POEMAS, destino casual o causal (Spanish Edition)

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Fortunately, there are a number of mitigating factors. The first is that while an adequate treatment of each of the poets I have chosen would require three separate theses, I in no way intend to offer an exhaustive, global interpretation of any of them. My interest lies in one highly specific question. Of the three, Borges is, obviously, the most studied a recent search of Dissertation Abstracts International yielded nearly hits, only a handful of which, however, deal explicitly with his poetry.

Perhaps more importantly, these three poets have never been studied in conjunction. In a certain respect, this is irreproachable. He then proceeds to adduce a list of descriptors. Elsewhere, similar sorts of descriptions abound: Despite differences of angle and emphasis, these sentiments are bound together by a vague but unavoidable sense that, under conditions of disenchantment, the world has grown pale, fragile, dull, flat, and unbearably light. I hasten to underscore the subjunctive mood of the last sentence, since not everyone responds in the same way.

Some people probably do not think about these sorts of things at all Thus, in the first part of this chapter, I attempt a detailed—though, of course, necessarily selective—account of the concept of disenchantment in Western culture. Because the subject of this dissertation is the relationship between disenchantment and poetry, I shall be especially concerned with the effects of disenchantment on language—and this in two respects.

First, I examine the impact of the Scientific Revolution not only on our understanding of the natural world, but also of the linguistic tools we use to navigate it. The Reformation interests me not only because it is there that the issue of sacramentality, specifically as it impacts upon modern poetry, takes center stage, but also because the Protestant attack on the doctrine of transubstantiation was symptomatic of a broader assault on the sacramental understanding of the universe characteristic of medieval Catholicism.

Framing the Eucharistic controversy occasioned by the Reformation in linguistic terms will, I hope, put us in a better position to grasp the implications of sacramentality for the modern poetic enterprise. In the second section of the chapter, I examine the question of disenchantment in Latin America. Here the material is significantly less rich and variegated, no doubt in part because Latin America has not experienced modernity in the same way that Europe did.

The sources of this discontent are, with various differences of emphasis and inflection, largely the ones mentioned earlier: The goal of the final portion of this chapter is to bring that peculiarity into focus and thereby to set the stage for the rest of the thesis.

Revolutions and Reformations To tell the story of the disenchantment of the West would be to tell a story coextensive in nearly every detail with the history of the West itself, and to pick up that story any point along the way would be to risk not only arbitrariness but also distortion. The challenge is both to keep arbitrariness to a minimum and, where possible, to justify it. However one chooses to tell the story of disenchantment, the two historical phenomena singled out for special treatment in this section the Scientific Revolution and the Protestant Reformation must figure centrally.

But even if the Scientific Revolution and the Protestant Reformation are not the only noteworthy sources of Western disenchantment and, obviously, they are not , they do provide a useful frame for understanding the various poetic responses to disenchantment that I intend to consider in subsequent chapters.

The Scientific Revolution The Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries represents one of the few truly epochal shifts in Western civilization. The earth dutifully abandoned its post at the center the solar system and began to orbit the sun though not, as Aristotle might have liked, in a perfect circle , while the solar system itself become one among others. Whatever its eventual social, cultural, and linguistic implications, the emergence of a specifically modern, scientific vision of the world was conditioned by a more fundamental philosophical shift, a change in our basic understanding of the nature of reality.

According to a broadly ancient view, the universe embodies, antecedent to all human reflection, a certain orderliness, a certain teleological orientation that naturally directs things toward a predetermined end. They are not the sort of thing you can touch, smell, taste, see, or hear. But everything you can touch, smell, taste, see, or hear exists only insofar as it participates in those Ideas.

The fact that the universe already contains within itself a meaningful, intelligible order suggests, moreover, that to be rational or just or good or whatever is simply a matter of getting oneself into the appropriate relationship with that order, of catching a vision of the meaning already inherent in the world. Indeed, for Plato, to know eidenai is simply to commune with or participate in the forms eidos. To reject the notion of the cosmos as an ordered, meaningful whole to reject, that is, the very idea of a kosmos is simply to fail to see it as a possible source of meaning or significance.

But if meaning no longer inheres in reality itself, then where exactly does it inhere? In a letter to Guillaume Gibieuf, Descartes provided a clue: And while this orientation and its consequences are perhaps epitomized in the disembodied solipsism of the Cartesian ego, the idea is hardly indigenous to Descartes.

Whatever its ultimate source, the inward turn entailed a fundamental reinterpretation of the relationship between human beings and the cosmos. First, since the cosmos was no longer seen as bearing within itself a meaningful order since, that is, the Ideas have been relocated within the human mind , the index of rationality could no longer be whether and to what extent one gets oneself into an appropriate relationship with that order. But this way of stating the matter, though I think accurate, is at least potentially misleading. Yet, as before, the full implications become most apparent in epistemology.

The simultaneous production of subjectivity and objectivity had profound implications, not least because it radically altered the structures of meaning, the way in which the human subject comported itself toward and derived significance from the world. Whereas previously meaning had been established in the very act of creation by a wise God, it now fell upon the human mind to interpret the cosmos, the structure of which had ceased to be given as intelligible. Instead of being an integral part of the cosmos, the person became its source of meaning.

Mental life separated from cosmic being: Instead, for Descartes and the rest of the modern philosophical tradition, rationality came to mean something like disinterested observation, the capacity to extract oneself from ordinary experience and see the world from the perspective of a neutral spectator. Modern Science and the Disenchantment of Language The disengaged posture toward nature characteristic of modern science also necessitated a fundamental revision of language, one that ultimately yielded the displacement of Latin as the language of knowledge and learning and its replacement by the various vernaculars of early modern Europe.

The seeds of the Latin-vernacular debate were sewn well before the outbreak of the Scientific Revolution. In De vulgari eloquentia ca. By the middle of the sixteenth-century, the intellectual firmament had changed. Both saw Latin as, in effect, a needless redundancy. Since all languages have basically the same semantic range, since all are capable of describing more or less the same array of observable phenomena, why torment yourself with deponent verbs and ablative absolutes when you already know French or Italian perfectly well?

The shift is unsurprising. Slightly later and with considerably more ambition , the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz imagined a universal conceptual language capable of transcending the vagaries and contingencies of the historical languages and expressing logical, mathematical, and metaphysical truths in a single, comprehensive symbolic system.

One, perhaps slightly tendentious way of summarizing that reconceptualization would be to say that modern science requires a distinctively non-poetic form of language, one that pairs sign and referent isomorphically and thereby suppresses the metaphorical and connotational excess characteristic of natural languages. And while Gadamer, like Heidegger, traces the phenomenon back to Platonism—specifically to the substitution, in the Cratylus, of the concept of eikon image for that of semeion sign —it clearly achieves something like an apotheosis in Bacon, Leibniz, and others.

