Caracol is a biannual publication in the field of Spanish Language and Spanish/Spanish-American Literature produced by the Department of Modern Literature of the School of Philosophy, Literature and Human Sciences of the University of São Paulo. It aims to publish original contributions in Spanish/Portuguese, interviews, reviews and, potentially, rare texts of interest to the academic debate in the disciplines of Spanish Literature, Spanish-American Literature, Spanish Language and Translation, being the only magazine in Brazil entirely dedicated to Hispanic Studies. Qualis grade: B1.
Universidade de São Paulo. Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas
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Em torno aos 100 anos de Marinero en tierra: leituras e releituras
This dossier offers a critical reflection on the centenary of Marinero en tierra, Rafael Alberti’s inaugural book, addressing both the impact of its appearance in the Spanish poetic scene of the 1920s and the diverse reverberations it has generated throughout the twentieth century and in contemporary criticism. Rather than treating the work as a fixed historical milestone, the contributions gathered here approach Marinero en tierra and its surroundings as a radiating core of aesthetic, historical, and cultural questions that traverse Spanish poetry, the experience of Republican exile, and its dialogues with other literary traditions, particularly the Brazilian one. The dossier brings together comparative perspectives, studies of intellectual and sociability networks, analyses of Alberti’s poetry and prose, reflections on exile as a symbolic and historical condition, and close readings of key works by the poet. Organized along a trajectory that moves from broader mappings to more specific analyses, this issue articulates tradition and avant-garde, memory and displacement, historical inquiry and aesthetic reassessment, thus contributing to current debates on the lasting relevance of Rafael Alberti’s work one hundred years after the publication of Marinero en tierra.
Copyright (c) 2025 Margareth Santos, Mayra Moreyra Carvalho https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Radiations from a Center. Interview with José Antonio Mesa Toré, Director of the Generation of '27 Cultural Center
Entrevista a José Antonio Mesa Toré - Director del Centro Cultural Generación del 27
Copyright (c) 2025 José Antonio Mesa Toré, Margareth Santos , Mayra Moreyra Carvalho https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Library of a Generation. Interview with Javier La Beira Strani, director of the Library of the Generation of '27 Cultural Center
Entrevista a Javier Strani - Director de la Biblioteca del Centro de la Generación del 27
Copyright (c) 2025 Javier La Beira Strani , Margareth Santos, Mayra Moreyra Carvalho https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Hispanic-Brazilian Generational Dialogues: Survey of the Presence of the Generación del 27 in Brazil
This article proposes the mapping of a research on the Brazilian Generation of 45 and the Argentine Generation of 42, considering, in this case, the known interlocutions with the current Garcilasista and the Spanish Generation of 27, which is not the first case, and something remains to be investigated. The Brazilian poetic context of the second Post-war, an emerging generation, as well as the most representative names from our avant-garde two years later revealed in their works a neoclassical turn refined with a tendency corresponding to the aforementioned Argentine generation, like Garcilasismo. In view of this, research into translations, poetic homages and critical studies in Brazil on the Geração of 27. We are also interested in the most effective exchanges between Brazilian and Spanish poets, such as Murilo Mendes, Rafael Alberti and Damaso Alonso (the latter a translator of Brazilian poets).
Copyright (c) 2025 Vagner Camilo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Un grande abrazo: Review of La Amistad, Patria de los Sin Patria: an unpublished epistolary edited by Barbara Greco
O epistolário La Amistad, patria de los sin patria, composto por correspondências entre María Teresa León, Rafael Alberti e Max Aub, e editado por Barbara Greco, constitui um testemunho raro e significativo da prática epistolar entre intelectuais espanhóis exilados após a Guerra Civil Espanhola. O conjunto reúne 44 cartas, quase todas manuscritas, de María Teresa León; 3 cartas de Rafael Alberti; 3 cartas de Aitana Alberti León; e 30 cartas de Max Aub. Redigidas em contextos de deslocamento geográfico e político, essas cartas não apenas documentam as relações pessoais entre León, Alberti e Aub, mas configuram um campo discursivo em que a amizade construída nesse distanciamento opera como forma articuladora de pertencimento simbólico e de continuidade subjetiva.
