Abstract

The Novelas ejemplares are not a travel book, but they present numerous issues related to this genre that deserve to be studied and analyzed. Classics can provide important concepts for travel literature. This paper is reading of La gitanilla from the concept of motion and the relationship between travel Cervantes’ theory of alterity.

Abstract

Epic poetry has always been considered a masculine genre. The eruption of a group identity, masculine, white, aristocratic and christian, is the result of the representation and the exclusion of the Other, fictitious and singular, but in fact composed of a variety of ethnic groups, origins, sex, genders, religions and different degrees between fiction and historicity. Indeed, in the historical epic poetry which narrated the Conquest, except for the conquistadors listed at length and the indigenous kings and caciques, only few characters are distinguished by a historical individualisation. The Other, Amerindian and female, makes a shy entrance into history, into singularity, into the (historical and christian) truth. It is the case of interpreters: Malinche and India Catalina, only historical native women that appear as part of the narrative plot as well as in the conquest enterprise in the poems of Lasso de la Vega (Cortés valeroso y Mexicana, Mexicana), of Juan de Castellanos (Elegías de varones ilustres de Indias) and of Saavedra Guzmán (El peregrino indiano).

Abstract

In this paper, I reflect on the research of mechanisms of literary representation of cultural and economical difference that intend to erode the separation that justifies the I/Other dichotomy. I focus on the study of La pell de la frontera (2014) by Francesc Serés. This book contributed to the report of the plight of migrants and the government's inaction on the social, economical and demographic changes that affected many villages of Baix Cinca and Segrià. I hypothesize that Serés uses the representation of used objects and ruined landscapes to build a story about a difference that could erode the limits designed by the dichotomy I/Other. My paper is structured in three sections, where it is analyzed: a) the process of deplacement of the author's function, b) the use of used objects as a meeting point with an Other that is not represented as "the" Other, and c) the erosion of the identity of the author and of the representativeness of the other in a collective frame.