For the desire to fix the semantic range of words, to excise from language all expressive, evocative, or poetic potential is simply the inescapable linguistic correlative of an ontology that sees the world as so much mathematizable matter—uniform and homogenous in space and time and with roughly the depth of a Cartesian coordinate plane. According to classical Trinitarian theology, Christ, the second person of the Trinity, is the Verbum Dei, the perfect and complete expression of the nature and substance of God the Father.

This has important linguistic implications. Even more importantly, human language must be in some sense creative, evocative, productive; it must have the capacity not only to describe reality but also to evoke it, to call it to presence. And it was precisely the rejection explicit or not of this logos theology that poised scientific thought to reject the understanding of language it presupposed. For if the world is merely a uniform, inert, mathematically quantifiable mechanism, and if language is merely a transparent, univocal tag we hang on that mechanism, it is difficult to see how either could be rendered significant, consequential, meaningful.

Nietzsche saw this point clearly. In The Gay Science he wrote: What would one have comprehended, understood, grasped of it? It is also a world that possesses nothing in the way of wholeness or integrity. On the one hand, to see the world as the embodiment of meaningful order would be to see it as akin to something like a novel or poem the analogy is hardly original.

We do not normally think it appropriate to rip the pages out of a novel and reassemble them on the basis of personal predilection, just as we do not normally think it appropriate to modify the order of the quartets in a sonnet—partly, no doubt, because the author disposed his text in just the way he did for a reason, and our task as readers is to grasp the intelligibility already inherent in it, not to create our own. In fact, the whole point is that it lack such a structure, since it is precisely the assumption that the various tiles were not intended to be arranged in any particular order that legitimates my arranging them in whatever order I please.

The basic idea should perhaps now be clear. If you imagine the world as bearing no meaning within itself, then you might also be led to imagine it as infinitely manipulable, infinitely rearrangeable. It requires no great reserve of mental energy to see how such an understanding of the world might yield what is perhaps the most distinctive byproduct of modern scientific rationality: For Weber, the Cartesian-Baconian desire to submit the world to human mastery and domination constitutes the fullest expression of modern disenchantment.

Monks, for example, engage in certain ascetic practices because they believe that the end to which those practices are oriented i. The end is therefore set in advance, and the means derive their rationality from the rationality already inherent in the end which they help to realize. To borrow an example from Umberto Eco: It has implications for all aspects of human life. The development of disenchantment was not, as the preceding account perhaps suggested, merely a move from religion to secularity but also an evolution within religion itself.

Not, of course, that this thesis has gone uncontested—both Scribner and Walsham think it somewhat overstates the case and therefore requires significant modification—but it has rarely been rejected outright. Since I have neither the desire nor the competence to advance an original thesis on the matter, I will accept it virtually without modification. The implications of this turn to biblical revelation as the locus of Christian faith were immense.

In the first place, the devaluation of nature as a source of knowledge about God went hand in hand with a radically new approach to biblical interpretation. For the first fifteen centuries of Christian history, the allegorical method was an important if not always the preeminent mode of scriptural exegesis. Rather than simply a strategy for wresting multiple meanings from the words of a text, or a license to play fast and loose with difficult or obscure passages, allegory in fact served as a reminder that meaning does not inhere exclusively in language and that the world to which language refers is itself symbolic of a higher, invisible reality Wirzba Allegorical interpretation thus not only assigned meaning to material objects, but also construed the whole of creation as revelatory of its Creator Harrison As Peter Harrison has argued, the Protestant rejection of allegoresis, besides fundamentally altering the way the Bible was read and interpreted, also had the effect of confining meaning to the domain of language and so of stripping the world of its sign-like status.

In this sense, moreover, the Reformation proved complicit in the rise of modern science. By releasing the natural world from the concerns of biblical interpretation, the Reformers simultaneously opened the door for the mathematical, casual, and mechanical categories imposed by Descartes, Galileo, and others. In the case of the Eucharist, as in that of allegorical exegesis, linguistic issues once again loomed large, since to call into question Catholic Eucharistic theology was to have called into question not only a particular piece of religious dogma but also a particular understanding of language.

We just decided to call the thing over there a clock, and that fact alone explains the graphic and acoustic signs associated with it. The relation between the two is purely stipulative, purely a matter of convention, and if we were in Madrid or Moscow or Tehran we would no doubt call it by a different name. Yet it is not the only way. But Locke and de Man move too quickly. If conjunctive semiotics seems quaint and old-fashioned to us urbane, demystified post-structuralists, it nevertheless exercised a profound influence on the history of linguistics. The occult tradition does not recognize this distinction: And just as casting stones entails some risk of bodily harm, so, too, does casting words.

The Eucharistic Controversy and Protestant Semiosis The distinction between disjunctive and conjunctive semiotics—or else something very much like it—lay at the heart of the Eucharistic controversy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Stated in terms unjustifiably vague and imprecise, traditional Catholic Eucharistic theology demanded a particular view of language, a particular understanding of how signification works. There is perhaps no better way to approach this issue than through the lens of the official Catholic response to the Protestant Reformation, the Council of Trent , the thirteenth session of which was dedicated entirely to the question of the Eucharist.

The first Canon of that session reads: Si quis negaverit, in sanctissimae Eucharistiae sacramento contineri vere, realiter et substantialiter corpus et sanguinem una cum anima et divinitate Domini nostri Iesu Christi ac proinde totum Christum, sed dixerit, tantummodo esse in eo ut in signo vel figura aut virtute, anathema sit.

Even more important is the understanding of signification that the doctrine of transsubstantiatio implies. And that, of course, is precisely what the Protestants denied. The major reformers espoused different and highly nuanced views of the Eucharistic sacrifice, and those views should not be conflated or confused. In the Institutes, he writes: The first is simply that the transubstantiation is unscriptural, that it results from a bizarre unwillingness to interpret that crucial line, Hoc enim est corpus meum, as the metaphor it so plainly is.

The other slope is steeper and more slippery—though, for just that reason, much more interesting. He accuses them, in other words, of a linguistic error, of failing to grasp the relationship between words and things. The key figure seems to be William of Ockham , who, near the beginning of the Summa totius logicae ca. For Ockham, by contrast, a sign is merely a symbol in the mathematical or logical sense , an indicator that points to reality but bears no natural relation to that reality.

The effects of this shift on poetic language were massive, albeit subtle. Even if the early Italian humanists Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch evinced little sympathy for nominalism or scholastic philosophy in general , its influence on the subsequent poetic tradition is undeniable. But expanded linguistic creativity came at a price. On the other hand, as language lost its perceived natural connection with reality, it increasingly came to be viewed as an impediment to, rather than a conduit of, scientific knowledge. Steiner is, admittedly, given to the occasional hyperbole, but his argument finds additional support in, of all places, the work of Jacques Derrida, who suggests that the intrinsic meaningfulness of the sign necessarily presupposes a theological understanding of signification: Before proceeding, I should note that the tale of disenchantment I wish to sketch in the rest of this section has two axes.