Copyright (c) 2025 Raphael Boccardo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Semantic Cartography of Sobre los ángeles: A Study of Isotopies and Metaphors in the Poetry of Rafael Alberti
The present article analyzes the networks of operation of isotopies and metaphors in Sobre los ángeles (1929) by Rafael Alberti from a semiotic perspective. Through the analysis of the poetry collection, it becomes evident how these semantic structures configure a web of meanings that articulates the existential crisis and the fragmentation of the poetic subject. This study explores the interaction between isotopies and metaphors in the construction of the work’s symbolic universe, where angels function as elements that embody disorientation and emptiness. A semiotic approach is employed to examine the dynamics between the isotopies of the celestial, the fall, and the loss of identity, among others. The findings reveal that the combination of these discursive mechanisms reinforces the philosophical and aesthetic dimensions of the poetry collection, highlighting a poetics of crisis in which the symbolic structure reflects the disillusionment and disintegration of the poetic subject.
Copyright (c) 2025 Fernando Candón Ríos https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Memory and Visions of Culture in La arboleda Perdida. Libros I y II
Inside the autobiographical and memoirist discourse of La Arboleda Perdida. Books I and II, corresponding to the stage of American exile, develop Rafael Alberti's visions of culture. The connections and displacements between the popular, the cultured and the mass culture (Chauí, Blanco, Williams, Martín-Barbero) demonstrate a truly democratic and modern reflection of the author, consistent with the auto-figuration (Heinich, Premat) of the writer.
Copyright (c) 2025 Silvia Cárcamo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Cambridge History of Cuban Literature (2024):
Copyright (c) 2025 Ivan Gabriel Grajales Melian, Yessy Villavicencio Simón https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Impresos, periódicos y sociabilidades letradas en Hispanoamérica (siglos XVIII-XIX)
Con el dossier Impresos, periódicos y sociabilidades letradas en Hispanoamérica (siglos XVIII-XIX), nos propusimos reunir estudios sobre un capítulo fundamental de la historia de los impresos en la región. El período abarcado va desde la intensificación de la circulación de impresos y el surgimiento de las primeras gacetas y diarios en los virreinatos durante las últimas décadas del siglo XVIII hasta la consolidación de la prensa moderna en las décadas finales del siglo XIX. Para abordar la diversidad de temporalidades y prácticas letradas que caracterizan este período, el dossier se organiza en tres secciones: Impresos y periódicos en el ocaso del período colonial, Impresos, política y opinión pública en la época de las Independencias y Diarios, diversificación de la lectura en la etapa republicana; y La circulación de impresos y la traducción.
Copyright (c) 2025 Hernán Pas, Bruno Verneck https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The civil war and the subsequent military regime in Spain from 1936 caused the exile of notable artists and writers, including Luis Cernuda and Rafael Alberti, members of the Generation of '27. The lives of both poets were affected by this event, which became a central theme of their poetry. This paper compares, at different times and based on some of their poems, the way in which each of them expressed and elaborated their ostracism. While Cernuda took it as a subject of personal meditation that implies much more than geographical distance, to the point of being indifferent to the possibility of return, Alberti frequently took a position in favour of the republican cause in a committed poetry, although also giving space to the expression of homesickness, and always with the hope of return. Thus, we identify two paradigms of the literary treatment of exile in two of the most original works of modern Spanish poetry.
