Spanish-Language Contributions

The surge of international electronic journals remains noteworthy and Espéculo: Revista de Estudios Literarios continues to lead the field in offering a wide range of topics ranging from American Transcendentalism to postmodern popular culture. Focusing on literary scholarship of merit, we note Emilio José Álvarez Castaño's "Emily Dickinson o la búsqueda de la transcendencia" (Espéculo 42: n.p.). Álvarez Castaño challenges the interpretations of Dickinson's poetry that rely on biographical and autobiographical sources; at the same time, he dismisses Freudian and other psychoanalytical explications of Dickinson's supposed insular personality and repressed spinsterhood. Instead, Álvarez Castaño argues that an examination of Dickinson's symbolic mysticism and epigrammatic religious conundrums sheds more light on her unique mind and character. Álvarez Castaño's title and thesis—"Emily Dickinson's Search for Transcendence"—place her at the crux of 19th-century American Transcendentalism. Álvarez Castaño proposes that Dickinson in essence was a mystic and he compares her to St. John of the Cross, and explicates several of Dickinson's poems, especially those that deal with metaphysical themes, to underscore how she created an intentional ambiguity that makes her work "an interior lyrical world." Álvarez Castaño concludes that Dickinson's "religious ideas were not shared by her community. . . . Throughout her work, and supposedly her life, she sought to transcend the life she led and did not like by reaching for a higher spiritual plane." The belle of Amherst's life and poetry were a mystery; she suffered the first and made art of the second.

Turning to the darker side of 19th-century American literature, in "Edgar Allan Poe y su presencia en Fernando Pessoa" (Espéculo 42: n.p.) Luis Juan Solís Carrillo offers an excellent study in intertexuality in pairing Poe and the renowned Portuguese poet and prose writer. Solís Carrillo documents Pessoa's lifelong interest in Poe: he underscores Poe's "presence" as both influence and inspiration to Pessoa's creative imagination and aesthetic principles. Pessoa placed the American writer in the pantheon of English poetry: William Shakespeare, George Gordon Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and Poe. Fluent in English, Pessoa translated "Annabel Lee" and "Ulalume" and championed Poe in European literary circles. Pessoa's greatest success was a celebrated translation of "The Raven." He imitated Poe in several novels: "The Pessoan incursions into the world of the detective novel finds its basis in his admiration for Edgar Allan Poe. . . . For him, Poe was the epitome of admired beauty." Pessoa tried his hand at tales of ratiocination, with mixed results, in The Anarchist Banker and Other Tales of Ratiocination and A Very Original Dinner. On the same subject but less interesting, Ana Rull Suárez offers "Posibilidades de enfoque de relato de E. A. Poe 'The Tell-Tale Heart' " (Espéculo 42: n.p.). The curiosity of the piece is the wonder of how Rull Suárez will invigorate this literary chestnut. She partly succeeds. Rull Suárez advances three possibilities: historical criticism, psychological criticism, and formalist criticism. In applying historical criticism, she outlines the sociopolitical disruptions of 19th-century America that affected Poe's sensibilities and shaped his negative view of humanity: "As a representative of American literature, Poe offers a pessimistic version in his manner of writing, replete with descriptions of violent acts and demonstrating the dark side of society, humanity, and, above all, the mind of a human being." The second category—"the dark side of the human mind"—leads to the psychoanalytical approach, both Freudian and Jungian. This is well-trodden ground and it is a field day in the reading of Poe; the reader can find psychosis, neurosis, neurasthenia, neuropathy—and every form of mental disequilibrium. The third possibility takes off from Poe's "The Philosophy of Composition," where he promulgated that "unity of effect or impression is a point of the greatest importance." Suárez's exercise in rhetorical criticism and the analysis of the metaphors, paradoxes, strategies, and narrative structures of Poe's work saves the essay from insignificance.

The "presence" of Poe stretches to postmodernism and is evident in...