Publications

“El bendito acento de la patria”. Fantasía, patria y territorio en Peregrinaciones de una alma triste (1876) de Juana Manuela Gorriti. Ediciones MYL, 2020

[In Progress] Jorge M. von Hassel. Apuntes de viaje en el oriente peruano. Critical edition by Carlos Torres Astocóndor. Ediciones MYL, 2027

Clorinda Matto de Turner. Herencia. Critical edition by Flor Mallqui Bravo and Carlos Torres Astocóndor. Notes in collaboration with Claudia Rivero Ramos. Ediciones MYL, 2021

This article analyzes Jorge von Hassel's Apuntes de viaje en el Oriente Peruano (1905), focusing on his portrayal of the rubber industry's impact on workers and Amazonian Indigenous peoples. I argue that despite openly aligning himself with the civilizing logic of the intellectuals of his time, his work implicitly exposes extractivism's toll through fractured families, precarious camp life, squandered earnings, and violence against Indigenous communities that resisted extraction.

Using memory studies—multidirectional memory (Rothberg, 2009) and acting-out/working-through (LaCapra, 2001)—this paper examines Luis Felipe Degregori's documentary Chungui: horror sin lágrimas (2009). I argue the film invokes Guamán Poma de Ayala's Nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615) to link colonial and republican abuses of Andean communities, situating Chungui's human rights violations during Peru's political violence (1980–2000) within a longer history of Indigenous dispossession. I further contend that the llaqta maqta dance closing the film enacts resistance through working-through, allowing the community to confront its trauma.

This paper argues that Peruvian literary criticism has a reflective tradition regarding its own function, examined here through "critical deontology"—the duties and principles critics like Antonio Cornejo Polar and Raúl Bueno Chávez consider inherent to their work. A deontological assessment of their scholarship reveals three commonalities: the centrality of Peru's multicultural, multilingual reality; the need to master disciplines adjacent to literature (sociology, history, anthropology, linguistics) to broaden interpretive scope; and the recognition of criticism as a political and ideological act shaped by the critic's training and professional relationships.

This work examines the value of language use in Inca Garcilaso de la Vega's Comentarios reales, analyzing two key scenes in the text. First, I read the story of Pedro Serrano as "poetic truth," arguing that it frames language as a means of understanding the other and a tool for forging relationships and identities between subjects. Second, I examine the functions of the general language under Inca rule, showing how it fostered social cohesion despite the cultural diversity of conquered peoples—together revealing Garcilaso's linguistic awareness as one that transcends mere correctness to engage individual and collective identity.

This article analyzes the opening scene of Juana Manuela Gorriti's Peregrinaciones de una alma triste (1876), proposing two readings of protagonist Laura. First, her tuberculosis functions as a symptom exposing the impossibility of representing women within elite criollo national projects while disrupting her social insertion. Second, Laura's escape enacts a "going through the phantasmic screen" of nineteenth-century national rhetoric, revealing its inconsistencies. The novel thus pursues an "alternative knowledge" through travel—dismantling the national project while affirming continuous displacement to forge new ties with marginalized communities.

This article analyzes the flight scene in Juana Manuela Gorriti's Peregrinaciones de una alma triste (1876), reading Laura's endless journey through three lenses: her tuberculosis as a metaphor for women's social repression, the journey as a search for alternative knowledge that punctures scientific discourse, and her strategic concealment of this search behind a phantasmic screen before men. The scene thus over-identifies with the national fantasy, juxtaposing inconsistent elements—science and woman as the "fair sex"—to undermine its control.

This article examines Juan Espinosa Medrano's Apologético en favor de Don Luis de Góngora to identify the model of literary criticism El Lunarejo envisions, distinguishing between the censorious critic, driven by passion, envy, and self-aggrandizement, and the commentator critic, who remains dispassionate, attentive to aesthetic novelty, and oriented toward extracting lessons from the text. Drawing on Espinosa Medrano's critique of Manuel de Faria y Sousa, I argue that the author implicitly constructs a "critical deontology," a set of principles and duties spanning dispassion, interdisciplinary training, attention to authorial intention, and formal care in critical writing, meant to govern the practice of literary criticism in both colonial Spain and America.

This article examines the function of literary criticism in Nelson Osorio and Carlos Rincón, tracing Osorio's call for a "new critical consciousness" grounded in historical-social context and explicit ideological method, and Rincón's historical mapping of criticism since Romanticism and his critique of both immanentist stylistics and mechanical sociology of literature. Both authors converge on a deontological demand: that the literary critic assume a conscious ideological posture as an organizer of social consciousness.

Brújula

vol. 16, 2023, https://brujula.ucdavis.edu/volume-16

Brújula

vol. 16, 2023, , pp. 1-17, https://doi.org/10.58748/JLFH3882

Brújula

vol. 16, 2023, pp. 109-122, https://doi.org/10.58748/XPLF6406