The first is simply a continuation of the narrative I have been pursuing so far: The second axis has to do with the evolution of concrete political and social arrangements in Latin America and, more specifically, in Argentina in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In both cases, my sketch is necessarily cursory and selective. Details shall be supplied in later chapters, especially as they relate to the work of the three poets to whom my dissertation is devoted.

Disenchantment and the New World The first point to notice is that Latin American was an engine of secularization long before it was a subject of secularization. That crisis was a long time coming. Harrison summarizes the issue like this: Prior to the age of discovery, a symbolic world existed in which a discrete set of natural objects had provided a ground for the composition of unlimited variations on eternal themes.

The meanings of things were always accessible through reference to a rich literary tradition. Now, however, what had once been a coherent universal language was inundated by an influx of new and potentially unintelligible symbols. In this expanded lexicon of natural objects there existed signs for which the familiar symbolic associations were totally lacking.

Among the disquietudes visited upon the Spanish in the New World was the recognition that the peoples of the Americas seemed conspicuously absent from biblical history. How los indios fit into that narrative was a matter of some confusion. Acosta advocated monogenism—a view which saw Adam and Eve as the sole progenitors of the human race—and speculated that the inhabitants of the New World must have arrived by land bridge Ford These interpretations—often forced, sometimes fantastical, rarely convincing—reveal not only the fecundity of the Christian tradition and the ingenuity of its custodians, but also the degree to which the new wines of scientific advancement and geographical expansion strained the old wineskins of traditional theology and cosmology.

That strain did not materialize in Latin America until much later, and even then its character was importantly different from similar manifestations in Europe. This owes largely to two general factors. The first is that Latin America arrived late to the party. When it did happen, Latin American secularization owed much to the influence of positivism of both Comtian and Spencerian flavors , which, as Leopoldo Zea has argued, was, with the exception of Scholasticism, the most decisive philosophical influence on the Latin American thought The story begins somewhat earlier, however.

By , most of Latin America had achieved independence. Yet independence was only half the battle, since emancipation from Spanish colonialism entailed the necessity of elaborating some conception of an autonomous—and, in all likelihood, secular—nation-state. Unsurprisingly, the demands of national allegiance clashed with the spiritual universalism of Roman Catholicism. The nation-building project thus went hand in hand with the process of secularization, and indeed it was not until Vatican II that Rome finally made its peace with the idea of nationalism.

Its logic was markedly dialectical. Or, perhaps even better, it is a distinction not only between two geographical locations, but also between two fundamentally different ways of looking at the world: In the following paragraph, he added: The difference, of course, is that for Hesiod the passage from the Golden Age to the Iron Age is a narrative of decadence and decline with the exception, ironically enough, of the Heroic Age , whereas for Alberdi history is mostly on the up.

But this was only half the story.

Problems emerged very early. Indeed, in the years following independence, liberal governments across Latin America remained fragile, understaffed, and broke. Most took out loans to maintain basic services, and many defaulted Chasteen By the s, disenchantment was complete as conservative caudillismo definitively supplanted the brief ascendency enjoyed by post-independence liberalism. Positivism, Modernism, and the Crisis of Secularization In Argentina, the conservative backlash against early liberalism was epitomized by the regime of Juan Manuel de Rosas, who ruled the country in some capacity or other from to Since that division has as its objective the exploitation of one country by the other, a profound enmity divides them and creates enemies in the heart of the bosom of the union or federation, which joins them together only to facilitate that exploitation] Obras VI: Unlike Unitarian liberalism, Argentine nationalism had no political party, no clear-cut agenda, no single spokesperson, and no catalogue of phrases and ideas.

And, in , the pendulum swung once again in favor of liberalism as Julio A. The population grew precipitously, from around two million in to nearly eight million in During the same period, nearly six million immigrants, mostly from Europe, flooded into Argentina, more than half of which, according to government estimates, settled in the country permanently.

At the level of ideology, positivism provided the social and political justification for the reforms instituted by the Generation of Mead. But Latin American positivists were hardly unreflective imitators of Comte and Spencer. Another difference, perhaps the decisive one, was that European positivism emerged in the wake of the triumph of natural science, while in Latin America positivism predated the ascendency of science.

European positivists, in this sense, had an easier go than their Latin American counterparts: Early in the second half of the nineteenth, however, Latin America had almost nothing in the way of a scientific culture Ardao What this meant, in part at least, was that Argentine positivism proved much more aggressively ideological than its European cousin.

In their view, history had in some sense come full circle: While Latin American positivism proved generally less dentulate than its European counterpart, it nevertheless generated a great deal of antipathy, especially among artists. The implication, of course, is that only by renouncing or at least being shielded from the world does artistic creativity remain possible.

Nadie tiene hoy su fe segura. The principal engine of that restoration was, of course, poetic language, and indeed the idea of poetry as a sacred vessel capable of imbuing the world with meaning and significance became one of the fundamental premises of modernista aesthetics and metaphysics. At the center of this vision is a distinctive conception of the universe, of language, and of the relationship between the two. The idea is that, since the poet is capable of discerning such relationships, poetry is accordingly capable of healing the sense of fragmentation, of alienation that seems to define modern life.

It is of course true that the exuberance of this analogical vision was tempered by the corrosive presence of irony, a concept that might be glossed simply as an awareness that the aspiration to unity, to harmony, to meaningfulness exists only as a fragile and temporary abeyance of the skepticism that plagues any attempt to think about meaning under conditions of modernity. The dialectic of analogy and irony in some sense defines the trajectory of modern poetry from Romanticism to the avant-garde. It is to that question that the rest of my thesis is devoted.

The chapter proceeds in four parts. Next, I describe the cultural context of Roman Catholicism in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Argentina. Here I shall be particularly concerned with how Latin American Catholics understood the relationship between the requirements of their faith and the pressures of modernity. Against this backdrop, I turn, finally, to a detailed account of his sacramental understanding of poetry.

The harsh rhetoric is not accidental. A public spat ensued, after which neither writer would again contribute to the publication Williamson In an interview many years later with Fernando Sorrentino, Borges himself offered the following explanation: Sorrentino 25 It seems, however, that Borges may have overstated the case.

At the end of the nineteenth-century, the modernistas set 15 In another interview with Osvaldo Ferrari in , Borges told an almost identical version of the same story, though in this case the magazine in question was Cuadernos del Plata also founded by Reyes rather than Libra The remainder of this chapter will be devoted to an explication of that poetics. Let us begin, however, by describing the cultural context of Roman Catholicism in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Argentina.

