in the book for it is a sum of and a landmark volume about bilingual education. As the title suggests, this book describes and analyzes the forces that have shaped bilingual education in the United States during the past two decades and examines the concomitant outcomes.

Structurally, the book is organized into four major sections. Starting with an excellent treatment of the seeds of controversy that sprang forth following the passage of the Bilingual Education Act of 1968, the author goes on, in the first section, to recapitulate the history of bilingualism and attitudes toward bilingual education in America from the late 17th century to the present and to describe the evolution of federal policy regarding the role of minority language in the education of language minority students.

Section 2 focuses on two major counter-movements that have emerged in the last decade which fueled the flames of controversy and moved the long-standing debate about bilingual education clearly beyond the realm of pedagogy into the political arena. Crawford presents (1) an insightful discussion of the rise of the English Only Movement and the roots from which it grew and (2) an astute analysis of the political maneuvering at the national level during the Reagan Years that resulted in a somewhat incongruous alliance between opponents and proponents of bilingual education.

Section 3 gets at the heart of the matter. Does bilingual education work? What do second-language acquisition theory and research say? Crawford rightly focuses on the problem of the tendency at the federal level to rely on «imperfect» evaluation studies of program models to gauge effectiveness of bilingual education with lesser attention given to the results of second-language acquisition research which refutes pervasive myths about bilingualism. He examines a number of alternative approaches to bilingual education, built on common-sense views, that have gained popular support in recent years in the United States. He concludes that in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary from basic research in second-language acquisition, and increasingly, from program experience, «alternative approaches» to bilingual education continue to garner a substantial number of advocates.

The final major section describes some attempts to put theory into practice. Among these is the highly successful Case Studies Project, an effort by the California State Department of Education to develop a «theoretically sound» model of bilingual education and to test it in selected school districts. Issues and concerns associated with bilingual education for Native Americans are discussed as are recent trends and experiments in two-way bilingual education, an approach which offers promise not only for assisting Limited English Proficient students in becoming fluent in English but for monolingual English-speaking students to gain mastery of a second or «foreign» language. Concluding the book is a Glossary of Program Models and a comprehensive bibliography of sources and suggested reading.

Whether or not one agrees with Crawford’s analysis and interpretation of the «facts» as presented, it behooves us all to examine both sides of the issues since there are few school districts in the United States that are not currently facing the challenge of educating students from non-English language backgrounds. Bilingual Education: History, Politics, Theory, and Practice certainly provides food for thought and should be required reading for all educators and a basic textbook for all educational personnel training programs. It might also be a good idea to have a few extra copies around to loan to your influential legislators and interested neighbors and colleagues.

Betty J. Mace-Matluck
Southwest Educational Development Laboratory

ABELLÁN, MANUEL L., ed. Diálogos Hispánicos de Amsterdam, N.º 5. Censura y literaturas peninsulares. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1987. 212 pp.

ALFARO, RAFAEL. La otra claridad. Madrid: Playor, 1989. 83 pp.

ÁLVAREZ, JOSÉ MARÍA. La caza del zorro. Barcelona: Tusquets Editores, 1990. 192 pp.

ÁLVAREZ-HESSE, GLORIA. La «Crónica Sarracina». Estudio de los elementos novelescos y caballerescos. New York: Peter Lang, 1989. 192 pp.

ANDERSON, DANNY J. Vicente Leñero. The Novelist as Critic. New York: Peter Lang, 1989. 256 pp.

ANDREU, ALICIA G. Modelos dialógicos en Galdós. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1989. 126 pp.

Antología de la poesía latinoamericana 1950-1970. Recopilado por Stefan Baciu. Albany: SUNY Press, 1974. 2 vols., 1244 pp.

ARANGO, L. MANUEL ANTONIO. Origen y Evolución de la Novela Hispanoamericana, 2 ed. Bogotá: Tercer Mundo Editores, 1989. 543 pp.

BORDA DE SAINZ, JOANN. Eugenio María de Hostos: Philosophical System and Methodology. Montclair, New Jersey: Senda Nueva de Ediciones, 1989. 240 pp.

CALDERÓN DE LA BARCA, PEDRO. El Castillo de Lindabridis. Edición, estudio y notas de Victoria B. Torres. Pamplona: Ediciones Universidad de Navarra, 1987 (Números Anejos de Rilce, N.º 3). 242 pp.

Cámara I (demonstration video). Prepared by Multimedia Services, Inc. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1990.

CARRASCO, JOSÉ A. Thoughts Wander Thru... Menlo Park, California: Markgraf Publications Group, 1989. 66 pp.

CASTILLA, ALFONSO X DE. Cantigas de Santa María (cantigas 261 a 427). Edición de Walter Mettman. Madrid: Castalia, 1989. 393 pp.

CATALÁ, RAFAEL. Cienciapoesía. Minneapolis: Prisma Books, Inc., 1986. 126 pp.

COLOMBI, MARÍA CECILIA. Los refranes en el Quijote: texto y contexto. Potomac, Maryland: Scripta Humanistica, 1989. 142 pp.