Copyright (c) 2025 Darío Gómez Sánchez https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
A comparative study of Marinero en tierra and Versos humanos
In 1925, two works won the Spanish National Literature Prize, Marinero en tierra by Rafael Alberti and Versos humanos by Gerardo Diego. In this article we will make a comparative study of both collections of poems to highlight the common features of two authors who perfectly represent the essence of the Generation of 1927. We will show the influence of traditional and popular lyric poetry in several of the poems, as well as recurring themes (the sea, death and love). In terms of style, both poets combine tradition and the avant-garde and they are influenced by other arts, which are also defining elements of this brilliant poetic generation.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ana María Alonso Fernández https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
«Un toque de azar absoluto»: dream and story in César Aira
The paper presents an analysis of the inventive power of the dream in César Aira’s fictions. In them, the dream becomes a model for the writing of ‘pure stories’ that are removed from the realm of explanation. But these are not –in novels such as El sueño, La Abeja, La villa or Un sueño realizado– prestigious dreams but, on the contrary, minor, banal, almost ridiculous dreams. Disencumbered of the symbolic prestige that it might have had in the Borgean tradition and in fantastic literature, the dream in Aira’s novels engages in a kind of dialogue with waking life that produces, among other things, particular visions of space. In short, this paper proposes that in the author’s urban novels we can capture a fin-de-siècle phantasmagoria that focuses on the minor lives of subjects affected by the generative power of the dream.
Copyright (c) 2025 Juan José Guerra https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Variations on Exile: Rafael Alberti and María Zambrano
This study explores exile as a symbol from Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic perspective in two key figures of the Generation of ’27: Rafael Alberti and María Zambrano. In Marinero en tierra (1924), Alberti expresses his deep-rooted connection and anticipates his way of facing exile through love and a bond with the land. Zambrano, in turn, develops a phenomenology of exile in works such as Filosofía y poesía (1939), Hacia un saber sobre el alma (1950), and El hombre y lo divino (1955), linking this experience to her method of poetic reason. Exile, as a key to interpretation, represents the human being’s separation from an original state of fulfillment, echoing the myth of the lost paradise. Beyond its territorial dimension, it symbolizes a rupture in identity and the sense of belonging. In Alberti and Zambrano, exile is confirmed as both a loss of spatial center and collective time; this experience defines their respective works.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ethel Junco; Claudio César Calabrese https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Affective and perceptive fictions of precariousness in recent Argentine literature
Recent Argentine literature highlights how precarity impacts lives, reorganizes bodies and affective connections, permeates subjectivities —exposed to increasing uncertainty, vulnerability, and instability—, alters ways of inhabiting and navigating spaces, and shapes the forms that social relationships take, particularly the possibilities of perceiving, understanding, and naming others. This article addresses the emergence of affective and perceptive fictions of precariousness that explore the links between poverty and frameworks of recognition, showing how the perception of others impacts subjectivities and the circulation of affect. The essay provides an overview of these fictions, focusing on their predominant features as well as certain nuances and shifts they exhibit in shaping experiences of precariousness. Additionally, it includes an analysis of La guerra de los gimnasios by César Aira to delve deeper into the proposed trends.
Copyright (c) 2025 Silvina Sánchez https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Representation of the Combatant Woman in Rafael Alberti’s “La miliciana del Tajo (Balada)” (1938). Tradición poética e imaginación popular
This article analyzes the representation of the militiawoman in “La miliciana del Tajo (Balada)” (1938) by Rafael Alberti published in El Mono Azul within the context of the Spanish Civil War. It examines the literary and cultural tradition that informs the republican poetics (Golden Age Spanish literature) and explores how the figure of the militiawoman reflects the author’s nostalgia of the spontaneous people’s resistance, as well as the era’s gender ideals and the shifts brought about by the war. Alberti reinterprets the tragic destiny of the female fighter as symbol that dialogues with Spanish literary heritage, with the popular imagination regarding female life stories and with the collective imagination surrounding the Republic and the Spanish people's resistance.