The focus, at least initially, was theological instruction rooted firmly in Thomistic philosophy and aimed at bringing the Catholic faith to bear on broader social and cultural questions. Camino, to mention only two , and saw the creation of Convivio, a forum for debate and discussion among Argentine Catholic artists designed to explore the artistic implications of the burgeoning Neo-Thomistic renaissance in the Southern Cone. Besides fostering conversation, Convivio also published an eponymous journal and hosted conferences, poetry readings, concerts, and artistic exhibitions Medrano In , Borges himself was invited to inaugurate an exhibit of works by the Uruguayan painter Pedro Figari.

There he suggested a modified version of fascism as an authentically Catholic alternative to the crude materialism of both communism and democratic liberalism. From Independence onward to say nothing of the colonial period , the Catholic Church enjoyed a more or less symbiotic relationship with the Argentine government.

That symbiosis ended, however, when the reforms proposed by the Generation of turned Argentina into a liberal, secular state. The implications were twofold. First, it referred simply to a preference for progress and innovation over tradition. In another sense, modernism referred to a movement within Catholicism that promoted historicist approaches to the Bible, secular political arrangements, and the synthesis of Catholic dogma with modern philosophical systems especially Kantianism and Bergsonism. The two senses are not easily dissociable, and taken together, they constitute two sides of the same progressive, liberalizing coin which late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Catholicism saw as a threat to its own ascendancy and in opposition to which it defined itself.

Both groups resented foreign influence cultural, political, economic, or otherwise , favored hierarchical and corporatist forms of social and political arrangement, and saw economic liberalism and participatory democracy as inimical to social cohesion and religious orthodoxy. Leopoldo Lugones was a notable exception. Although Lugones shared with Catholicism an antiliberal, antileftist bias, he nevertheless remained steadfastly anticlerical. For a Catholic Church already reeling from the encroachment of modernity, resistance to the eclipse of Catholicism in Spain could have only seemed a matter, quite literally, of life and death.

See King for a full account of the relations between the two during the war. Philosophical, Theological, and Literary To this point, I have presented the conflict between Catholicism and modernity in Latin American and beyond in primarily political terms: But to imagine that the quarrel was conducted exclusively or even primarily in such terms is to obscure two important facts. The first is that behind issues of political power and cultural authority, stood a host of philosophical, theological, and literary questions—questions about the fundamental nature of reality and the place of human beings in it.

Another figure that ought to be mentioned in this connection is the American-turned-British poet T. Critical commentary on Eliot by Latin American writers is also substantial Young That alternative, in turn, had two central components. The first was a rejection of any form of authoritarian politics that would, as it were, impose traditional Catholicism upon an increasingly secular polity.

The second component involved a reconceptualization not only of the appropriately Catholic response to modernity, but also of how to understand the fundamental problem of modernity itself. This reconceptualization attempted to move away from the view common to Meinvielle and Franceschi that secularization and modernity were problems for which politics usually some form of fascism, however modulated provided the most appropriate solution and toward the view that the problem was, at root, philosophical, theological, and literary.

My goal is and , respectively. Eliot read Maritain on Aquinas while in France in and began immediately to entertain the possibility of a neo-Thomistic revival. Later, in , Eliot published The Idea of a Christian Society where he argued that the collapse of Christianity would inevitably entail the disintegration of Western culture The first is to make explicit the various ways in which the concerns of the postwar avant-garde coincided with those of the burgeoning Catholic renaissance. The Realist Attitude and the Sacramental Alternative In a very precise sense, the nineteenth century was the century of Realism.

In science and philosophy, in literature and art, in history and sociology, the age counseled careful attention to the details of the physical world, close observation of empirical phenomena, and a studied indifference to that whatever stubbornly resisted submission to scientific explanation. This was not, however, a realism for its own sake, but rather one born of the suspicion that all those matters that had once exercised the human mind God, the soul, angels, heaven, hell, and the like were so many needless distractions, abstruse metaphysical trivialities whose primary function was to impede our slow, but certain, march toward full intellectual maturity.

The fall of the Roman Empire, so the story goes, inaugurated a tragically protracted period of cultural regression in which the achievements of pagan antiquity were systematically repressed by a corrupt, brutish, and unlettered ecclesiastical hierarchy. Then, at long last, the Enlightenment, with its gospel of Reason, Progress, and Tolerance, finally breached the citadel of religious fanaticism and ushered in an age of scientific discovery and social, political, and technological advancement. My version of this narrative is purposely triumphalistic.

Central to that expectation was the idea that secularization—i. Needless enslavement to religious superstition, so it seemed, constituted the final obstacle to social utopia. The twentieth century shattered that optimism. Even more unsettling was the suspicion that all those horrors were perhaps not simply accidental effects of an improper or incomplete application of Enlightenment ideology, but rather a manifestation of its secret essence. Such, at any rate, was the thesis advanced by Horkheimer and Adorno , who argued that the Enlightenment was destined to turn on itself and transmute a gospel of liberty and toleration into a tool of domination.

While the destructive potential of modern forms of rationalism and scientism was perhaps not fully apparent until after World War II, the First World War had made contributions of its own. That same year, Louis Mairet, a French soldier, wrote from the trenches: The very narrative that had promised to save humanity now threatened to destroy it. Another way of making this point would be to say that Surrealism signaled a renewed interest in transcendence among otherwise secular intellectuals.

Or, even better, the goal was not simply to privilege transcendence over immanence, but rather to explore the various ways in which immanence and transcendence interpenetrate, become entangled, modify one another dialectically. Barely a year after the publication of the First Surrealist Manifesto, the German historian and art critic Franz Roh published Nach Expressionismus: Between Catholicism and Modernity Breton, Roh, and Benjamin were convinced secularists, but their projects showed important affinities with the goals and aims of traditional religion.

He did so in two related ways. The second was to reconceptualize the relationship between art and sacramentality. Yet if this is true, it is also true that for the artist matter is never merely matter; instead, it is always matter-as-potentially-meaningful. Ink, parchment, slabs of marble, and splotches of paint are therefore never fully reducible to their material composition, since those materials are always potentially something other sculptures, paintings, poems, and so on.

The second is that art is always sacramental in character: Maritain would not visit Argentina until , but his influence was felt much earlier. By this time, Maritain had returned to France, but the polemic continued, mostly through letters, for several months. First, as noted earlier, the resurgence of Catholicism in France came as a direct response to the trauma of the First World War. That collapse, moreover, was a catalyst for a widespread resurgence of Hispanidad among Latin Americans.

The most visible effect of that resurgence was the great wave of conversions to Catholicism in the pre-war and inter-war periods Quijada. In , for instance, as the debate raged about whether Argentina should join the war on the side of the United States, President Yrigoyen made 12 October the date Columbus discovered the New World a national holiday.