Critical Studies: A Journal of Critical Theory, Literature and Culture, Vol. 1, N.º 1 (1989). 126 pp.

CROSBIE, JOHN. A lo divino Lvric Poetry: An Alternative View. Durham: University of Durham, 1989. 92 pp.

CUNQUEIRO, ÁLVARO. Cuando el viejo Simbad vuelva a las islas. Barcelona: Destino, 1989. Primera edición en Destinolibro. 162 pp.

_____. Las mocedades de Ulises. Barcelona: Destino, 1989. Primera edición en Destinolibro. 307 pp.

DELIBES, MIGUEL. El libro de la caza menor. Barcelona: Destino, 1989. Primera edición en Destinolibro. 229 pp.

DÍAZ, JOSÉ, MARGARITA LEICHER-PRIETO and GLENN J. NADELBACH. AP Spanish: A Guide for the Language Course. White Plains, New York: Longman, Inc. 1989. 132 pp.

_____. AP Spanish: A Guide for the Language Course. Teacher’s Manual. White Plains. New York: Longman, Inc., 1989. 37 pp.

DÍAZ PETERSON, ROSENDO. Las novelas de Unamuno. Potomac, Maryland: Scripta Humanistica, 1987. 104 pp.

ESPÓSITO, AUGUSTINE M., O.S.A. La mística ciudad de Dios (1670). Sor María de Jesús de Agreda. Potomac, Maryland: Scripta Humanistica, 1989. 92 pp.

FERNÁNDEZ CUBAS, CRISTINA. El ángulo del horror. Barcelona: Tusquets Editores, 1990. 160 pp.

GONZÁLEZ T., CÉSAR A. Unwinding the Silence. Introduction by Luis Leal. LaJolla, California: Lalo Press, 1987. 89 pp.

HEMPEL LIPSCHUTZ, ILSE. La pintura española y los románticos franceses. Madrid: Taurus, 1988. 406 pp.

HERNÁNDEZ, RAMÓN. Invitation to Die. Translated with an Afterword by Marion F. Freeman. New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc. 1989. 212 pp.

In Love and War: Hummingbird Lore and Other Selected Papers from LAILA/ALILA’s 1988 Symposium, edited by Mary H. Preuss. Culver City, California: Labyrinthos, 1990. 110 pp.

JUÁREZ, ENCARNACIÓN. Italia en la vida y obra de Quevedo. New York: Peter Lang, 1990. 249 pp.

Letras Peninsulares 2:1(1989). Reaproximación al naturalismo español/Spanish Naturalism Reconsidered.

LEVINE, ROBERT M. Cuba in the 1850s Through the Lens of Charles deForest Fredericks. Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1990. 86 pp.

LISPECTOR, CLARICE. The Stream of Life. Translated by Elizabeth Lowe and Earl Fitz. Foreword by Hélène Cixous. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 79 pp.

Literatura Mexicana. Vol. 1, N.º 1 (1990). México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. 319 pp.

LUERA, YOLANDA. Solitaria J. La Jolla, California: Lalo Press, 1986. 49 pp.

MARES, MICHAEL A., RICARDO A. OJEDA and RUBÉN M. BÁRQUEZ. Guide to the Mammals of Salta Province, Argentina. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990. xv + 301 pp.

OLIVARES, JULIÁN, ed. The Harvest (Short Stories by Tomás Rivera), bilingual edition. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1989. 135 pp.

One More Stripe to the Tiger. A Selection of Contemporary Chilean Poetry and Fiction. Edited and Translated by Sandra Reyes. Fayeteville and London:

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The University of Arkansas Press, 1989. 310 pp.

ORTEGA Y GASSET, JOSÉ. Meditaciones sobre la literatura y el arte (La manera española de ver las cosas). Edición de E. Inman Fox. Madrid: Clásicos Castalia, 1988. 394 pp.

RENER, FREDERICK M. Interpretatio. Language and Translation from Cicero to Tytler. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Editions Rodopi, 1989. 367 pp.

RIELO, FERNANDO. Balcón a la bahía. Madrid: Fundación Fernando Rielo, 1989. 79 pp.

SAA, ORLANDO. El teatro escolar de los jesuitas en España. New Brunswick, New Jersey: SLUSA, 1990. 218 pp.

SÁENZ DE ARGANDOÑA, PEDRO MARÍA, S.J. El dualismo en Miguel de Unamuno. New York: Senda Nueva de Ediciones, 1988. 78 pp.

STONE, MARILYN. Marriage and Friendship in Medieval Spain. Social Relations According to the Fourth Partida of Alfonxo X. New York: Peter Lang, 1990. 187 pp.

Studies in Romance Linguistics. Edited by Carl Kirschner and Janet DeCesaris. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1989. 496 pp.

VON RICHTHOFEN, ERICH. La metamorfosis de la épica medieval. Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, 1989. 352 pp.

Hispania [Publicaciones periódicas]. Volume 74, Number 1, March 1991