Copyright (c) 2025 Virginia Bonatto https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Alexandre Dumas’ Teresa in Andrés Bello’s Version (1839), or a Partial Experiment of Theatre Genetics from a Translation
This article aims to study Andrés Bello's translation of Alexandre Dumas' play Teresa (1832) to tentatively reconstruct part of nineteenth-century Chile's dramaturgical and theatrical universe. Based mainly on methodologies of theatrical genetics (Grésillon, Thomasseau, Féral) and on a comparison of the translation with its original, and starting from the premise that Bello's text is an arrangement of the original, with substantial modifications both at dramaturgical and microtextual level, the essay aims to understand the artistic, political and social reasons behind these changes, within its context and, ultimately, to try to fill a historiographical gap around the theatrical practices of the nineteenth century in Chile.
Dossier: La circulación de impresos y la traducción
Copyright (c) 2025 Andrea Pelegri Kristic https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Writting dose. Old age and drugs in La vida a ratos the Juan José Millás
Based on the assumption that the treatment of illness has a structural place in the work of Juan José Millás, the aim of this article is to analyze La vida a ratos (2019) from the intersection between old age and drugs. Dimensions that produce in the narrative of this author a point of inflection that makes the text present itself in the form of a diary. This point of inflection is what our work wants to interrogate. We maintain that in La vida a ratos we can see a particular modulation of millasean writing, which takes place at the crossroads between old age and drugs, and manifests itself under the figure of the scriptural dose. This figure synthesizes the narrative fragmentation and contraction that La vida a ratos brings as a novelty. At the same time, it exposes how the text adopts a pharmacological functioning that, from the question of old age, enables Millás a new type of formal exploration.
Copyright (c) 2025 Sofía Dolzani https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Literature and Advertising (Buenos Aires, 1870-1890)
Between 1870 and 1890, between the publication of El gaucho Martín Fierro (1872) and the arrival of Rubén Darío in Buenos Aires (1893), literature and advertising maintained unique relationships. Modern advertising had just emerged in the 1860s, while the project of a national literature, between newspapers and books, was beginning to be fulfilled. The article examines five episodes of literary history (A Visit to the Ranquel Indians by Lucio V. Mansilla, The Gaucho Martín Fierro by José Hernández, Juan Moreira by Eduardo Gutiérrez, a short novel by Juana Manuela Gorriti and a successful literary and artistic almanac of the end of the century) that were also episodes in the history of advertising.
Dossier: Diarios y diversificación de la lectura en la etapa republicana
Copyright (c) 2025 Sergio Pastormerlo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Constitution of Cadiz and the Birth of Public Opinion in Havana (1810-1814)
This paper examines the impact of the Cádiz Constitution (1810-1814) on the Cuban press and the formation of public opinion. During this period, freedom of the press allowed for a proliferation of publications, transforming the press into a forum for political and social debate, often masked through libel and personal attacks. It analyzes how, despite censorship control exercised by traditional elites, the press facilitated the dissemination of liberal and constitutionalist ideas, promoting citizen participation in public debates and political polarization. The emergence of numerous newspapers and pamphlets during these years, in addition to reflecting the political tensions of the insular society, contributed decisively to the modernization of Cuban journalism and literature.
Dossier: Impresos, política y opinión pública en la época de las Independencias
Copyright (c) 2025 Juan Bosco Amores Carredano, Alain Jesús Fuentes Santos https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The temporality of prints and the time for writing: 19th century almanacs andcalendars in Río de La Plata
The popularization of almanacs and calendars was a phenomenon that characterized printed culture in the 19th century. They were an everyday element that only in recent years began to capture the interest of researchers. Based on the survey of a limited corpus of almanacs published in Río de la Plata, we explore the intersection between temporalities, the materiality of the prints, and the practice of appropriation by their readers —people who left marks, notes, and reflections on their pages. Almanacs and calendars are privileged printed materials for observing technical transformations, political ups and downs and the shifts in the daily life of an increasingly diverse reading public. The analysis of the changes and permanences in this type of long-lasting printed material —strongly associated with generic conventions— allows us to appreciate the novelties and continuities in the daily life of ordinary audiences.
