How a Colony Was Created by the Failure to Create a Colony: V.S. Naipaul’s The Loss of El Dorado (2024)

Les Lettres de Sophie de Vallière by Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni Edited by Marijn S. Kaplan (review)

French Review, 2008

Literary Fiction Under Coloniality and the Relief of Meditation in Guadalupe Nettel's Desupés del invierno, Carla Faesler's Formol and Laía Jufresa's 'La pierna era nuestro altar'

Disability and the Global South Vol.6, No. 1, 1677-1694, 2019

The present article fosters a dialogue among multiple currents of literary research. Disability scholars such as Garland-Thomson, Davis, and Mitchell and Snyder, have famously explored the literary conventions of normativity. Their queries on normates and statistical averages, form a parallel line of thought with Moretti’s (2007) ‘distant reading’ of the novel. These two distinct pathways- distant reading and disability- lead to the same questioning of the accepted aesthetics of rationality, which of course interests scholars of Anthropocene. An environmental thinker of the stature of Ghosh has already taken up Moretti’s observations, and the present article places that engagement into a still richer context, with decolonial thinkers such as Grech, Maldonado-Torres, and Mignolo. This broad juxtaposition of thinkers, indicates that disability thought already prepares the environmentally conscious imagination to reach for alternatives to ableist and colonial readings. The principles of this wideranging theoretical dialogue are then put to the test with examples drawn from three Mexican writers’ fiction. The novels Formol (2014) by Carla Faesler (b. 1967) and Despúes del invierno (2014) by Guadalupe Nettel (b. 1973), along with the short story ‘La pierna era nuestro altar’ from El esquinista (2014) by Laia Jufresa (1983), review colonial habits using the aesthetic of realism and end up in familiar disenchantment that forestalls the possibility of an alternative. Nevertheless, these texts manage to interrupt their conventional fictions in the realist mode for moments of mindfulness. These pauses from accepted reasoning suggest an alternative style of cogitation, against the assumptions of the ‘normate,’ that may support Felski’s and Latour’s calls for a turn away from disenchantment. The article concludes that literary fiction might begin to listen to its own science and contemplate environmental disaster through a more mindful mode of poetic thought, a perceptive thinking that does not automatically accept the conventions established for the rational as the only ‘realistic’ aesthetic. The breaks or ‘breathers’ from the conventions of rationality included in these three contemporary fictions point the way toward a permissible mode of wellbeing in accordance with decolonial goals. Even if such mindful writing does not ultimately take hold in literary fiction, it may still aid critics in reassessing the tendency of the normate to cast itself as a superior kind of victim

‘Looking at the “Crack’d Mirror”: Narratives of Restoration and Anticipation in Grazia Deledda’s La madre and Anna Banti’s Artemisia” (Journal of Narrative Theory)

A Daughter's Unsettling Auto/Biography of Colonialism and Uprooting: A Conversation with Isabela Figueiredo

ellipsis (Journal of Lusophone Studies), 2010

PROCEEDINGS — ‘Fictions of “la tournante”: Fallacies, Facts, and Effects’, Proceedings of the 7th Narrative Matters Conference: Narrative Knowing/Récit et savoir (Université Paris Diderot, 23–27 June 2014)

Proceedings of the 7th Narrative Matters Conference: Narrative Knowing/Récit et savoir, 2014

