Journal articles: 'Spanish Science fiction' – Grafiati (2025)

Abstract:

Tradicionalmente, no se menciona a Cervantes en la historia de la ciencia ficción. Sin embargo, un análisis de varias muestras de la ciencia ficción española contemporánea, tales como El mundo de Yarek (Elia Barceló), "El día que hicimos la Transición" (Ricard de la Casa y Pedro Jorge Romero), y "El centro muerto" (León Arsenal), demuestra que existen varios paralelos entre éstas y el Quijote. Se divisan, especialmente en el segundo tomo, vislumbres de algunos de los subgéneros y temas más importantes de la ciencia ficción, entre ellos la virtualidad y la construcción de mundos, las ucronías (con sus historias alternativas, viajes en el tiempo, y rarezas en el transcurso del tiempo), y las nuevas ontologías como las inteligencias artificiales y las identidades/memorias cargadas.

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There are no references to creative fiction in Erving Goffman’s founding statement of his sociology of the interaction order, his 1953 Chicago doctoral dissertation ( Communication Conduct in an Island Community). Yet four pages into his first and best-known book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), Goffman cites a ‘novelistic incident’ describing the posturing of Preedy, a ‘vacationing Englishman’ on a Spanish beach. It is introduced in order to articulate the distinction between ‘expressions given’ and ‘expressions given off’ and to indicate their capacity for intentional or unintentional engineering. The page-long passage about Preedy, found in a 1956 collection of William Sansom’s short stories, is often mentioned in reviews and summaries of Goffman’s groundbreaking book. This article describes the types of fiction drawn upon by Goffman and examines the ‘work’ that fictional illustrations distinctively do in his writings. The discussion sheds light not only on why Goffman elected to include fictional illustrative materials in his sociology and why eventually he dropped their use, it also underscores some strengths and limits of the fictional for interactional analysis in sociology.

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This review paper assesses academic articles published about Spanish fictional television series in scientific journals indexed in multidisciplinary databases: Web of Science (WoS), Scopus and Dialnet between 1998 and 2020. A combined quantitative and qualitative method of analysis based on the SALSA Framework was used, in order to build a systematic bibliographic review. The results showed that the most common studies were those about the representation proposed in the fictional series about certain groups or social settings. Other approaches referred to the development of television fiction genres, adaptations, as well as to audiences and how audiences had received the series. Innovative research pointed to the emerging themes of transmediality, participatory audiences, hybrid studies that explained the content from production and authorship, and feminist works. Among the gaps noted were approaches that addressed the audiovisual language and the aesthetics of television fiction as research opportunities.

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The subject of the study is the stylistic functions of Spanish adverbs with the suffix -mente in modern Spanish based on the analysis of corpus contexts of works of Spanish prose of the XXI century. The analysis of functional features was based on the theoretical positions of the authors of domestic and foreign grammars of the Spanish language, works on linguistics. Adverbs with the formant - mente are grammatically multifunctional elements that are polysemantic lexical units that have the ability to acquire additional connotations in collocations with other parts of speech. Stylistic possibilities of adverbial units help to solve such author's tasks as assessment, characterization of characters, achievement of expressiveness of the text and imagery of the narrative. The novelty of the study lies in the fact that for the first time examples from the corpus of the Spanish language of the XXI century were analyzed, the names of the authors of which are well known to the Russian-speaking reader (Carlos Ruiz Safon), or practically unknown at all (Anton Castro, Diego Torron). The result of the study was the conclusion that the formant -mente has not lost its productivity at the current stage of language development and is a characteristic feature of the artistic style of the modern Spanish language. The findings have both scientific significance for theoretical research in the field of morphology of the Spanish language, and practical value for translators of Spanish prose.

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The article features the results of a contrastive analysis of the figurative characteristics of color terms as elements of the conceptual worldview of Spaniards and Ukrainians. In this regard we consider the following topics: concept COLOR as a cross-object of conceptology, linguistic culture and discourse; color terms as an element of the conceptual worldview of Spaniards and Ukrainians; ethno-specific contrasts of the figurative constituents of the color terms black, white, red, blue, yellow, green in Spanish and Ukrainian in fiction. This study explores the linguocultural concept of COLOR from the cognitive, ethno-cultural and discursive perspectives, and therefore the concept can be considered as the subject matter of such disciplines as anthropology, linguocultural science and discourse theory. The corpus of the study was formed using the continuous sampling method from multi-genre prose written by contemporary Spanish (Carlos Ruiz Zafón, Camilo José Cela, Gabriel García Márquez) and Ukrainian (Yurii Andrukhovych, Lyubko Deresh, Oksana Zabuzhko) writers. A common feature of the color term black in Spanish and Ukrainian fiction is its use in the description of human blood and its altered states. The color terms black and white characterizing such concepts as NIGHT, DEATH, EYES can be observed in the individual authors’ worldview of Spanish-speaking and Ukrainian writers despite the non-contiguous nature of the two languages and cultures. In the Spanish linguistic culture, the color term blue is used as an image of DEATH and LONELINESS, whereas in Ukrainian – as an image of RAGE, TENSION and ILLNESS.

