Utah Foreign Language Review

Editor’s Note

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The twenty-first edition of the Utah Foreign Language Review contains the proceedings of the Confutati conference hosted by the Department of Languages and Literature at the Univeristy of Utah in February 2014. The conference theme was “Passages, Protests, and Paradigm Shifts,” and particpants presented research on a variety of cultural productions, including print, film, web series, and music—the mediums themselves illustrating how literary studies have changed and expanded over the years. Following the conference theme, the range of papers included analyisis of genre-bending works, highlights of historical changes in mindesets, examinations of protests and protest culture, and divergent explorations of canonical texts and authors. The selection of conference papers presented here represents scholarship on social, political, and cultural changes occurring around the globe—in literature and in life.

This issue of UFLR represents another change in the field, as this is the first time in the journal’s twenty-year history that UFLR is presented strictly in electronic format. The descion was made to embrace the age of digital scholarship and cease to distribute print compies to authors, libraries, and subscribers—just as scholars and societies have embraced so many positive changes. You, reader, are still welome to print off the articles if you find the reading experience to be most pleasurable with the tactile sensation of paper on your fingertips. Thank you for taking the time to read this edition of UFLR; we hope you enjoy the essays and creative prose.

Birth of the Militant Queer Identity: Analyzing “The Woman-Identified Woman” and “Queers Read This”

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Manifesto texts have been credited by scholars for aiding social movement groups in articulating various issues, creating cohesion among membership, and mapping out a path towards a successful future. Yet while much attention has been given to the movements that these texts represent, not as much study has been devoted towards examining manifesto texts themselves, particularly ones representing queer communities in the United States. Subsequently, there’s been little research as to whether queer social movement manifestos exhibit similar patterns of style or rhetorical invention, regardless of context. To address this scholarly gap, this essay exams two modern queer manifestos: The Lavender Menace’s 1970 “Woman-Identified Woman” and Queer Nation’s 1990 “Queers Read This.” The goal of exploring reoccurring patterns within these manifestos is not for mere classification, but rather twofold: first, to reveal similar cultural cycles of oppression and resistance in the relationship between dominant and marginalized communities, particularly as it relates to sexuality; and second, to recover rhetorically rich artifacts that can contribute to building a queer collective memory.

Gabriela Mistral and the Etymology of Ecological Thinking

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This project frames itself around the poetry and prose of Chilean poet and essayist Gabriela Mistral, and considers their function as a foundation for contemporary feminist ecological discourse. To do so, the study takes up Greta Gaard’s call to revive ecofeminism in her 2011 article “Ecofeminism Revisited,” and explores to what extent ecofeminism, a theoretical school of thought that emerged and was cast aside as essentialist during the last few decades of the twentieth century, persists in the guise of less controversial monikers. One such moniker is Lorraine Code’s “feminist ecological thinking,” a term that appears in her 2006 book entitled Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location. Code is careful to avoid essentialist language when she describes feminist ecological thinking as an “imaginary” that infuses, shapes and circulates “throughout the social-material-intellectual-affective atmosphere(s) like the air we breathe.” Yet, to what extent does this name change constitute a true paradigm shift, and what carries through from ecofeminism to feminist ecological thinking? To approach the question, this project first addresses how Mistral’s 1931 essay, “Conversando sobre la tierra” (‘Talking About the Land’), anticipates early ecofeminist rhetoric, and then illustrates how etymological considerations of “nostalgia,” “lunatic” and “soul” in her later poems echo Code’s feminist ecological imaginary. This analytical trajectory speaks to Gaard’s call for the revision and revival of ecofeminism, and it is through the oeuvre of Mistral that ecofeminism and feminist ecological thinking find common ground.