THE DISTINCTION FROM WHICH THIS ARTICLE DEPARTS — as restated by Sigmund Freud in the first of his ‘Contributions to the Psychology of Love’ — sets science against literature. The former, having totally renounced the improper — because ‘unreasonable’ — influence of affect, deals only with the facts, leaving to the latter the production of certain (emotional, aesthetic, and literary) effects. Analysis of Édith Wolf’s En réunion (Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, 2003), Élisa Brune’s La Tournante (Éditions Ramsay, 2001), and Fabrice Genestal’s La Squale (Fox Pathé Europa, 2000) reveals the convergence of ontological and discursive facts to be the product of signifying effects, however. By laying bare the performative processes by which fictional depictions of gang rape in France came to be ‘taken as’ — as if having ‘the force of’ — scientific fact, this article explores (and explodes) Freud’s science–literature opposition. What is more, the absolutist terms upon which Freud’s assessment stands imply that the primary use of language is to convey meaning and that words bear an originary relation to things. By demonstrating, with reference to each of the three texts under consideration, how the correspondence of words and images with real things in the world is achieved, this article trenches upon (and troubles) this commonplace misconception. For the denial and/or dispossession of this potential — not of the representational power to describe, but performative power to construct relations of correspondence with reality — is to perpetrate what John Langshaw Austin, the British linguist and father of speech–act theory, calls the ‘“descriptive” fallacy’. In the final part of this article, I problematize this particular use of language — this inwrought pattern of locutionary usage — further. For, by insisting upon those elements which are by different definitions ‘constative’, ‘literal’, and ‘representational’, and by establishing such firm correlations between their fictional depictions of ‘la tournante’ and the scientific discourse of facts, Wolf’s En réunion, Brune’s La Tournante, and Genestal’s La Squale conceal the ideological and allegorical through the efficacy of their discursive effects.

GUIMARÃES ROSA: THE STREAMMING MATTER OF NARRATIVE 1

Spanish & Portuguese Department - Yale, 2016

Beyond any dichotomy of regional vs. universal, the work of Brazilian writer Guimarães Rosa moves towards an understanding of life as becoming. Not only human life, but also other ways of becoming (such as woman-, animal-, child-, mad-becoming). More then narrating sheer facts, more than just telling stories, Guimarães Rosa’s narrators want to understand the “streaming matter” (“a matéria vertente”) of events, the flowing of life as a ceaseless movement. Thus, Guimarães Rosa’s narrative depends on the way it articulates points-of-view (according to the Deleuzian concept of “point de vue” in his reading of Leibniz). In this brief report of a Seminar held recently at Rio de Janeiro, I want to sketch some paths to move across Guimarães Rosa’s novels and short stories, according to some concepts of Bergson’s and Deleuze’s philosophies.

Voicing Narrative Through Translatlanticism and Transformation in Historia de la Monja Alférez by Catalina de Erauso

2022

This thesis analyzes various aspects of Catalina de Erauso’s Historia de la Monja Alférez, escrita por ella misma (1829). The first chapter explores notions of interior and exterior as categories that determine not only the protagonist’s movement in space but also their expression of self-identity over the course of the text, focalized through first- person narration. Additionally, the chapter brings to light how the interior narrative parallels Erauso’s desire to share their transformation from nun in a Spanish convent to a soldier in the Americas with picaresque tendencies. Erauso leverages the power of exterior appearances through the self-fashioning of their public persona which then leads into discussion of Erauso’s dual goal of their narrative—demonstrating the private and public narrative aspects. The second chapter analyzes the roles and social occupations that Erauso undertakes during their life and how these endeavors play into the gendered nature of the text. As the number of social and occupational identities embodied by Erauso grows over the course of the narrative, the leitmotif of staying versus fleeing emerges as an organizing plot device, which is examined in chapter three. This project stands to show Historia through a narrative-led analysis to better illustrate the intricacies of Erauso’s life and work, connecting the protagonist’s literary life to their personal trajectory.

In Absentia: A Study of Loss in Caryl Phillips’ The Lost Child

This paper will focus on a passage from the novel The Lost Child (2015) written by the Kittitian-British novelist Caryl Phillips. Since the most of Phillips’ works are related to the African Diasporas and the author himself is a British African-Caribbean, the study will initially refer to the Caribbean Diaspora and the concept of re-membering, with an overview on Postcolonial Literature as a genre. The sense of loss which derives from national and social unrooting will play a crucial role in The Lost Child, where it is mainly socially connotated. The novel will be considered under the perspective of its protagonists and especially Ben, who lost his brother and mother and lives without any reference point, compelled to find alone his place in the world, living a life in absentia. The translated passage, which concerns in fact the interior conflicts of Ben, will be compared to the original text and commented with special emphasis on translating issues.

Reconstructing Woman: From Fiction to Reality in the Nineteenth-Century French Novel

French Studies, 2009

Hanna Meretoja. The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory: The Crisis and Return of Storytelling from Robbe-Grillet to Tournier. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. xviii + 282 pp

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, 2017