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Resum: L’objectiu d’aquest article és analitzar la presència del mediterranisme, entès com a doctrina d’identificació col·lectiva, en la literatura catalana de ciència-ficció sobre la fi del món. L’article estableix les possibles relacions entre els motius que provoquen l’apocalipsi (guerra mundial destructora, invasió d’extraterrestres, motius ecològics) i les diferents imatges del Mediterrani com a refugi de valors clàssics i vitals (durant la postguerra i fins als anys setanta), com a imatge de la societat desapareguda (durant l’exili i en ecoficcions dels anys setanta) o, en la ficció climàtica apocalíptica i en la ficció de l’Antropocè, com a massa d’aigua amenaçadora o com subjecte de nous valors d’identificació. Aquest recorregut pot ajudar a entendre els canvis ideològics esdevinguts entre la guerra freda, la postmodernitat i l’actualitat.Paraules clau: ciència-ficció, apocalipsi, mediterranisme, postmodernitat, Literatura catalanaAbstract: The aim of this paper is to analyse the presence of Mediterraneanism, that is, a collective identification way of thinking, in Catalan science-fiction literature about the end of the world. The paper lays out the possible relationships between what causes the apocalypse (a destructive world war, an alien invasion, environment issues) and the different portraits of the Mediterranean as the sanctuary of classical and life values (literature after the Spanish Civil War and until the 70s), as the portrait of a lost society (literature of the Exile period and 70s eco-fiction), or as a menacing water body or a subject of new identity values in apocalyptic climate fiction and Anthropocene fiction. This paper can help understand the ideological changes that happened between the Cold War, Postmodernity, and the present time.Keywords: Science fiction, Apocalypse, Mediterraneanism, Postmodernity, Catalan literature

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This paper presents a study analyzing second language vocabulary gains after an extensive reading program that included non-fiction graded readers of scientific content in English. The study was conducted in a Spanish primary school (N = 96) and implemented in two different modalities: reading-only and reading-while-listening, which included audiobooks. The study lasted one school year and involved 39 science graded readers, making it unique in its duration and scope. The findings indicate that the practice of extensive reading resulted in notable improvements in vocabulary acquisition during the first half of the school year; however, the advantages were less evident in the second half. Different factors intrinsic to the program but also related to students’ motivation will be discussed in order to explain the findings.

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The future is not what it used to be. A new strain of futurism has taken over the stage of global science-fiction: one whose understanding of the future cannot be distinguished from its understanding of the present. Gone are the days when extraterrestrials in shiny, extravagant outfits mastered fascinating technologies that flirted with magic. Characters in Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror (2015–2020) dress like us, and the dystopian technology they put up with is, for the most part, a technology that has existed for years. Armando Iannucci’s imagining of a space cruise for rich people in Avenue 5 (2020) overlaps with Elon Musk’s actual plans of sending wealthy tourists to the moon, while Albert Robida’s visionary téléphonoscope (1879) amounts to a sad reminder of our everyday Zoom call. Is not the current COVID-19 crisis the blueprint to the ultimate post-apocalyptic script? Spanish filmmaker Juan Antonio Bayona noted in a recent interview that Steve Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011), originally labeled as a sci-fi movie by IMDB, is now a drama according to the same internet portal. Science is not fiction anymore, which means at least two different things: that science has lost the power to convey the kind of awe that may be later turned into fiction, and that fiction seems to be unable to inspire a narrative of scientific or—broadly speaking—human progress. How can we retrieve the emancipatory value of progress in good old futuristic sci-fi when the future coincides with the present? What should cultural production look like to help us imagine an alternative to financial capitalism in the face of the impossibility of utopia? The answer, I will claim, resides in Franco Berardi’s concept of “futurability”. This paper explores the limits of this concept by reading side by side Javier Olivares’ and Pablo Olivares’ The Ministry of Time (2015) and Oriol Paulo’s Mirage (2018).