See Orbe for a full account. This is true, as far as it goes: But the idea is also potentially misleading. Yet on this point one cannot be entirely certain. La democracia es su espejo. La industria absorbe todo su quehacer. This is partly true, but it does not really get to the heart of the matter. The genitive should be understood both objectively and subjectively: The linguistic pole involves the way in which poetic language, though itself material, serves as a mechanism for the transmission of transcendent reality.

The remainder of this chapter will be devoted to fleshing out these ideas. My account moves in two directions, both of which track the broad contours of disenchantment described in Chapter 1. The description is deliberate. My account of it, however, rests on a general distinction between two varieties. The decade-long transition was marked by an almost complete poetic silence and punctuated by two key events.

El recuerdo de los obispos de piedra resonaba en las naves profundas. Mi vida era como la muerte junto a la vida eterna de sus sepulturas. I shall return to the latter in a moment. As he puts it in the De trinitate: To see the world as marked by the vestigia of the triune God is thus already to see it as sacramental. Even more important than the Trinity in this respect is the Incarnation. Both belong to a long tradition of Eucharistic poetry: The differences, however, are at least as important as the similarities.

Estrellas 75 A number of contexts liturgical, semiotic, epistemological, and ontological overlap here. The speaker is therefore not simply reflecting upon the Eucharist, but also participating in it. Each of the three opening lines has a tripartite semiotic structure: First, since the Eucharist is, by its nature, a celebration that implicates the celebrant, it requires a model of signification that takes the interpreter into account.

At a more abstract level, it seems plausible to suggest that if signs in general are to be meaningful, they must, at a minimum, be meaningful to someone. Since the process of signification amounts to a series of oscillations internal to the sign in which signifier and signified displace one another in an endless motion of differing and deferral, Saussurian semiotics explains the differential production of signification within the sign but has almost nothing to say about how that signification relates to its interpreter Davies To get a sense of their implications, let us return to the text.

Disjunctive semiotics is basically structuralist orthodoxy: Its opposite, conjunctive semiotics, tends instead toward the identification of word and world, of sign and meaning, and so accords language a density or potency capable of interacting with and transforming reality Greene I return to this idea in Chapter 3. Official Catholic doctrine has it that, upon consecration, the Eucharistic elements the bread and the wine actually become the body and blood of Jesus Christ while nevertheless retaining bread-like and wine-like qualities.

This paradox is usually explained in terms of the Aristotelian distinction between substance and accident. Substances can exist independently of all other things of that kind i. Upon consecration, however, the substance of the bread is evacuated and replaced by another substance: Replacing one substance for another is called transubstantiation. The bread, to be sure, still looks like bread, still tastes like bread, but this is only because it retains accidental bread-like 40 Other examples of substances include tables, planets, atoms, and humans; other examples of accidents include being square, weighing ten pounds, being-taller-than, and so forth.

At the level of substance, what appears to be bread has in fact become the body of Christ. The strangeness of this account hardly needs to be pointed out. It attempts to explain an already peculiar piece of religious doctrine in terms of a metaphysical scheme that most of us are likely to find bizarre, if not unintelligible. As the poet observes the host, he asserts, against all empirical evidence, that what appears to be bread is actually something else entirely.

In one sense, of course, this is exactly what we should expect: The Eucharist, then, appears as something like the limit of signification; it is where language performs most perfectly its function of rendering present what is absent and where the boundary towards which language, insofar as it attempts to be meaningful, always tends. In this sense, to the extent that language attempts to signify at all it attempts to become Eucharistic.

This recognition of the Eucharist as the site of semiotic plenitude should not, however, blind us to another important matter: The point is crucial for reasons both epistemological and linguistic. In fact, Eucharistic skepticism immediately doubles back on itself in a deepened and intensified reaffirmation of the reliability of sensory experience. Specifying the precise nature of that presence is a tricky matter. This last point is especially noteworthy inasmuch as it helps us combat certain caricatures of Christian thought that have been disseminated by partisans of post- structuralism.

According to the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, the substance of the Eucharistic bread is replaced, upon consecration, by the substance of the body of Christ. Yet this is impossible. Accidental properties are properties that a substance can either gain or lose without ceasing to be the substance it is. What, then, is the status of those properties taste, color, shape, and so on that once inhered in the substance of the bread but which, after consecration, cannot be said to inhere in the substance of the body of Christ?

In what do they inhere? The short answer is that they do not inhere in anything. First, while the doctrine of transubstantiation is framed in the Aristotelian categories of substance and accidents, it finally exceeds those categories. Second, the central mystery of the Eucharist the conversion of the bread into the body of Christ is in fact accompanied by another, secondary mystery: This means, in turn, that the Eucharistic bread does not exist in the same way that we take other bits of the physical universe to exist that is, either as substances or else by inhering in substances.

Even more importantly, as accidents that inhere in no finite substance but are instead sustained directly by divine being, the material elements of the Eucharist exist only as signifiers, that is, as visible signs that disclose the invisible reality of God. Theirs, in other words, is an existence entirely exhausted by signification, wholly constituted by the manner in which they manifest the substance of the body of Christ.

They are, as it were, all smile and no cat. Estrellas 75 These lines dramatize a motif that recurs throughout the Bernardian canon. The poet begins with a meditation on some small, unassuming object in this case, the Eucharistic host and, suddenly, that object turns out to have implications for the whole of the created order. Almost immediately, water is no longer simply water, but a metaphor for the divine substance: In the wake of this recognition, moreover, the world itself acquires a sacramental valence: But in what sense?

Here we must recall a few points. First, to say that the Eucharist is an image of creation is to say that whatever can be predicated of the Eucharistic elements can also be predicated, in some analogous sense, of the world itself. The point is stronger still, however. At this point, moreover, the distinction between substance and accident—the very distinction in terms of which the doctrine of transubstantiation is framed—begins to unravel.

Earlier, the Eucharist seemed to constitute a special case in which accidents exist without inhering in any particular substance. Now it seems that the Eucharistic was no exception at all and instead that the totality of the created order likewise shares this peculiar characteristic. Admittedly, this line of thought runs some risk of collapsing into pantheism. To avoid such a conclusion, we must recall the semiotic nature of the Eucharist.

Even as the Eucharistic host is so transfigured by signification that it takes on the bodily presence of its referent, the materiality of the host is nevertheless preserved. Further, if, to deploy some Augustinian categories, the host occupies a middle space between pure signum and pure res, the same appears to go for the whole of creation. Despite the fact that material reality is constituted by its participation in divine being, that reality preserves both its materiality and its status as sign, that is, a semiotic vehicle for the manifestation of divine presence.