Grotesque Discoveries and Divisions in W.S. Merwin’s “The Folding Cliffs”

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The epic narrative poem “The Folding Cliffs” by W.S. Merwin reflects the idea of truth as a grotesque and divisive concept. Because “The Folding Cliffs” is based on historical accounts and oral tradition, it could be posited that it is a nonfiction work or at the very least “based on a true story”. This paper examines the concepts of truth and the grotesque and the innate relationship between the two. Establishing a definition of the grotesque, based on the ideas of Wolfgang Kayser, I identify four principles of the grotesque and use them as a lens for reading Merwin’s work. The concept that truth is distorted has become especially pertinent in light of the emergence of creative-nonfiction and the debate over what constitutes truth. Using Merwin’s piece as a vessel, I argue that truth is a fallacious concept, and that all so-called truths are fleeting and influenced by experiences and imagination.

From Feet to Wings: The Importance of Being Bare-Footed in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon

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In her novel Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison uses the motif of shoes repetitively. Based on this, I argue in my article entitled “From Feet to Wings: The Importance of Being Bare-Footed in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon” that in her use of the shoe motif, Morrison departs from many Western folktales where more often than not shoes entail power and transformation.

Morrison’s subversion of the shoe metaphor underlines the magical and transformative power her characters become endowed with once they step out of their shoes. This becomes significant since when feet become liberated from shoes, characters like Pilate and Milkman – who I focus on – learn how to sing and learn how to redraw the physical map of their ancestors. As a result, their bare feet transform into wings and they fly.

The theoretical frameworks I draw upon in my article are Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope, Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject and Freud’s analysis of the sexual significance of shoes and flight. These theoretical frameworks combined highlight the inseparable connection between shoes, maps, and flight. Space, time, and the self converge with the result of offering a new perspective. Shoes, I maintain, represent space and largely inform gender and identity throughout the novel.

Critics writing on Morrison’s novel focus separately on the metaphor of shoes, flight, and singing. What my article offers is a comprehensive view that connects these motifs together in conjunction to maps. My paper also traces the transformation from feet to wings and examines it against the background of the western tradition. Thus, my article brings a new reading to Morrison’s Song of Solomon in particular and to African American literature in general that synthesizes several motifs previously considered separately, and adds a new dimension to the gendering of space.

Sacrilege or Revelation? Pussy Riot in Russian Orthodox Protest Culture

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The paper discusses problems in the translation of Pussy Riot across ideological paradigms, as exemplified with the phenomenon of celebratory reenactments and protests in support of Pussy Riot in two case studies in Chicago. The paper brings to the table questions about context-specific nature of political art and activism and offers a comparative application of religious and protest aesthetics, through the discussion of anarchism within Russian Orthodoxy and the transfiguration of “sacrilege” into “revelation” in the performance of Pussy Riot. This paper is situated in conversation with issues in cultural, visual and contextual translation, as well as post-colonial discourse and the politics of representation.

El espectáculo de la violencia como denuncia social en La virgen de los sicarios, de Fernando Vallejo

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En este ensayo analizo el uso que Fernando Vallejo hace del espectáculo literario para evidenciar el fenómeno de la violencia a través de su novela La Virgen de los Sicarios (1998). Desde mi punto de vista, este texto funciona como una forma de protesta social a través de la cual el autor denuncia el grave problema de la violencia a través de una de sus representaciones más espectaculares de Colombia: los sicarios. Por lo tanto, sostengo que la estética de la violencia vallejiana es producto no solamente de un sistema económico y político corrupto, sino también el resultado de la relación entre los espectadores de la violencia y la violencia representada a través del espectáculo. Además, el narrador elige mostrar dicho espectáculo violento por medio de un punto de vista del mundo más que despiadado, descarado. En este análisis propongo que Fernando Vallejo decide evidenciar la cruda realidad de su país a través de un narrador apático ante la miseria y el dolor

humanos; un alter ego que denuncia a las altas esferas del poder, así como también a una sociedad que se ha vuelto indiferente al sufrimiento, la pobreza, el dolor humano y la muerte. En La virgen de los sicarios, Fernando Vallejo utiliza el espectáculo como un “aparador mediático” que muestra una realidad violenta sin ningún pudor; para llevar a cabo este análisis, utilizaré como apoyo teórico las ideas de La sociedad del espectáculo de Guy Debord (1967), así como el texto de Jacques Ranciѐre: El espectador emancipado 2008).