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Spanish horror films set in the late Franco period are a highly successful genre. However, academics have criticised its study, arguing that such films are of low quality. Nevertheless, the genre is a fundamental cultural source for understanding how fiction interacts with a society’s fears as it undergoes a profound transformation. This article aims to analyse the ways rituals were represented as allegorical figures of the anxieties and conflicts in the final years of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship (1968–1975). On the one hand, we will examine the three main discourses that were instrumental to the founding of monstrous cults based on gender, class and nationalism. On the other hand, we will analyse the intermingling of political violence and modernisation through the performance of rituals. Satanic rituals served as visual metaphors for a reality constructed from the Manichaean vision of Catholicism and the exclusionary nationalism of Francoism imposed through political violence.

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The article explores Katherine Anne Porter’s existential concerns reflected in her fiction. Applying the tools of biographical and historical criticism as well as textual analysis, the study delves into the disintegrating apocalyptic fictional world of the American South in the tumult of the Great War and the Spanish influenza that constitutes a mirror of the author’s own personal tribulations in the context of social and personal upheavals. Strands of Existentialism represented by both Christian and atheist thinkers have been adopted as a background against which Modernist anxieties could be best understood and analyzed. The recurrent motif of time with its elusiveness and relativity tends to combine the seemingly dissimilar voices of selected Existentialists, fictional characters and the author herself in their search for truth, identity and meaning, emphasizing subjectivity as the essential element of cognition. As human anxieties are impossible to be encompassed and cast in the clearly defined borders, spiritual concerns outlined in the article tend to remain a riddle open to a multitude of explanations. However, indirect and implied inclinations towards Christian theology alluded to both in the writer’s works and life suggest the adoption of a Kierkegaardian ‘leap of faith’ by the existential sceptic into an orderly essentialism of the Catholic religion as a solution to all anxieties and uncertainties of life.

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In this article an assessment is made of the Spanish implementation of Directive on the rights of victims of crimes and specialized eu policies and legislation in this field. Special attention is made to the European Protection Order and compensation schemes from both the State and the offender. This contribution is divided into seven parts. These include: A general overview on the victim rights’ situation in Spain with the main changes following the implementation of the Victims’ Rights Directive (2); an explanation of the Spanish compensation system for victims (3) and of protection measures for victims (4); a brief commentary on foreign victims in irregular situation (5) and a critical overview of protection measures in the field of victims of female genital mutilation (6). Final remarks will be also given (7).

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Examining three fiction films (Techo y comida, Ayer no termina nunca, and Magical Girl), this essay illuminates the traces of the economic crisis in recent Spanish cinema, focusing on how it is inscribed on female-gendered bodies and subjectivities. In exploring how female pain accumulates across the boundaries of genre in these disparate films, it asks what kind of gendered subjects these films construct, and what work women's suffering is asked to perform, both for the benefit of the film's plot and the spectator's engagement. It shows how, even in cinema sympathetic to those devastated by crisis, women are cast as disposable raw material, as it were, “primed for suffering.” At the same time, it argues, these films bring to light and embody experiences that are seldom revealed, enacting an ethical gesture of potential solidarity with those devastated by multiple forms of crisis.

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Un análisis sobre La bomba increíble, de Pedro Salinas, es interesante porque nos permite disfrutarla desde diferentes líneas. En primer lugar, no ha sido estudiada como el resto de sus textos literarios, aunque los valores de esta pequeña obra maestra merezcan una especial atención que no ha tenido. Por otra parte, es uno de los extraños casos de novela de ciencia ficción escrita por un autor canónico español. Por último, es sorprendente cómo el poeta mostró todas sus obsesiones, miedos y visiones poéticas con una novela con el futuro como tema. Un análisis de los mecanismos de construcción empleados por Salinas –especialmente ficcionales, pero también lingüísticos y simbólicos– nos permitirá entender y, por consiguiente, disfrutar mejor la novela, así como ponerla en el lugar que le corresponde.An analysis about Pedro Salinas’ La bomba increíble: una fabulación is interesting because we can enjoy it from different points of view. In the first place, it has not been studied as the rest of his literary texts, although the values of this little masterpiece deserve a special attention that has not taken place. On the other hand, it is a strange case of the science fiction novels in Spanish literature written by a Spanish canonic author. Finally, it is amazing how the poet showed all his obsessions, fears and poetic visions with a novel with the future as its main subject. An analysis of the mechanisms of construction used by Salinas –specially the fictional ones, but also the linguistic and symbolic ones– will allow us to understand the novel and consequently enjoy it more. Thus we will be able to put it in the place where it should be.

Abstract:

El presente trabajo expone los numerosos factores ‒editoriales, sociales, políticos y técnicos‒ que influyeron en el auge de la ciencia ficción española durante los años ochenta. La enorme complejidad de esta realidad histórico-literaria aporta claves para el entendimiento del desarrollo del género en España y, en general, para abrir nuevas vías de análisis de la literatura española de la segunda mitad del siglo XX. Spanish science fiction had a very good period in the decades prior to the Civil War. We wouldn´t find a similar interest until the seventies and the eighties. To start with, this was due to the New Dimension magazine and subsequently many factors contributed to the appearance of several interesting writers that, especially with their short stories, provided the best works until nowadays.