For Marx, fetishization occurs when the value that accrues to an object by virtue of its participation in a given social texture is mistakenly supposed to inhere in the object itself. To take a classic example: Allegories of Sacramentality This labored account of the logic of the Eucharist is not meant to stand on its own. It is instead the ground for reading a number of other manifestations of sacramentality in the Bernardian canon.

Such is the project of the following two sections. As we shall see, however, the confrontation between music and poetry generates a unique conundrum, one that cannot be solved on its own terms. This is true in at least two related senses. At a formal level, music functions as a sort of limit-case of all artistic possibility, an idea which itself is something of a commonplace. When Walter Pater suggested that all art aspires to the condition of music, he meant that while the other arts especially the verbal ones are founded on a distinction between sign and meaning, music is that form of expression in which the gap between material sign and expressive content collapses.

The distance between what music is and what it means is null, since the one is indissociable, even at a conceptual level, from the other. This property affords music what no other form of artistic expression except perhaps dance enjoys: As soon as a signifier is put into play, it is immediately and perpetually displaced down a line of other signifiers.

Music, on the contrary, escapes this necessity. There is never any question of whether, if at all, the musical sign coincides with its meaning, precisely because the two are, by their nature, identical. In this sense, music stands as the impossible ideal: Which is just to say: This, of course, is almost a tautology. Rather, music is sacramental because it is that form of artistic expression which, by its very nature, opens upon transcendence. Although the question of music pervades the Bernardian canon, it is particularly important in a series of poems collected in Las estrellas All the poems save one are sonnets, and each bears the name of a canonical classical composer.

On this point, the sestet is more explicit still: In these lines, the central theme is the relationship between the poetic voice and the natural world, a relationship described in explicitly musical terms: If, as Wordsworth believed, the pressures of modernity threaten to drive a wedge between nature and the human mind, then poetic language works to counteract this division and therefore to mend the broken relationship between humanity and the cosmos.

The second quatrain specifies further still the musical ontology that governs the poem as a whole: Here the Eucharistic connection should not be missed. Musicality, in other words, is not something applied to the world from the outside. The idea that music is in some sense constitutive of reality immediately suggests a mythical resonance, one that finds its echo in the Orpheus myth. In Book 10 of the Metamorphoses, Ovid writes: The list continues until each tree in the catalogue makes its appearance. As the musical sonnets make clear, it is not the poet whose language sustains the world in being.

The opening quatrain reads: Tu canto se despierta entre las rosas, Abre sus grandes ojos pensativos, Y anima las tinieblas silenciosas Con el calor de sus destellos vivos. The Latin anima also gives the Spanish and Italian alma soul. The point is significant. While consonants are formed by bringing the various bits of the mouth teeth, tongue, lips, palate, throat, and so on into commerce with one another, vowels are nothing but sounded breath Abram In Genesis, for example, Adam becomes a living creature precisely when God breathes into his nostrils the breath ruach of life Genesis 2.

The poem is what it is about.

Which means, of course, that it approaches the condition of music. The first half of the sestet develops in still greater detail the motif of musical personification: Y cuando al fin penetra en mis dolores, Los inflama hasta el fondo con su acento, Y con su acento los reduce a flores. In this case, on the other hand, the motion is inward: But the logic is sacramental nonetheless—and in a very peculiar way. Despite this semantic change, however, certain superficial i. A profound change at the level of semantics is therefore accompanied by a relatively insignificant change at the level of orthography.

Now suppose we think of semantics as analogous to the Aristotelian category of substances. But if meaning is substantial in the relevant sense, then spelling is purely accidental. Different graphic and sonic arrangements can and do signify the same concept book, Buch, libro, livre, librum, etc. In this sense, the sonnet dramatizes, rhetorically and grammatically, the phenomenon of transubstantiation.

It is also here that the text renders most explicit the connection between music and the Eucharist. The transformative power of music is thus analogous to the transformative power of the Eucharist. The former is, so to speak, an allegory of the latter. The analogy, of course, is far from perfect. The first is that all analogies are imperfect. This is no doubt a paradoxical assertion, and I shall return to it in a moment when I take up La ciudad sin Laura. El camino es el mismo que siguieron un San Juan o una Sta. That inadequacy depends at least in part upon a play on the various possible meanings of canto.

Teasing out those meanings requires a brief historical and etymological digression. In a somewhat more technical sense, canto refers to the divisions of a poetic work RAE, def. Despite obvious differences, chant functions in each case as a musical conduit of the sacred, one that conjures away the drab mundanity of ordinary existence and opens immanence to the inflowing of transcendence. Etymology points in the same direction. Poetic tradition has made much of this connection.

But the Bernardian link is 44 For a good account of this matter in Greek and Latin poetry, see Chandler.

Hispania. Volume 73, Number 2, May 1990

For the Spanish tradition, see Blecua. For the English tradition, see Doggett. As Derrida and others have shown, the absence of self-identity is constitutive of language itself. I shall return to this idea at various times throughout the rest of this chapter. The stanza cited above rhymes consonantally in the pattern ababb. The reason has everything to do with the structure of the poem itself. He is thus left with two options: Neither option is fully acceptable.

Generally speaking, ripios are thematically inconsequential, their purpose instead being to guarantee conformity to an established scheme. In this text, the preferred metaphor is economic. But if ordinary language is communicative and representational, poetry by contrast seeks the complete dissociation of sign and referent, one in which words no longer refer to external reality but instead contain their significance wholly within themselves.

The point of this distinction is twofold. If language is no longer referential, it is likewise no longer beholden to external criteria of evaluation Modern poetry made much of this notion. Despite his resistance to the afrancesamiento of Hispanic verse, he must have known that any account of the relationship between music and poetry would evoke immediate Symbolist resonances. Such, indeed, is the theme of much of the rest of El buque. The idea announces itself as soon as the poet first hears the sound that he will later identify as music.

The first intimations are, as one might expect, vague and indistinct: This final observation, in which the poet at last identifies what he hears as music, constitutes the turning point of the poem. In the following stanza, the speaker adds: Almost immediately, the speaker proceeds to confess his own limits: In these enigmatic lines the poet uses the same verb comprender to describe what at first blush appear to be two diametrically opposed states of affairs: Clearly, comprender is being used in two distinct senses, and those two senses in turn seem to answer to the distinction between discursive and intuitive forms of knowlege.

Discursive knowledge, on the one hand, is a mode of knowing in which the mind moves through a series of premises to a conclusion. First I know that all men are mortal; then I know that Socrates is a man; and then I know Socrates is mortal. Discursivity is therefore inherently temporal, and its relationship to language also inherently temporal is hardly accidental. Intuitive knowledge, by contrast, refers to a form of knowing that lacks any such temporal dimension. The same applies to divine knowledge. The first explanation is linguistic: Again, to follow an argument made clear in Derrida, linguistic signification is always a matter of delay, of deferral, of traversing the intraversible distance between sign and meaning.