Copyright (c) 2025 Lucía Pose https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Geography of Enunciation of Archivo Americano y Espíritu de la Prensa del Mundo (1843-1851)
The article proposes a preliminary approach to Pedro De Angelis’s newspaper Archivo Americano y Espíritu de la Prensa del Mundo (1843-1851) from two perspectives: first, it analyses the combination of journalistic matrices that the publication presents and that is reflected in the dual character of the title (an “archive” and a “spirit”). Second, it examines the construction in the pages of the newspaper of an American locus of enunciation that, also articulated from the title through two separate and at the same time united spaces (“the American”, America and the World), is exercised in the critical and distanced reading of the foreign press and competes with the romantic ways of working with the authority of the European text by proposing alternative ways of reading the discourses that were written from outside about America and, fundamentally, about the Río de la Plata.
Copyright (c) 2025 María Laura Romano https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Death, politics and satire in Mexican popular broadsheets: the “calaveras” from the Porfiriato to the Revolution
To add to the knowledge of the instances of production, circulation and reception of printed matter in the Hispanic American sphere of the 19th century and limiting myself to the Mexican space, I have studied how the political theme was a relevant factor for the configuration of certain popular literary genres. This is notable in the case of the calaveras, which are a satirical poetic form in the current Mexican literary tradition. Here I present the study of the calaveras of political themes produced by the printing press of Antonio Vanegas Arroyo between 1880 and 1917, arguing that they are key materials to understand the splendor and decline of the calaveras as an editorial form. I propose a classification of the calaveras into five categories, based on the way in which the political theme was intertwined with death as a literary artifice and on the consequences that it had on the satirical tone and the critical intention of the discourse.
Copyright (c) 2025 Grecia Monroy Sánchez https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
"Always have Independence and Order as your motto". El Eco Oriental (1827) and adherence to the unity of regime in the context of the war between the United Provinces and the Empire of Brazil
The paper proposes to analyze El Eco Oriental, a republican, pro-independence and unitary newspaper that has not been subject of specific studies until now. It was published in the Provincia Oriental (Eastern Province) from March to April 1827, when the war between the United Provinces and the Empire of Brazil was still taking place. The main objective of its editors was to publicly defend the questioned Constitution that the General Congress held in Buenos Aires approved in December 1826. The paper first presents the political and journalistic context in which this press medium emerged. Then, it studies the formal characteristics of El Eco and offers information about its editors. Finally, it analyzes more extensively some aspects of the link between the concepts of republic, independence and order in this press medium. To this end, it also takes into account the debate generated in the Chamber of Deputies and in the provincial government regarding the same issues.
Copyright (c) 2025 Wilson González Demuro https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
A “communications circuit”: The newspapers in the Viceroyaltyof Peru (1811-1820)
The production, circulation and reading of newspapers between the years 1811 and 1820 in the viceroyalty of Peru is the subject of study of this essay. During those years, the viceroyalty of Peru in general, and Lima in particular, were inundated with a large number of foreign and local periodical publications. This process constitutes an exceptional window to appreciate the importance of print culture in a colonial context. From a methodological point of view, this study applies the so-called “communication circuit”, proposed by the American historian Robert Darnton. This is a proposal specific to the history of the book, which allows us to understand printed matter and its readers in their historical contexts.
Dossier: Impresos y periódicos en el ocaso del período colonial
Copyright (c) 2025 Pedro Guibovich Perez https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Victor Hugo from the salon to the press. The circulation of Alberdi 's Claude Gueux translation between Buenos Aires and Montevideo in the late 1830s
Towards the end of 1830, Juan Bautista Alberdi translated Claude Gueux, a story by Victor Hugo against the death penalty, to accompany the reading of his ‘Fragmento Preliminar al Estudio del Derecho’ at the meetings of the Literary Salon of 1837. Two years later, already exiled in Montevideo after the break with Rosas, he published the story in the newspaper El Corsario, which he edited. The aim of this article is to analyse the uses and effects of translation in its two contexts of circulation, especially in relation to a central problem for Buenos Aires romanticism at the time: that of the political representation of the literati in the context of Rosas.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ana Eugenia Vazquez https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Americanist Ideasand Liberalism in two of Alberto Blest Gan´s chronicles
In two os Alberto Blest Gan´s twelve chronicles published in the newspaper La voz de Chile in 1862, he vividly comments about Liberalism and the creation os Latin American Unions against European political and economical interventions in the Area. Those are rare opportunities to dig into this polemicist facet of the Chilean Novelist who scarcely wrote elsewhere about his political and ideological positions in a direct way.