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Europe has just established the first regulation for artificial intelligences. Large technology corporations and private educational institutions are already imagining neural networks educating us. Has anyone stopped to think about who, how and for what purpose we humans are going to educate machines? The Spanish critical pedagogy research team (PEDACRI), after participating in international conferences on digital education, robotics, ethics in the metaverse and cartography of hyperreality and participating in various publications on the challenges of pedagogy and ethics in the technologisation of educational processes, reflects in this essay on the challenges and questions we need to ask ourselves to imagine the post-human or trans-human community to come. Reviewing works coming from philosophy and those plays, series and films that address the future and the relationship between humans and machines, we analyse the opportunities and threats that can humanise machines or programme them as soulless weapons, which can civilise us or return us to a state of barbarism. The word robot, let us not forget, is derived from the Polish word roboca, which means “slave”. Will we be able, as the replicant in Blade Runner wonders, to programme silence? What can philosophy and pedagogy contribute to the ethical programming of algorithms?

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The aim of this research paper is to demonstrate that Hemingway's work, ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ to show commitment to representing the war literature in which he realistically depicts the war scenes and the crippling impact of violence upon the individuals. This research is qualitative research carried out within the framework of theory, fiction, and history. We have deeply and analytically studied the text and marked the relevant portions. After many close readings and intensive study of the text, the relevant textual evidence was located, marked, and extracted. In 'For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway enthusiastically depicts the heroic actions of Robert Jordan, the American protagonist, fighting for the Spanish cause and the other loyalists who were engaged in resisting fascist aggression against the democratic setup.

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This article deals with the use of the American television series Game of Thrones (HBO: 2011–) as part of the political discourse of the emerging political party Podemos in Spain. First, we focus on Podemos leader, Pablo Iglesias, who, in 2014, edited a book devoted to analyzing this series from a political science viewpoint. We then move on to study ideologically charged symbolic gestures and the detailed analysis of the parallelisms between Daenerys Targaryen’s revolutionary enterprise and Podemos’s bottom-to-top quest to seize power. We then scrutinize how emergent political forces that threaten the enduring hegemony of traditional parties use popular cultural artifacts to intervene in the social fabric and how they attempt to tune in with the Internet-dedicated, socially networked younger classes. This article, thus, analyzes how the relationship between politics and serialized TV fiction has morphed within the Spanish mediascape, paying special attention to the impact of participatory culture.

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Abstract: From 2008 until her untimely death in 2021, Almudena Grandes wrote a weekly column in El País where she often addressed, and lamented, the state of Spanish democracy and the need to reconcile Spain's history for a chance at a better future, a topic familiar to readers of her novels. Although her fiction writing on these themes is well studied, her nonfiction has garnered less attention. The 2019 publication of a selection of these columns, La herida perpetua , spanning the decade marked by the 2008 economic crisis through the 2018 resurgence of the far right, provides us an opportunity to look more closely at the impact and importance of Grandes's nonfiction. Informed by recent scholarship on the state of Spanish democracy and criticism of traditional narratives of the transition to democracy (1975–1982), I argue that these columns represent a public call to action with the goal of (re)building a society that values open debate and fosters an active citizenry, one with the resilience to exercise their rights daily to hold accountable corrupt politicians. Collecting a selection of Grandes's weekly writing into one volume allows readers to contemplate the political events of an important period in Spain's democracy and to engage the legacies of the past while suggesting possibilities for the future, a dialogical exchange that defines democracy and is necessary for its survival.

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La ficción sonora resurge en España con la irrupción de las plataformas sonoras como la red de podcasts Podium Podcast desde el año 2016, la innovación experimental sonora de la emisora pública RNE con el Laboratorio de Innovación Audiovisual de RTVE y la emisión puntual de audiodramas en las cadenas de radio convencionales, que difunden estos espacios en momentos especiales. En esta investigación se realiza un estudio de caso de diez ficciones radiofónicas de la emisora pública RNE, las emisoras privadas Ser y Onda Cero y las plataformas Podium Podcast y Spotify. Para ello se aplica una metodología mixta en la que se combina el análisis de contenido de la muestra de las ficciones seleccionadas con entrevistas en profundidad a ocho expertos en sonido conocedores el proceso de ejecución de las ficciones sonoras en distintas facetas. Los resultados de la investigación subrayan los rasgos distintivos del género en cada una de las plataformas y emisoras analizadas y cómo la distribución y el consumo a la carta posibilitan el resurgir de la ficción sonora con producciones muy cuidadas en el diseño sonoro y orientadas a un público habituado al audiovisual y el cine, que ha evolucionado con respecto al tradicional radioteatro.