In music, by contrast, no such distinction between signifier and signified is possible. Gili Gaya noted, however, that use of aunque in a concessive sense was rare. When we consider the finding of these various studies as they relate to use of subordinate clauses and complex sentences among Spanish-speaking children, it becomes clear that many factors operate to inhibit the formulation of generalizations at this preliminary stage in the research.

Such factors include first, the paucity of systematic research regarding the topic and, second, questions related to methodologies employed in the existing literature which, in some cases, pose difficulty in interpreting the findings. Many of the investigations to date, most of them doctoral dissertations, have undertaken exploratory or comprehensive descriptions of the syntactic development of Spanish speaking children.

The nature of such studies necessarily precludes an in-depth and focused investigation of any one specific area of syntactic or semantic development. In several studies, use of subordination and complex sentences among Spanish-speaking children has been noted only as such structures provide the syntactic environment for use of subjunctive mood; in some cases, results are reported only for children's use of subjunctive, with no explicit attention to development of subordination or sentence complexity. The number of studies which have given explicit attention to the development of subordination among Spanish-speaking children remains very limited.

Most of those studies which have observed use of subordinate clauses in complex sentences have noted children's spontaneous production of such structures. Study of children's comprehension of subordinate clauses has been very limited; the only environments to have received explicit attention in the literature to date are object noun clauses after decir , adverbial clauses of condition, and certain types of relative clauses.

In some cases methodological questions or problems have made difficult the interpretation of findings of particular studies; in such instances, the results reported could have been at least partly a function of the methodologies employed. Moreover, differences in methodological approach among studies which have treated children's subordination in complex sentences make comparison of findings across studies very difficult, if not impossible. In some studies the number of informants has been small; in such cases typically there has clear been very little quantification of data.

All of the studies reviewed have been cross-sectional studies in which different children of specific age or grade levels served to represent various stages of linguistic development; none of the studies has been longitudinal. In some cases, especially in studies of bilingual informants, various intervening factors, e. Many of the studies reviewed have observed only children's spontaneous use of subordinate clauses; rarely, however, has the use of such structures been elicited systematically by the investigator.

As the studies reviewed here relate specifically to the development of clause subordination and sentence complexity among Spanish-speaking children, they might well be characterized, then, as exploratory. Despite limitations regarding the state of the literature to date, however, some commonalities do emerge from the findings reported. It would be premature, of course, to formulate generalizations regarding this area of syntactic and semantic development among Spanish-speaking children on the basis of the limited literature to date.

Nevertheless, examination of the results, however tentative, from past investigations can offer direction for future research into this most significant area of language development in Spanish, and merit attention within this context. One study has shown that monolingual children's comprehension of object noun clause introduced by decir varies with the meaning of the verb and the underlying structure of the dependent clause: Findings in those studies which have treated relative clauses among Spanish-speaking children seem at first glance to vary considerably.

Fortunately, this is one area of clause subordination among Spanish-speaking children which has been studied from the point of view of both comprehension as well as production. Findings in studies of children's comprehension of relative clauses have shown some convergence. A study of bilingual children in San Francisco showed a developmental norm, with comprehension improving over grade Merino, Nevertheless, both studies which have investigated subjects' comprehension of relative clauses have shown that such comprehension remains a difficult task even for older children, i.

A study of monolingual children has shown comprehension of relative clauses to be related to syntactic structure: However, findings among those studies which have observed production of relative clauses, especially among bilingual children, are more divergent. With respect to adverbial clauses in the Spanish of children, investigators have typically observed their use in relation to semantic categories, such as temporal, locative, causal, and hypothetical. Evidence of developmental patterns for bilingual children's production of adverbials of cause McKay, and of condition after al menos que and si Merino, has also been offered.

In another study of bilingual children, production of locative clauses showed a pattern of growth over grade, although the pattern was not a very marked one McKay, Other investigators of children's Spanish have made no mention of locative modification. The lack of mention of adverbials of concession in studies dealing with bilingual children and the specific mention of their rarity among even school-age monolingual children Gili Gaya, suggests that concessive adverbials may have a later development than other types of adverbial modification.

In other cases, however, attempts to discover commonalities in the findings of the literature to date are frustrated. For example, only one investigator has mentioned the confusion of causal porque and purposive para que among young monolingual children Gili Gaya, ; such confusion has not been noted in other studies of Spanish-speaking children's use of complex sentences of which I am aware. In general, then, an overview of the developmental literature as it relates to complex sentences and subordinate clauses in Spanish suggests that while children make developmental gains in this regard from the ages of two to ten, neither bilingual nor monolingual children at age ten have yet acquired the full range of semantic and syntactic expression characteristic of adult's use of subordination in complex sentences.

Very few observations regarding Spanish-speaking children's use of dependent noun clauses have surfaced in the developmental literature to date. Even the limited literature on children's use of dependent noun clauses suggests that such structures develop variably according to the grammatical function they serve in relation to the main clause in complex sentences.

The existing developmental literature suggests that children's use of adverbial clauses develops variably by semantic categories, with some types of adverbial modification appearing early, e. The literature suggests, too, that the various semantic categories of adverbials have their own development, with the range of adverbial conjunctions in a given category expanding among older monolingual and bilingual children.

As for future research into this particular area of language development among Spanish speaking children, it goes without saying that the topic deserves to be the focus of concentrated and systematic investigation. While the early exploratory and comprehensive studies e. In order to elucidate patterns in children's Spanish which are truly developmental, rather than dialectal, the norm of behavior against which children's language is measured must be the children's own language variety or dialect, rather than an external dialect, perhaps a standard dialect, to which the children have not been exposed.

Systematic investigation of development of sentence complexity among monolingual Spanish-speaking children is of critical importance. Such studies would have the added benefit of providing a basis for comparison with investigations of bilingual children's language development, in which external factors may operate to mediate the developmental process. In order to identify features of bilingual children's Spanish which are truly developmental, efforts must be made to control for such factors, e. The effect of syntactic difficulty on children's development of subordinate clauses has been given limited consideration in the literature to date.

Evidence from past studies suggests that this factor may influence the development of various types of noun and adjective clauses. Efforts must also be made to determine to what extent semantic or cognitive development may also affect the development of subordination and sentence complexity in Spanish. The current literature for Spanish suggests that children's use of adverbial clauses is related to semantic development.

To my knowledge, such questions have not been systematically addressed in the language acquisition literature for Spanish. Also, since subordinate clauses provide the syntactic environment in which subjunctive mood verb forms are used in Spanish, the development of subordination should also be studied in relation to children's morphological development, particularly, the morphology of the Spanish subjunctive.

