Nuevas Poligrafías. Revista de Teoría Literaria y Literatura Comparada

Transactional Relationships and Schizophrenia in Mr Salary by Sally Rooney

Mariana Bolfarine — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0600

This study aims at investigating Sally Rooney’s short story Mr Salary (2016). The complexities around human relationships have always interested Rooney, who asserted that “there is a shared knowledge that relationship forms of the past were not actually suited for everyone” (London Review Bookshop, 2019: 16:11). This is especially true considering the “cultural moment where certainties around relationships have deteriorated slightly” (London Review Bookshop, 2019: 17:17). In this regard, my analysis will develop under two key points. The first is Rooney’s depiction, in Mr Salary, of transactional relationships between the two protagonists, Sukie and Nathan, and between Sukie and her father, Frank, in the face of the economic changes brought about by the Celtic Tiger and post-Crash periods in Ireland. To make this point I will resort to the works of Barros Del Río (2022), Carregal Romero (2023), Bolfarine (2023), among others. The second point will focus on issues related to language, silence and (hindered) communication among the characters in Mr Salary by means of Fredric Jameson’s (1983) notion of schizophrenia, not in the clinical sense, but as a tool derived from cultural theory. According to Jameson, a consequence of global capitalism (as with schizophrenia) is a breakdown of the relationship between signifiers in language—which change the individual’s perception of time trapping them in an eternal present. My analysis will be directed at the way in which Sukie, the protagonist and first-person narrator, undergoes a process that enables her to move away from this eternal present and look into a future of new choices and possibilities.

The Importance of Being Normal: The Circulation of Affects in Sally Rooney’s Short Fiction

Karolina Ulloa — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0600

When defining the short story, Ireland’s alleged eminent prose form, Frank O’Connor surmised that its fictional worlds orbited toward the incapacity to accept a “normal society.” In other words, he deemed it a vehicle for abnormal characters. To continue the dialogue fostered by this canonical study, I propose that what lies underneath O’Connor’s observations is not a clear-cut differentiation between the two sides of the spectrum, but rather a quest for normalcy, which I pose as a quest for belonging. The first decade of the new millennium witnessed the collapse of the Celtic Tiger, whose neoliberal promise became the dominant public discourse. Its crash left citizens, mainly those belonging to the lower-middle and middle class, unguarded against the predatory capitalism that governs today’s world. Contemporary authors are registering the impact of larger, systemic failures in their fictions and confronting their mechanisms. An exemplary case is Sally Rooney, whose brutally precise prose details how the magnitude of ephemeral circumstances feels too overwhelming to understand and, thus, to articulate. Her characters struggle with the intimate implications of the global world we inhabit and navigate a profound sense of isolation as a result. Drawing on affect theory, in this article I analyze the characters’ processes of becoming aware of their affects and the fact that they are not yet ready to be translated into speech, what I term quotidian unease, in order to illuminate their quest for normalcy in Mr Salary and “At the Clinic.”

Body, Trauma and Transformation in “The Woodcutter’s Bride” by Deirdre Sullivan

Dolores Horner Botaya — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0600

In the short story “The Woodcutter’s Bride”, included in her collection Tangleweed and Brine, Irish author Deirdre Sullivan rewrites the traditional tale of “Little Red Riding Hood” using narrative strategies which link the treatment of space with that of the body of the main character to emphasize the protagonist’s metamorphosis and her role in the plot, all which contributes to subvert the coming-of-age motif in the story. Sullivan’s tale uses one of the best-known endings of the canonical tale, the one rewritten by the Grimm brothers, to reinvent the plot of the protagonist and emphasize the devouring act as a traumatic experience and an incomplete transformation at once. According to fairy tale scholars such as Jack Zipes and Maria Tatar, transformation is one of the genre core aspects, and can be analyzed from a sociocultural perspective. In the analysis tradition of “Little Red Riding Hood” we can examine concepts such as trauma, desire, the main character’s agency and the importance of her disobedience into an adverse context. Sullivan’s version elaborates on those concepts and, by letting the main character tell her own story the author provokes an identification with the reader. The representation of the body and space work as narrative strategies that question earlier versions of “Little Red Riding Hood” and at the same time foster dialogues with other rewritings of the same plot written by contemporary women authors.

JONES, Paul Christian. (2022). Poe, Queerness, and the End of Time. Palgrave Macmillan.