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Between the late 1980s and early 1990s, interest in the cyberpunk genre peaked in the Western world, perhaps most evidently when Terminator 2: Judgment Day became the highest-grossing film of 1991. It has been argued that the translation of Katsuhiro Ōtomo’s manga Akira into several European languages at just that time (into English beginning in 1988, into French, Italian, and Spanish beginning in 1990, and into German beginning in 1991) was no coincidence. In hindsight, cyberpunk tropes are easily identified in Akira to the extent that it is nowadays widely regarded as a classic cyberpunk comic. But has this always been the case? When Akira was first published in America and Europe, did readers see it as part of a wave of cyberpunk fiction? Did they draw the connections to previous works of the cyberpunk genre across different media that today seem obvious? In this paper, magazine reviews of Akira in English and German from the time when it first came out in these languages will be analysed in order to gauge the past readers’ genre awareness. The attribution of the cyberpunk label to Akira competed with others such as the post-apocalyptic, or science fiction in general. Alternatively, Akira was sometimes regarded as an exceptional, novel work that transcended genre boundaries. In contrast, reviewers of the Akira anime adaptation, which was released at roughly the same time as the manga in the West (1989 in Germany and the United States), more readily drew comparisons to other cyberpunk films such as Blade Runner.

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The coronavirus pandemic has stimulated a number of texts, which are aimed at helping children to cope with situations alien to them. For example, the picture book Staying Home by Sally Nichols and Vivienne Schwarz (2020) deals with the conditions of lockdown and family isolation, whilst Piperpotamus by Annis Watts endeavours to explain COVID-19. This pandemic is not the only such event in history. The Black Death swept across Europe (1347–51) followed by the Spanish flu pandemic (1918–20). Both of these have stimulated historical fiction for older children and Young Adults and have done so by employing differing literary approaches. For instance, Cat Winters’ In the Shadow of Blackbirds (2013) incorporates a ghost story set against the contexts of séances and spirit photographers as the bereaved hope to gain comfort, whilst Charles Todd’s An Unmarked Grave (2012) is a murder mystery. Dystopian science fiction has also been employed to examine the equivalent circumstances of such pandemics. The plague in Gone (2008–14) by Michael Grant follows a nuclear disaster, which has produced a world where only those under fifteen have survived beneath a dome created by a young autistic child at the point of the explosion. Unforeseen forces have erupted resulting in mutation where individuals have supernatural powers taking them into a posthuman state. Their world is later blighted by plague and the children have to deal with remaking their lives and their society without the help of adults. This article will consider the various ways that such texts have approached these world-changing disasters and the common themes, which emerge to give our current generation of children ways of thinking about their present and their future.

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This paper explores the life of Joseph Grigulevich (1913–1988), a famous early Soviet illegal intelligence operative, who conducted various “special tasks” on behalf of Stalin’s foreign espionage network. These included the murder of dissident Spanish communist Andreas Nin (1938), a participation in the assassination of Leon Trotsky (1940), posing as a Costa Rican ambassador (1949–1952), and an abortive project to assassinate Joseph Bros Tito (1952). In contrast to conventional espionage studies that are usually informed by diplomatic, political, and military history approaches, I employ a cultural history angle. First, the paper examines the formation of Grigulevich’s communist and espionage identity against his background as a cosmopolitan Jewish “other” from the interwar Polish-Lithuanian realm. Second, it explores his role in the production and invention of intelligence knowledge, which he later used to jump start his second career as a prominent Soviet humanities scholar and a bestselling writer of revolutionary non-fiction.

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During the Spanish Civil War and the Francoist dictatorship that followed, women were shielded from the public eye. Their predetermined social role was that of submissive and devoted wives to their husbands as well as homemakers and childcare providers. There are few artistic works that suggest otherwise. However, during the Civil War and after, many women were in fact politically active. They occupied important positions in the resistance and were present along with the men in the trenches. Spanish graphic novels have managed to create many works of fiction based on the Civil War, mainly drawing on (auto)biographical accounts. There are so many significant works dealing with the war and Francoist repression that they represent a genre of their own. Nevertheless, the authors of these works, as well as their main protagonists, are usually men. This is true despite the fact that after the war, during the four decades of the Franco dictatorship, many women suffered from political persecution. The aim of this article is to analyze the role of women outside the domestic space as it appears in selected graphic narratives set in the period of Franco’s regime. Given the extent of the regime’s repression, these works are frequently set in the prisons around Spain where female prisoners were incarcerated and tortured. The narratives we analyze are based on real testimonies from real victims. Their individual experiences are joined together in a collective whose voice has long been silenced until recently.

