Enrico Mario Santí

Towards a reading of Fernando Ortiz's Cuban Counterpoint

Enrico Mario Santı́ is the William T. Bryan Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Kentucky, Lexington. He has authored books on José Martı́, Pablo Neruda, Fernando Ortiz, and Octavio Paz. He is now working on an intellectual biography of Paz. This essay is an extract from Santı́’s ‘‘Fernando Ortiz: Counterpoint and Transculturation,’’ which will appear as a chapter in Ciphers of History: Latin American Readings for a ‘‘Cultural’’ Age (forthcoming) .

Lydia Rubio: Alphabet of Gestures

ISSN: 0890-5762 (Print) 1743-0666 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rrev20 Lydia Rubio: Alphabet of Gestures Enrico Mario Santí To cite this article: Enrico Mario Santí (2015) Lydia Rubio: Alphabet of Gestures, Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, 48:2, 180-185, DOI: 10.1080/08905762.2015.1083240 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08905762.2015.1083240For the past thirty-five years, the artist Lydia Rubio has worked with an overall premise: art is a mystery whose solution can be as desirable as it is elusive. No sooner do we begin unraveling one of its clues than it poses other mysteries: cutting off one branch makes a myriad of others sprout. While cutting and pruning, spectators must decode. In this, Rubio proceeds like a postmodern Gnostic, intent on pursuing dispersed clues of a hermetic secret and organizing themes according to a formal strategy of fragments, structured in series that spawn paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints—duly accompanied by diaries, maps, notes, even doodles. The series are ruled, in turn, by insights into a correspondence with conceptual codes that range from the letters of the alphabet to the four elements, cardinal points, and even gods of multicultural pantheons. Taken piecemeal, each form constitutes a clue for a plot whose meaning may well be lost. In the course of our reading, the plot ́s formal beauty snares us, seducing us into further speculation about questions that Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Issue 91, Vol. 48, No. 2, 2015, 180–185

Ten Keys to The Labyrinth of Solitude

1. The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) is a double cornerstone of modern literature: both a modern essay and a reflection on modernity. Within the broader Hispanic context, it is an essay on national identity*/what Germans at one time called Volkerpsychologie (psychology of nations) and which, during the 19th century, became popular throughout the Spanishspeaking world. Spanish Romantics (Larra and Mesonero Romanos) inaugurated the tradition in Spain, but it was the Generation of ‘98 writers (Ortega y Gasset, Unamuno, Azorı́n) who developed it in such texts as Purity Revisited (1895), or Meditations on Quixote (1914). The tradition in which Paz’s book fits was once described by him: ‘‘It is a book in the French tradition of ‘moralism.’ It is a description on the one hand of certain attitudes and an essay, on the other, on historical Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Issue 70, Vol. 38, No. 1, 2005, 17 /30

Hacia Oppiano Licario

Description des esquisses du roman posthume de L. L. et confrontation avec le texte publie. Ce roman est la suite du roman Paradiso, dont il constitue un fragment.