Egeria

 

 

Sánchez de Movellán, Luis. "Egeria parte 1 – Parte 2" Audio. Ivoox (Españoles Olvidados) 4 & 11 April 2025.*

https://go.ivoox.com/rf/144426017

https://go.ivoox.com/rf/144845467

2025

Word Play

Artículo sobre dramaturgia y estilística donde se me cita de pasada:

Smorul, Kathryn Ridinger. "Word Play: Modernist Women and Performative Writing." Ph.D. diss. Eberly College of Arts and Sciences, West Virginia U, 2015. Online at The Research Repository @ WVU (Graduate Theses, Dissertations and Problem Reports). 6677. (Djuna Barnes, Gwendolyn Bennett, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mina Loy).

         https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/6677

         2024

Dos prólogos a 'Frankenstein'

Notas (tomadas en 2007) sobre el prólogo del editor y la introducción de la autora de Frankenstein. Edición usada:

 

Mary Shelley. Frankenstein. Ed. M. K. Joseph. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1969. (World's Classics ed., 1980).

 

 

Introduction (by M. K. Joseph).

The Prometheus myth is a basic clue to the meaning of Frankenstein. 2 myths: Prometheus pyrphoros  and Prometheus plasticator, mixed since late Antiquity. The theme was being worked on by Byron and Shelley at the time Mary Shelley wrote the novel. Theories of galvanism, Erasmus Darwin, H. Davy, Volta... and Shaftesbury's Characteristicks, on the possibility of creating a human being, use of Prometheus myth. 

 

3 concentric layer structure. (En realidad 4 capas concéntricas, pues el prefacio de Mary Shelley se ha vuelto parte de la novela (véase por ej. la versión de Gonzalo Suárez, Remando al viento), y las extrañas conexiones críticas con el libro desarrolladas tanto por la misma M. Shelley como por los comentadores, que la suelen mostrar como la que roba el fuego de la inspiración de los poetas).  

 

Parallelism between Walton and Frankenstein: Faustian hybris in both. Cautionary tale vs. the science which takes men away from normal society. Echo of The Ancient Mariner.  Parallelism Mer de Glace (Alps) / the North Pole. The Monster's narrative: a Godwinian Genesis. 

 

Improbabilities and contrivances: the cottage, Safie, the journal. Paradise Lost offers a double parallel (Adam/Satan) for the Monster. He demands his Eve; "we are drawn to complete the equation for ourselves: as the monster is to Frankenstein, so perhaps is Frankenstein to whatever power created man. The clue to the monster's predicament—benevolence corrupted—may also be the clue to Frankenstein's" (xi).

 

The Monster becomes a doppelgänger or a Mr Hyde. Only at end the story is proved not to be an hallucination. "Yet the monster is, in a literal sense, a projection of Frankenstein's mind, and an embodiment of his guilt in withdrawing from his kind and pursuing knowledge which, though not forbidden, is still dangerous." (xi). The epigraph applies to both. (Y a Mary Shelley también). Frankenstein's sin vs. Godwinian social benevolence, influenced by Perby Bysshe Shelley's Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude.

 

Writing at the start of scientific revolution: Prometheanism is applied by Mary Shelley to science, not art —a great move. The novel creates a lasting symbol of the perils of scientific Prometheanism, it has become independent myth, giving rise to  films, etc., "It is ironic but entirely appropriate that, in the process, the nameless monster seems to have usurped the name of his creator" (xiii).

 

 

 

Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818)

 

Epigraph from Paradise Lost. (Y sigue inmediatamente la dedicatoria a William Godwin, su padre; hay pues dos "makers"; "to mould Me man", irónico en una mujer autora, ¿clave genérica para la novela como travestismo?)

 

Introduction (de Mary Shelley, en retrospección, escrita en 1831). 

 

(Se oye una voz nueva, nueva relación del autor con la invención y la imaginación. Lo presenta como parte de su vida interior, sólo con dificultad y límites transmitible al papel. Escribe desde niña, pero le gusta fantasear:)

 

"my favourite pastime, during the hours given me for recreation, was to 'write stories.' Still I had a dearer pleasure than this, which was the formation of castles in the air—the indulging in waking dreams—the following of trains of thought, which had for their subject the formation of a succession of imaginary incidents" (5) Dreams are free and original, writings are derivative, because they are going to be read by others, "but my dreams were all my own" (5). 