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<p><strong>Resumo: </strong>Neste estudo, propõe-se uma consideração sobre a reformulação de saberes tradicionais em termos não metafísicos na obra do escritor argentino Alberto Laiseca, <em>Los sorias </em>(1998), construída a partir da convergência dos temas das religiões, da magia e da astrologia, lado a lado com outros saberes em face de (des)hierarquização.</p> <p><strong>Palavras chave: </strong>Literatura hispano-americana; literatura argenti­na; romance contemporâneo; ficção científica.</p> <p><strong> </strong></p> <p><strong>Abstract: </strong>In this study, we propose a consideration on the reformulation of traditional knowledge in no metaphysical terms in the work of Argentine writer Alberto Laiseca, <em>Los sorias </em>(1998), constructed from the convergence of the themes of religion, magic and astrology alongside with other knowledge in the face of de-hierarchization.</p> <p><strong>Keywords: </strong>Argentine literature; contemporary romance, science fiction, Spanish American literature.</p>

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The queer aspect of national literary histories has been traditionally obscured, and although it is gradually being recuperated, the impact of translation has been so far overlooked. Using the example of modernist fiction from England translated into Spanish and published in Argentina, I argue that translation smuggles, purposely misappropriates and resignifies alternative sexual desires and gender identities, opening spaces for local literatures to further explore these possibilities. Translation episodes from the 1940s and 1950s in Argentina are key to reconstructing the obscured history of literary queerness and I focus on one example that is perhaps the earliest, a translation of Denton Welch’s “When I Was Thirteen” by Jose Bianco of Sur magazine which appeared as “Cuando tenía trece años,” published in September 1944. Rather than isolated instances, such translations served to slowly transform the sentimental landscape of Argentine literature in a context where the popular imagination was prescriptively heteronormative. This article exhumes this little-known episode as one of the first cornerstones in a queer chapter of literary history in translation. Strictly related to depictions of homosexual desires, I propose “queer decorum” as an approach that affects translation strategies and decisions, subsequently affecting the translated text as a result and somehow making its publication possible.

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This paper studies the translations published between 2005 and 2012 by 25 publishing houses incorporated into the Galician publishing field since 2003 regarding their levels of publication, issue date, literary genre and source language. At the same time, it reflects upon the relationship between these publications and the cultural normalización discourse. After presenting and discussing relevant data from the Projeto Livro Galego database (Samartim & Cernadas 2020), it is shown that Spanish and English are the main source languages for these works, while the most translated genre is children and young adults literature, followed by prose fiction. This is, however, mostly due to a minority of publishing houses that concentrate many of the publications, while the remaining businesses show more varied translation plans. Also, data shows that the translation sub-field in the selected period is dependent on the field of power. Finally, the idea of normalización is presented as one of the main functions of Galician literary translation. This analysis aims at contributing empirical information, and some critical remarks, to the understanding of the cultural model of a European minoritized language in one of its fundamental expressions. Recibido: 18 abril 2022Aceptado: 12 mayo 2022

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Knightly Code of Conduct in Alonso the Wise’s Siete Partidas: Text and Context Alfonso X of Castile, also known as Alfonso the Wise was one of the most eminent Medieval rulers of the Kingdom of Castile and León. This paper presents selected facts from his life, especially highlighting his achievements as a patron of science and literature, as well as propagator of the vernacular language, i.e. Castilian. A special focus herein will be on the code Siete Partidas. Written under Alfonso’s auspices, this text describes knightly customs and combines the features of fiction and legal documents. The paper consists of two parts: a commentary and a translation of Title XXI of Partida II. The commentary presents the essential information on Alfonso X, including his legislative activities connected to Siete Partidas, and also the significance of the code for Spanish legislation, the contents of the seven books (partidas), as well as its authorship. In order to provide some background of the knightly culture on the Iberian Peninsula in the 13th century, knighthood rights are also presented on the basis of other contemporary texts on related subjects, such as Ramon Llull’s The Book of the Order of Chivalry or the French anonymous treatise L’ordene de chevalerie. The translation presented in the second part of the article is the first and the only Polish version of a fragment of Siete Partidas dealing with duties, privileges and also customs. Prepared on the basis of the critical edition by Jerry R. Craddock and Jesús Rodríguez Velasco, the translation attempts to grasp the nature of the original language and content, providing notes, which facilitate comprehension of particularly challenging problems.