Nineteenth Century Latin American Liberalism
Copyright (c) 2025 Laura Janina Hosiasson https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Transatlantic Circulation of Discourses on the Castes of New Spain (18th century)
This paper seeks to demonstrate the processes of circulation of people and objects as a vehicle of ideas and discourses during the eighteenth century between New Spain and the Peninsula. On this occasion, caste painting is presented as a materialization of a novo-Hispanic socio-racial discourse in order to investigate the circuits in which this genre is inserted. The importance of the interweaving between images and texts for the construction of an imaginary about the inhabitants of New Spain based on the instance of circulation and reproduction of discourses of power is demonstrated.
Copyright (c) 2025 Elisabeth Fromentoux Braga https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The press in the province of Antioquia has undergone along journey: from official journalism to independentand partisan journalism
The article presents a socio-historical journey of how the main newspapers emerged in the province of Antioquia during the first half of the 19th century, analyzing their various stages of development, starting with the arrival of the printing press and the first newspapers during the Independence process. , as well as, the configuration of elite sectors linked to the acquisition of the press and the journalistic function as a mechanism of social and political formation that allowed them to consolidate a social status within the province. Likewise, it shows the role of newspapers as means of disseminating the government, of configuring an Antioquia "identity", and, finally, the stage of the independent and partisan press, a time in which the partisan debate and a series of references typical of the revolutionary process in France in 1848 are disseminated.
Copyright (c) 2025 Juan Guillermo Zapata Ávila https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The journalistic work of José A. Alzate in the debate on the nature of America (1768-1795)
During the Age of Enlightenment, an intense debate developed about the nature of America, in which European philosophers and naturalists questioned the prevailing historiography on pre-Hispanic societies and the processes of Spanish conquest and colonization. Theses based on degeneration, inferiority and indolence as characteristic elements of American nature began to gain strength. In the face of these ideas, coming mostly from northern Europe, but also sometimes from peninsular Spain, the Novo-Hispanic Creoles reacted firmly and defended the human and natural wealth of their territory. In order to delve deeper into the Creole participation in the dispute and the ideological consequences it had, I have analyzed the journalistic work of José Antonio Alzate, a Creole of Jesuit formation and enlightened thought whose publications are indispensable to understand the society of New Spain during the last third of the 18th century.
Copyright (c) 2025 Marcos Gallego Álvarez https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Fashion, consumption, and gender in Correo del Domingo (1864-1868)
This article analyzes the presence of fashion in the first period of the newspaper Correo del Domingo. Published in Buenos Aires between 1864 and 1868, a historical moment characterized by the increase of the population, the growth of the reading public and the incorporation of images in the periodical press, this publication was characterized by the wide variety of its contents. In the first section, the place of fashion in the Buenos Aires press from the first half of the nineteenth century is reviewed, and the editorial proposal of the newspaper under study is presented; secondly, images of fashion and its consumption are analyzed along with the texts that accompany them; finally, the texts on fashion written by the editor of the newspaper are approached from a gender perspective, to demonstrate how Correo del Domingo transmitted conservative ideals in this aspect. The paper contributes to the history of the illustrated and fashion press in Argentina; and helps to understand the relevance of fashion and clothing in a rapidly expanding city.
Copyright (c) 2025 Teresita Garabana https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0