 

"I did not make myself the heroine of my tales" (6) (pero sugiere un elemento de proyección que además se realiza:  "I could not figure myself that romantic woes or wonderful events would ever be my lot; but I was not confined to my own identity, and I could people the hours with creations far more interesing to me at that age, than my own sensations" (6). Nota: to people, creations. 

 

Luego se presenta a sí misma como discípula e hija intelectual de Percy Bysshe Shelley. Historia de la estancia en Suiza, historias de fantasmas alemanas que lee prefiguran temas en Frankenstein:  el retorno de lo reprimido, el creador que acaba con su raza. Byron propone escribir cada uno una ghost story, pero Mary insinúa que ni la prosa ni la narración se les dan bien: "The illustrious poets also, annoyed by the platitude of prose, speedily relinquished their uncongenial task" (8) (—detecto un tono de burla?).

 

"I busied myself to think of a story"  desea mostrar  miedos misteriosos ocultos en nuestra naturaleza y asustar al lector,  pero writer's block: "that blank capability of invention which is the greatest misery of authorship, when dull Nothing replies to our anxious invocations" (—¿invocar a lo oculto?). 

 

Mary aprende de Byron y Shelley como el monstruo aprende de Paradise Lost: "Many and long were the conversations between Lord Byron and Shelley, to which I was a devout but nearly silent listener" (8). Experimentos científicos discutidos, posibilidad de crear vida, electricidad, fabricación de partes corporales  "brought together, and endued with vital warmth" (9) —cf. el sueño de su hija muerta, acercado al fuego y calentado a la vida.   

 

La noche de la conversación, "I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie" (9). "Ve" la imagen central de la novela, el monstruo animado "on the working of some powerful engine" (9). "Frightful it must be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world" (9). Cf. la oposición entre la auténtica vida y creación de la poesía de Byron y Shelley, por una parte, y el "mecanismo" de la prosa por otra, que ellos no consiguen crear pero Mary sí,  efecto de una  "Uneasy, half vital motion" quizá.  

 

Es crucial en el prefacio el tema de Frankenstein durmiendo, paralelismo con M. Shelley: esperando a que se disuelva la fantasía, "that this thing, which had received such imperfect animation, would subside into dead matter" (9). Paralelismo monstruo / historia:  Frankenstein libro, creador y monstruo son todo uno. 

 

Pasa al presente histórico: el libro como proyección y conciencia autónoma, nos mira (como el monstruo) con "yellow, watery, but speculative eyes" (9). Enlace narrativo: "I opened mine in terror".  

 

Pasamos al pasado verbal; busca la autora librarse de la idea, pero sólo lo puede hacer aceptándola, creando el monstruo. "I could not so easily get rid of my hideous phantom; still it haunted me" (10).  

 

Parece chocante que hasta entonces no hubiese relacionado ese monstruo con la historia, y entonces percibe la relación. Además, anuncia orgullosamente Mary Shelley que lo que la aterroriza a ella aterrorizará a otros, y se libra de su complejo de inferioridad ante los grandes poetas:  "I announced that I had thought of a story". Shelley la anima a desarrollarlo, etc.

 

"And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper. I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words, which found no true echo in my heart" (10). Sugiere que para ella la novela tiene asociaciones personales con aquella época, pero no para el lector. —¡Tela! Lo importante es la semiconsciencia o deliberación con la que establece el paralelismo entre la creación del monstruo y la de la novela.

 

 

—oOo—

La Jane Austen Milenial

 Un artículo sobre Sally Rooney:

Muro, Alicia. "¿Es Sally Rooney la Jane Austen milenial?" The Conversation 30 June 2022.*

         https://theconversation.com/es-sally-rooney-la-jane-austen-milenial-184806

         2023

Y sobre Jane Austen, claro. Le pongo este comentario:

“Lo que daría por ver cómo tratarías tú la comunicación en internet…” Parte de la respuesta quizá esté en este pasaje de ‘Northanger Abbey’: “Blogueras en 1800.” http://garciala.blogia.com/2008/030202-blogueras-en-1800.php

 

—oOo—

Qué no leer este año

Quién es Colleen Hoover, la escritora del momento que vende más libros que la Biblia https://t.co/UE7F0XGIeP

— ABC.es (@abc_es) September 30, 2022

Amigo, Pablo. "Quién es Colleen Hoover, la escritora del momento que vende más libros que la Biblia." ABC (Cultura) 29 Sept. 2022.*

         https://www.abc.es/cultura/libros/colleen-hoover-escritora-momento-vende-libros-biblia-20220929150921-nt.html  

         2022

 

 El año que viene la cuestión se habrá resuelto por sí misma.