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Abstract In this study, I frame the concept of techno-poetics by analyzing Alex Epstein’s micro-stories and by examining the development of the micro-fiction genre throughout the world. Epstein is a contemporary Israeli author whose universal micro-stories have been translated into several languages (English, Spanish, French, and Russian). Epstein uses a dual language: given his career as a computer programmer in a high-tech company, the language of his thoughts is conveyed through the logic of technology, whereas, as an artist, he is loyal to the language of poetics. Is Epstein a “programmer” of micro-stories? Within the framework of this study, I analyze the dynamic relationship between the polar opposites of technology and poetics, as it is revealed in Epstein’s micro-stories, taking into account the genre’s characteristics as well as the unique features with which Epstein—as a contemporary author—imbues his works. More specifically, I analyze six categories that describe the relationship between digital technology and the world of art, a relationship that informs Epstein's micro-stories. Epstein's work was not created in a void; nevertheless, his micro-stories differ not only from the works of previous authors of the genre, but also from those of his contemporaries, whose work, likewise, deals with the tension between technology and poetics. A major difference is the methods of publication that Epstein uses, which form part of the techno-poetical process. In this sense, the themes, the conception of art, and the method of publication are all indications of a unique artistic phenomenon.

Abstract:

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Abstract:

Este artículo analiza la representación sobre la crisis del COVID-19 que han realizado las series de ficción televisiva española, producidas y emitidas durante la crisis: Jo tambe em quedo a casa (TV3, 2020); Diarios de la cuarentena (TVE, 2020); En casa (HBO, 2020); Relatos con-fin-a-2 (Amazon Prime Video, 2020) y Cuéntame (TVE, 2021). Se propone una metodología cualitativa, el contexto de producción en la coyuntura de la pandemia y se efectúa el análisis textual (Casetti y DiChio, 1999) de las cinco producciones. Se concluye que la industria televisiva española mostró determinación, creatividad y adaptación frente al contexto de crisis, mientras que la ficción permite la catarsis y fabrica memoria colectiva aunque con escaso compromiso social.

Abstract:

Este artículo analiza los imaginarios de la crisis representados en la cultura popular española mediante el estudio cualitativo de base semionarrativa de las series, los realities y los medios del corazón más consumidos entre 2008 y 2015. Estos textos muestran distintas formas de enfrentarse a la adversidad en relación al género de los personajes, y promueven valores neoliberales como el emprendimiento, la austeridad, la resiliencia, junto con apelaciones a la solidaridad entre ciudadanos.

Abstract:

In modern humanities the range of issues, related to manifestations of intertextuality in texts of different language systems, their interpretation by the recipient, as well as the use of intertexts by authors of verbal and non-verbal texts, is still of great interest to researchers. Moreover, the intertext plays a significant role in modern text-creating. This makes important studying the structural characteristics of intertextual units with the aim of developing the technic of creation one’s own intertexts as well as translating intertexts of others. So, the object of the present research are the intertextual units in the postmodernist writings, the subject are their linguistic characteristics. As the material the author has chosen the fiction by Julio Cort&#225;zar, which is particularly reach in intertexts. In order to delineate the existing definitions of intertextuality according to the “broad” and “restricted” approaches and precise our own vision of this phenomenon the author applied the methods of the cognitive sciences and semiotics. The general linguistic methods, such as description and observation, have been used in the analysis of the structure of the chosen intertextual units. The scientific originality of the research consists in the description of the linguistic particularities of different types of quotes in Cort&#225;zar’s fiction. During the analysis, quotations based on literal reproduction of the original format of the intertextually borrowed saying and citations that change it have been defined. The author pays particular attention to the analysis of the attribution, considered the key structural component of an intertextual unit. The results of the research may form the basis of the further researches of the linguistics of intertext. It may also be of practical interest to the authors using intertextual units in their own texts, as well as to translators of Cort&#225;zar’s and other postmodernist writers’ fiction.

Abstract:

