In the Beginning There Were Dragon(cillo)s: Using Shadow Puppetry to Engage Young Audiences

Dragoncillo Puppet Troupe was established in 2018 by Esther Fernández, Jonathan Wade, Jared White, and Jason Yancey. The troupe grew out of a staging of The Fabulous Johnny Frog at the 2018 Association for Hispanic and Classical Theater’s (AHCT) yearly symposium. This work, adapted by Yancey, focuses on the controversial Juan Rana protagonist and was designed as an outreach initiative to bring early modern Spanish theater to schools using shadow puppetry. In 2019, Yancey created a new performance based on two entremeses written by Francisco de Quevedo, Siglo de Oro Drama Festival and their community partners This essay illustrates how the Dragoncillo Puppet Troupe was conceived and developed over the span of two years with the goal of introducing early modern Hispanic literature and culture to diverse audiences across the United States while at the same time reaffirming that played a significant role in the cultural, social, and religious life of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain.

Onlajn-nastava romanskih književnosti i kultura u doba pandemije virusa korona

The World Health Organization declared a coronavirus pandemic on March 11, 2020. Measures taken to prevent the spread of the virus have dramatically changed the functioning of schools and forced teachers and students around the globe to adapt quickly to virtual teaching with which many had no previous experience. While exploring the circumstances in which the online teaching of French and Hispanic literature and culture took place at the Department of Romance Studies at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad (FFUNS), we faced a series of questions that needed to be addressed: how students master new technologies, what is their attitude towards online teaching, what shortcomings did they notice, and what made it easier for them to learn the subject content. The first part of the paper provides an overview of the selected literature on virtual teaching published in French, Spanish, English, and Serbian, while the second part presents an analysis of a survey conducted among the students of the Department of Romance Studies at FFUNS who attended classes during the pandemic. The obtained results, valuable both for the improvement of online literature and culture classes and for virtual teaching in general, indicated that the majority of the surveyed students have a negative or moderately negative attitude towards online teaching, while more than a half rated online teaching as equally or less difficult as face-to-face teaching, emphasizing a more flexible organization of time and greater opportunities for using the multimedia content in literature and culture classes. Based on the students' answers, it turns out that the achieved results measured by the number of the passed exams and grades do not differ significantly in relation to the lectures in the classroom.

“Mostrar, no decir”: The Influence of and Resistance Against Workshop Poetics on the Hispanic Literary Field

Until recently, due to the Romantic imaginary of the artist-as-genius, the Hispanic literary tradition has been wary of a literary advice industry or academic programs of creative writing. This wariness hindered the professionalization of Hispanic authors, but at the same time it kept Hispanic literature out of anglicized uniformity which permitted, by the mid-twentieth century, a reinterpretation of western literature by writers such as Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, and Mario Vargas Llosa. Nonetheless since the early 2000s a series of MFA programs in creative writing, first in the United States, but more recently in Latin America and Spain, have been changing Hispanic literature. These programs, with syllabi imported from the Anglophone canons, have influenced a new generation of writers who mirror the English savoir-faire and reject their own literary traditions, which were more experimental, less rooted in realism, and even somewhat baroque. There is, however, also resistance in the field, where workshop-inspired developments coincide with a return to a more Hispanic tradition of innovation.

Descensus ad Inferos: tres ejemplos de la literatura hispánica medieval del siglo XIII (Libro de Alexandre, General Estoria y Milagros de Nuestra Señora)

The journey to the afterlife is a fundamental theme of mythological origin and present in primitive religious thought. Of course, it was in the Middle Ages when writers again addressed the topic of the descent into hell. Although the journey to the underworld was frequently presented as the pilgrimage of a hero or an individual soul, it was also possible that the gods, oblivious to the world of shadows, entered there. Following this perspective, this article will analyze the descent into hell by three female visitors depicted in 13th-century Spanish literature. Thus, in the first place, I will present examples of testimonies created prior to the consolidation of the topic of descensus ad Inferos in the Middle Ages to identify the literary traditions that influenced the reworking of the theme. In the second part, I will describe the topic in three texts of Medieval Hispanic literature, by evoking the digression on Natura in the Libro de Alexandre (cc. 2325-2437), the miracle “De cómo Teófilo fizo carta con el diablo de su ánima et después fue convertido e salvo” from the Milagros de Nuestra Señora (cc.703-866) and the passage about Juno’s fury and revenge from Part Two of the General Estoria. Finally, it will be demonstrated how the episodes describing the descent into hell by Natura, Juno and the Virgin Mary follow a similar structure. Their entrance into Hell is justified by the attributes they possess as mediators.

Moronga, by Horacio Castellanos Moya, and the Divergence of Latin American Noir

Taking Moronga (2018), by Salvadorian author Horacio Castellanos Moya, as a point of departure, this article focuses on the reinterpretation of mainstream crime fiction in Latin American terms. This new approach is made from both formal and thematic perspectives. Moronga is structurally fragmented; the traditional detective figure has disappeared, and the plot does not revolve around a single crime but denounces a society at large which is characterized by paranoid surveillance. The reinterpretation of the crime fiction genre in Latin American terms has opened up two different strands of noir: firstly, the so-called ‘post-neopolicial’ where crime is a mere backdrop to formal experimentation, and secondly, what Ricardo Piglia refers to as ‘ficción paranoica’ [paranoiac fiction]. Moronga is a good example of both these strands, making it an appropriate case study to analyse the ways in which Hispanic literature deviates from classic Anglophone crime fiction (particularly the North American hardboiled tradition).