 

—oOo—

Alfonsa de la Torre

 

Sánchez de Movellán, Luis. "Españoles Olvidados 02/12/2021." Audio. Decisión Radio 2 Dec. 2021.* (Ildefonsa Teodora de la Torre y Rojas, "Alfonsa de la Torre", Spanish poet, Premio Nacional de Poesía 1951).

         https://www.decisionradio.com/espanoles-olvidados/i/4d9db30c80de7529c37feb3f1b3b5193/espanoles-olvidados-02122021

         2022

—oOo—

Luisa Carnés Caballero

 

Sánchez de Movellán, Luis. "Luisa Carnés Caballero." Audio. (Españoles Olvidados). Decisión Radio 18 Nov. 2021.*

         https://www.decisionradio.com/espanoles-olvidados-1/c/0/i/60670645/espanoles-olvidados-18-11-2021

         2022

Emily DICKINSON – La Recluse incandescente (DOCUMENTAIRE, 1988)

Morrison, Toni

By Adam Begley.  From the Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors (2000).

 

MORRISON, Toni (1931-[2019])

 

FICTION: The Bluest Eye (1970), *Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), Paradise (1998) [Love (2003), A Mercy (2008), Home (2012), God Help the Child (2015)]

NONFICTION: Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) 

Sula—I'm talking about the character here, not the novel—would have winced at the sentimental streak running through Beloved, Toni Morrison's best-known book. Sula is bad news, a skeptical fatalist, an idle, amoral artist, an accident so sure to happen it doesn't bother waiting. But she's my favorite; and she lights up Morrison's second novel like a torch. She's a good part of the reason why I insist that Sula, the skinny, 174-page novel, is Morrison's masterpiece.

Beloved—I'm talking about the novel here, not the character, who's really just a ringer from The Exorcist—is something of an icon, a bit like Morrison herself, the unassailable Nobel laureate, supremely confident in herself as a woman, a black woman, and a black woman writer. Beloved is a "contemporary classic," a big book with a colossal subject: slavery. Who wants to knock it? Not m, because in fact it's beautiful, rich, fierce, harrowing. A damn fine book. But also sentimental. Why should uplift and overripe prose poems clog a novel about a runaway slave willing to slaughter her own children, including her newborn baby, rather than be dragged back to captivity, children in tow?

In Beloved, Morrison strains to remind us of goodness and love, as though she feels she has to counter the world's gross tonnage of evil. So we have a white girl busy saving Sethe's life (Sethe the runaway slave, half-dead, hugely pregnant); the white girl chatters all the while about how "Sleeping with the sun in your face is the best old feeling." And we have two of Morrison's specialties, food and sex, served up luscious enough to make us forget all that looming horror. Here, for example, the erotic version of corn-on-the-cob: "How loose the silk. How quick the jailed-up flavor ran free . . . [N]o accounting for how that simple joy could shake you."

I can already hear a grad-school clever argument about how Morrison binds food and sex and the monstrosity of slavery in one tangled life-like whole, but that doesn't change a thing. The music swells, Sula winces.

Morrison began with a bone-dry book, The Bluest Eye, about a little black girl raped by her father and driven mad by her yearning for blue eyes, epitome of the white world's ideal of beauty. A sad and bitter story, choked by too many voices, it contains passages as lovely as anything Morrison has written—but it's a minor work in a minor key.