The classical Greeks believed that Eros was about erotic love. When we forsake the object of our love, it becomes relegated to the dustbin of memories, which makes it difficult to recover or retrieve. This article discusses how romantic love has been celebrated in works of magical realism in Asia that have evolved to include a range of emotions, political resistance (and questioning state authority and authoritarian personalities), fantasy, delusion, illusion, and fiction. One of the most pronouncedly celebrated works on magical realism was Gabriel GarcaMárquez’sLove in the Time of Cholera(1985) (1), which was about patience, perseverance, and emotional endurance. It is a frequent reminder of the need to preserve the memory of the object of one’s love, as it appears to be the only way to ensure that the dead never die. Three years later, Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses(1988) (2) analyzed censorship and religious violence in India (and Pakistan), but incurred the wrath of religious fundamentalists in Iran. Gabriel Garca Márquez’s work was translated from Spanish to English and another 56languages; it became so influential that many scholars used to believe that magical realism originated from LatinAmerica and from the work of Gabriel Garca Márquez. Others believed that it was from several other Latin Americanscholars, including George Borges. Before Márquez and Borges, western European scholars said that magicalrealism originated in Germany between 1919 and 1933, i.e., the Neue Sachlichkeit (or Post-Expressionist) inter-war years, in the work of art critic and historian Franz Roh. Neue Sachlichkeit represented a new but unsettling depiction of a society devastated by war. But this claim is not entirely accurate, as there are other, much earlier claims. Nevertheless, for purposes of this article, magical realism began in Latin America and Mexico, most notably with the work of Gabriel Garca Márquez, who would eventually win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. This articleis particularly partial to the influences of Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera(1985) (1), which pedestalizes the memory of being devoted to the object of first love and the fragility of life. In one sense, the confusion, massacres, and plagues of Márquez’s narrative reveal the decadent human desire to plot, plan, and massacre fellow human beings, as we are naturally driven by a God-given desire to destroy the things that we create. Exactly as Goddoes to man, the article asks us to think about the literature of Asian magical realism in general and of Southeast Asian magical realism in particular. What patterns can be gleaned from a brief survey of how magical realism works in Southeast Asia, and what can those patterns tell us about our strengths and desires within streams of consciousness?

Abstract:

The number of non-English speaking and bilingual immigrants continues to grow in the U.S. Previous research suggests that about one third of White Americans feel threatened upon hearing a language other than English. The current research examines how exposure to a foreign language affects White Americans’ perceptions of immigrants and group-based threats. In Study 1, White Americans were randomly assigned to read one of four fictional transcripts of a conversation of an immigrant family at a restaurant, where the type of language being spoken was manipulated to be either Korean, Spanish, German, or English. In Study 2, White Americans read the same fictional transcript—minus the Spanish; however, there was an addition of two subtitles conditions in which the subtitles were provided next to the Korean and German texts. The two studies suggest that exposure to a foreign language—regardless of whether they are consistent with Anglocentric constructions of American identity—lead White Americans to form less positive impressions of the immigrant targets and their conversation, experience an uptick in group-based threats, and display greater anti-immigrant attitudes. Moreover, there is evidence that the (in)ability to understand the conversation (i.e., epistemic threat) influences participants’ perceptions of immigrants and group-based threats.

Abstract:

Linguistic techniques used for formulating and for proving propositions in arts and in sciences do not solely depend on grammatical and lexical structures of national languages, they also belong to certain cultural traditions. Interpersonal relationships also influence the form and the content of scientific texts, they are governed by ethical principles of scholarly communication. The notion of ‘epistemic warrant of judgments’ used metaphorically gives a culture-dependent way for looking at the real-time processes of conjectures and refutations, where ‘epistemic default’ is not excluded. The logical ‘possibility’ and ‘probability’ themselves may be considered as culture-dependent, so that the possible-world pragmatics acquires a civilisational aspect. Empirical facts concerning relative frequencies of the use of certain lexical items are discussed in this paper. Thus, possibility is much more frequently mentioned in both scientific and in fictional text corpora in Latin, in French, in Spanish, in Italian, in English, in German, and in Russian. The concept of ‘improbability’ is much less frequent than ‘probability’.

Abstract:

Rural depopulation has been a constant feature of contemporary Spanish history and has been amply studied from the perspective of geography. Recently, however, there has been considerable media attention given to the consequences of internal migration. Behind the alarming demographic statistics lies a nexus of processes which have been reflected in the cinema since its beginning. This paper explores these processes at work in the rural sending environment and receiving urban destination through an analysis of six representative Spanish films. The fictional representation through film of a complex reality provides insights into the internal and contextual keys to understanding the phenomenon of ‘empty Spain’ or ‘hollowed-out Spain’. The films illustrate the persistence of two conflicting ideas (the rural and urban), divergence about what constitutes development and the quality of life, and the processes leading to ‘demotanasia’.

Abstract:

The rediscovery of Greek novels in Europe, in particular Heliodorus’ Aethiopica, together with its literary emulations by Lope de Vega or Miguel de Cervantes, had a deep impact in the renewal of motifs, fictional devices and character descriptions, for example the explicit or implicit presence of foreign languages or the predominance of female characters. The analysis seeks to quantitatively identify the multilingual character and the position of the female protagonists in novels using network analysis. We have approached both aspects from a twofold methodological perspective – first, using taxonomies that help to describe more precisely the concept of multilingualism for quantitative studies; second, making use of measures of centrality to locate the protagonist. Taking into consideration various network metrics together with the language attribution, we can compare the correlation between character importance and languages. The results validate the hypothesis that the novels show a strong thematization of foreign languages, but the female heroines fall behind their male counterparts in protagonism.