Latin American Philosophy of Literature

The goal of this paper is to argue that the Neptuno Alegórico and the Theatro de Virtudes Políticas, which were composed in 1680 by the Novohispanic philosophers Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora to accompany respectively two arches erected to celebrate the entry of the Spanish viceroy to Mexico City, are notable not only as examples of panegyrical Baroque literature but also as philosophical texts aimed at moral instruction. To be specific, I argue that (...) the Neptuno and the Theatro belong to a hybrid genre that I label ekphrastic moral mirrors. Ekphrastic moral mirrors, which constitute a subset of the traditional speculum principis, are characterized by offering moral instruction to a prince indirectly, by means of an elaborate ekphrasis of a work of art (which, in the case of the Neptuno and the Theatro, were the two arches that they were paired with). I also argue that, insofar as the Neptuno and the Theatro create different audiences that are mutually aware of each other in virtue of systematically relying on ekphrasis deployed in a public setting, they are potentially more effective for moral instruction than other traditional mirrors of princes. (shrink)

Se comenta el artículo de Marisa Moyano y Hugo Aguilar sobre "El ensayo de interpretación continental: lecturas performativas y pensamiento identitario en ‘Ariel’ ". Ni reflejo pasivo de una realidad previa, ni palabra demiúrgica inventora de una realidad imaginada, los discursos identitarios son momentos reflexivos en una red inter-narrativa e inter-subjetiva de palabras, gestos y actos que afirman y constituyen a un grupo humano como sujeto político y cultural.

In this short paper I try to present William James’s connection with the Argentinian writer Macedonio Fernández (1874-1952), who was in some sense a mentor of Borges and might be considered the missing link between Borges and James.

The year of the centennial of the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges is probably the right time to exhume one of the links that this universal writer had with William James. In 1945, Emece, a publisher from Buenos Aires, printed a Spanish translation of William James’s book Pragmatism, with a foreword by Jorge Luis Borges.