Then comes Sula, the story of two little girls, best friends, who grow up very different in "the Bottom," the black neighbourhood of a small Ohio city. Sula and Nell are bouncing with life, vividly real but also emblematic. Sula becomes the radical individualist, Nell the pillar of the community, steady, maternal, dutiful. Morrison weaves her tale with just three strands, a place and two families, but she seems magnificently omniscient, as though she had access to the pooled insight of every sociologist, every psychologist, every anthropologist; as though she had solved the riddle of what holds society together, what holds the solitary self together—and what blows it all apart. Though packed with comic scenes and and brilliantly inventive, Sula ends on a note of rich, full-throated sadness. There's plenty of laughter in the Bottom, but only visiting white folk manage to "hear the laughter and not notice the adult pain that rested somewhere under the eyelids, somewhere under [the] head rags and soft felt hats . . . . [T]he laughter was part of the pain."

Song of Solomon—another marvel, a rambling tale, almost picaresque, freer and more daring than Sula, though less precise, less perfect—follow a callo young man's slow steps to redemption. If Sula is about self and community, Song of Solomon is about self and family. Hints of the fantastic in the first two novels—folklore, and the maybe-magic of myth—blossom here. The ordinary takes wing: Our hero flies.

The weakest of Morrison's novels is Tar Baby, a dubious jumble set in the Caribbean, featuring a white candy magnate, his black servants, their beautiful niece, and an ugly cruelty inflicted years ago. Morrison's first extended excursion into the heads of white folk. Only for the loyal fan.

Beloved wiped the slate clean and beckoned, with the same gesture, the august attentions of the Swedish Academy. After which, of course, a disappointment: Jazz, a curiously dispassionate, plotless love story set in Harlem in the 1920s. A teenage girl, an older man, and his jealous wife generate some bizarre domestic violence. In the background, the threat of race riots.

Another kind of violence powers Paradise: the defensive violence of black people intent on protecting their community. Ruby, Oklahoma, is an all-black settlement founded in 1950, a patriarchy, fortress of rightenousness, a prosperous, peaceable community. Persecuted by whites, shunned by lighter-skinned blacks, the people of Ruby have shut out the white world. A few miles from Ruby is the Convent, nun-less since 1970, a shelter of sorts for women, most of them battered and abused, some black, some white. There is no structure to life at the Convent, no rules, no authority. It is an anti-community, a kind of anarchist's paradise. In 1976, the misguided men of Ruby, who think of the Convent as a witches' coven, stage a deadly raid.

The narrative is choppy and needlessly confused, but Morrison's messabge comes through loud and clear. No haven can be heavenly, no home can smack of paradise, if it begins with exclusion or thrives by triage—some in, some out, some damned, some saved. Morrison is agitating for the abolition of us versus them.

As a storyteller Morrison combines a poet's grace, a radical's fervor, and a great preacher's moral majesty. She writes for and about the African-American community ("If I tried to write a universal novel," she once claimed, "it would be water"). And yet she reaches us all.

 

See Also: Nobody who "writes like" Morrison is anywhere as good as she is. If you're after other African-American writers, try James Baldwin or John Edgar Wideman (avoid Alice Walker). If you're after nuanced treatment of racial isues, try Nadine Gordimer. If you just want a novel as good as Sula, try The Great Gatsby or Billy Budd.

 

—Adam Begley

 

 

Mary Astell

 

Mary Astell (BBC In Our Time): https://t.co/tuesDJjkcp

— JoséAngelGarcíaLanda (@JoseAngelGLanda) November 25, 2020

Mary Wollstonecraft (NIVEL AVANZADO)

Rosenfeld, Adam. "Mary Wollstonecraft's "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman." Video lecture. YouTube (Adam Rosenfeld) 12 April 2018.*

https://youtu.be/mkcGjg5JX6o

2020

And Adam Sadler:

- Sadler, Gregory B. "Mary Wollstonecraft: Her Life and Key Ideas. Women's History Month Lecture." Video. YouTube (Gregory B. Sadler) 27 March 2017.*

         https://youtu.be/ztl5-465rZU

         2020

Slides:

         https://www.academia.edu/32096173/

         2020

More Sadler: 

- BBC In Our Time: Mary Wollstonecraft (audio): http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00pg5dr






- A lecture by Lyndall Gordon, one of Mary Wollstonecraft's biographers:




- A BBC series on women and power— 

 
Suffragettes forever! The Story of Women and Power. Presented by Amanda Vickery. BBC series.
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0544j0j

"A Vindication of the Rights of Men." Wikipedia: The Free encyclopedia.*

         https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Vindication_of_the_Rights_of_Men

         2020  

Laura Freixas en "El libro como universo"