Sonia Vidrio Mendoza — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0600

VENKATESH, Vinodh. (2016). New Maricón Cinema: Outing Latin American Film. University of Texas Press

Alejandro Cristhian Bravo Espinosa de los Monteros — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0600

Nota editorial No 11: El cuento irlandés

Aurora Piñeiro, Laura Patrícia Zuntini de Izarra — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0600

“The same bad dream goes on”: Unheimliche and Suburban Gothic in Anne Sexton’s “The House”

Sofia Ramos Soto — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0600

Anne Sexton's poetry, as is the case with that of Sylvia Plath and other poets representative of the confessional movement from the 20th century, is usually constrained to interpretations focused on her personal life (Gill, 2013a: 10). Although the autobiographical nature of her work is an element to consider when approaching her poems, engaging in a reading that focuses on this aspect alone excludes the possibility of inserting it within a broader social framework. For this reason, I propose to reconcile the problems that arise when approaching her poetry from confessional and psychoanalytical points of view by turning our gaze outwards: no longer towards the author's psyche, but towards the external factors that permeate the terror within some of her poems. By studying “The House”, I am interested in approaching Sexton’s poetry from its social, historical, and geographical context in order to analyze the horror that the poem evokes as a portrait of the upper-class families who resided in the suburbs in postwar America during the late 1940s. To this end, I will resort to Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic concept of Unheimliche to explain the uncanny effect that the poem causes by presenting the home and the family as a terrifying setting. Through this, I seek to reject the tendency to perform a psychological interpretation of Sexton and, instead, demonstrate how the Unheimliche in “The House” circumscribes the poem within the subgenre of the suburban gothic.

“I want the bones”: Submerged Hauntology in Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip

Odette de Siena Cortés London — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0600

M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! showcases an anti-narrative quality that prompts unsettling feelings linked to the gaps of an African presence in the archives related to the Middle Passage. By opening said archive, poetry gains a restorative feature that triggers an undoing of written language and its violence as well as a reintroduction of the voices of the victims back into the collective memory. This article proposes an approximation to Philip’s poetry through the lens of submerged hauntology as a poetic imaginative attempt that departs from absence to shape the voices and stories of those who once were pushed to the margins of the archive. By combining Kamau Brathwaite’s notion of submarine unity with Philip’s insights on hauntology, I propose a way to read Zong! that encompasses both visual and written qualities as means to articulate archipelagos of meaning expressed through the haunting voices that reside in the Atlantic. Through a close reading of visual grammar, I will analyze three fragments where submerged hauntology is present as a means of writing that, alongside water, undoes and redoes a new tenor to the massacre that occurred on Zong. Thus, the presence of a submerged hauntology can become a literary approach to understand the anti-narrative qualities of Philip’s poem that require new ways to extract meaning through fragmentation, silence, and affects of the Atlantic ghosts.

Thundering Gaze: José Revueltas and Anamorphosis

David H. Colmenares González — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0600

This article proposes a study of the gaze and the visible in the work of the Mexican writer José Revueltas (1914-1976) based on an analysis of some of the most recurrent optical devices in his narrative: convex mirrors, the oblique gaze and the eye of the cyclops. These “depraved perspectives” will lead, in the late work written in confinement, to a visual device with deep baroque roots: anamorphosis, a visual device that requires the decentring of the point of view in order to restore the meaning of the image. This technique underlines the situated and arbitrary nature of perception, destabilising all ideological coherence. Far from being a mere “metaphysical impertinence,” the aesthetics of anamorphic deformation constitutes one of the main driving forces of Revueltas’ narrative, by positing an irresolvable tension between the imperative of political action and literary imagination. Finally, the article analyses the political and aesthetic implications of these optical devices, proposing that anamorphosis offers a dialectical solution to the tension between political commitment and fascination with the criminal underworld. Revueltas’s oeuvre, an unavowed heir to baroque aesthetics, destabilises the visual field and exposes the fracture of the social world, articulating a tragic knowledge that resists the euclidean geometries of power and ideology.

“The Death of Baldassare Sylvande”, an Inverted Pastiche of The Death of Ivan Ilyich

Julieta Videla Martinez, Malena Ferranti Castellano — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0600

We propose to study Marcel Proust’s text ‘The Death of Baldassare Silvande’ included in his early work The Pleasures and the Days (1896) in the light of his reading of Lev Tolstoy’s nouvelle The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886). Some scholarship has already recognised the direct relationship between the two published works and argues that Proust, through his early literary writings, imitated Tolstoy’s narrative. However, in the present study, from an aesthetic-hermeneutic reading and with a comparative methodology, we will focus on the approach to illness in these works, written within a context of décadence. We will thus argue that Proust’s story, rather than functioning as an imitation of Tolstoy’s, is in fact an ‘inverted pastiche’ that adopts the mirror modality of The Death of Ivan Ilyich. This pastiche superimposes Proustian aesthetic theory on Tolstoy’s aesthetic theory and, despite this superimposition, we will also give an account of how Tolstoyan aesthetics lays the foundations for Proust’s work. We will therefore seek not only to broaden and deepen studies of Proustian pastiche, but also to contribute to illuminating the important relations between the French and Russian literary traditions and how the works of both authors can be read through the lens of style.