Attention should also be given to the possible relationship between development of sentence complexity and clause subordination in Spanish and corresponding development for other languages. The psycholinguistic literature includes a growing number of studies on the topic, especially as it relates to English. Another interesting area of inquiry would be the relationship between first-language development and that of second-language acquisition regarding development of subordination and sentence complexity.

Future studies of development of sentence complexity among Spanish speakers would also profit by greater attempts to relate empirical language data to theoretical issues and approaches to language acquisition. The example which some of the studies have established, with larger numbers of informants and greater and more systematic quantification of data e.

Efforts such as these may well be expected to contribute significantly toward the growing literature on language acquisition in general and language acquisition in Spanish in particular. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Texas at Austin. University Micro films, No. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of New Mexico.

The Acquisition of Syntax in Children from 5 to Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Washington. Estudios de lenguaje infantil. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Stanford University. Folklore of Hispanic countries can provide the FLES teacher with a wealth of instructive and entertaining rhymes, jingles, and games. The integration of such activities can aid in the achievement of goals in listening, speaking, and cultural understanding when used in a meaningful communicative context.

Alan Maley, talking about poetry and song as forms of language use, points out:. Because the very function of poetry and song is to enhance our experiencing of existence, in however humble a particular; it follows that they offer significant input for learners.

This sets them apart from much other language learning material: They have a content affective or cognitive which really means something and is not simply cooked up for the supposedly fragile digestion of language learners. For example, the teacher who uses a little rima de sorteo to choose a leader for a classroom activity is providing input which is both comprehensible and culturally authentic.

Although the children may not know the meaning of each and every word, they do know the purpose of the rhyme. By carefully choosing rhymes, games, and jingles which are related to the curricular con tent, the FLES teacher provides an easy way for students to become comfortable with the vocabulary. Soon they will be able to manipulate the familiar words much more efficiently and effectively than when taught by rote memory, drills, or simple repetition of lists. The purpose of this article is to offer a sampling of the many rhymes, jingles, and poems identified as part of the oral tradition.

Included at the end of the article is a list of a few sources for the teacher who wishes to explore further this treasure trove of folklore. These little rhymes, said frequently and casually by the teacher, will soon be echoed by the children as they vie to choose leaders for their activities. The most well-known counting-off rhyme is this one.

It has many variations. Rhymes and Jingles with Numbers: This is a delightful rhyme to use with pantomime. The names of animals form an important part of almost every elementary foreign language curriculum. Use the following little jingles with pictures, movement, and imitation of sounds. To remind children to remain seated. Perhaps the best summary is found in the words of Carmen Bravo-Villasante on the back cover of her beautiful Adivina Adivinanza: Learning Another Language Through Actions. Sky Oaks Productions, Teaching Spanish in the Grades.

Cambridge University Press, Banks Upshaw and Co. Available from National Textbook Co.

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Holt Rinehart and Winston, Mexican Folkways 7 The following is a selection of recent note worthy books in Spanish for adolescent and reluctant readers. Titles for serious readers grades 9 through 12 and 9 through adult are included in addition to many titles that may appeal to less eager readers. The reason for this wide variety of reading levels is to encourage all adolescents into the world of books disregarding individual reading abilities. Sierra i Fabra, Jordi. The adolescence of John Lennon is narrated in a fluid style by an obvious admirer of the man and his music. John Lennon's intense feelings for a mother whom he barely knew, his relationship to a devoted aunt who really cared, and his love for music are depicted in an engrossing and touching manner.

This biography should appeal to adolescent readers as they deal with their own passions and tribulations. Planea tu carrera y tu vida. Plan Your Career and Your Life. Written in an easy-to-understand manner, this manual intends to assist young adults in designing a program of personal development. It emphasizes the importance of setting personal and career objectives and in following a plan of action.

Each chapter includes easy-to follow exercises that readers are encouraged to do as they plan their lives. The Sweet toothed Boy. According to the preface, this is a recipe book for children and their mothers, which means that children should not prepare these fifteen Mexican candies without the assistance and supervision of an adult.

The variety and authenticity of these delicious candies from all over Mexico make this book a most delightful experience. In addition, the appealing illustrations and easy-to-follow directions will tempt many skeptics. Editorial Plus Ultra, Twenty-two recipes for appetizers, vegetables, seafood dishes, meats and desserts, mostly from Central and South America, are included in this unassuming paperback publication. Perhaps the instructions are not as care fully explained as cookbooks in the English language world, but older children and adolescents will certainly savor these popular Latin American dishes.

Readers are supposed to find Wally amidst a large crowd of people in the city, at the railroad station, on the beach, at the airport, in a museum, in a large department store and other places where crowds generally gather. Busy, detailed illustrations of numerous people engaged in countless activities are the main focus of this large format, attractive publication.

Lovers of detail will be able to spend hours deciphering the witty illustrations of people involved in ludicrous activities. I Want a Medal! In a most sarcastic and amusing manner, this story tells about a great general who was most distressed because in one corner of his uniform he did not yet have a medal. Hence, like all important generals, he organized a war so that he could win another medal. The general's experiences with a group of soldiers who, instead of weapons use musical instruments, makes him very angry, but ultimately affects his choice of a new career.

Not surprisingly, the Great General becomes the Great Conductor who wins a medal in the competition of orchestra conductors. Witty, full page color illustrations of the great general-turned conductor and his important army add an immeasurable sense of mirth to this human story of a man's need for success and recognition. All readers will rejoice and some will sympathize. Love On This Side of the Stars. The city of Havana Cuba is the setting for this fast-paced science fiction novel. Readers will be intrigued by a strange cadaver, a beautiful young woman from outer space, an intelligent police officer and their extraneous love affair.

Regrettably, the physical presentation of this paperback publication -cheap paper, unappealing cover, crude black and white illustrations- leaves much to be desired. Nevertheless, young adults will enjoy this brief novel which won the David Award for science fiction in Cuba in El libro de los trabalenguas.

The Book of Tongue Twisters. Spanish-speakers of all ages will enjoy this delightful collection of tongue twisters. The most popular word games from the oral traditions of Spain and Latin America are represented in this unassuming paperback publication. Tiny, black and white line illustrations serve only as background decorations. Cuentos de Pedro Urdemales. Stories About Pedro Urdemales. This is a delightful sample of the folklore of Spanish-speaking people which has been handed down through several generations with amusing, albeit small, watercolor illustrations.

El caballito de los siete colores y otros cuentos. The liveliness of these tales make them ideal for recreational reading. In addition, a well-written literary analysis of these myths and legends make this collection of special interest to scholars and serious students of Colombian folklore. Rivera Izcoa, Carmen, ed. Cuentos de enredos y travesuras.

Stories of Mischief and Wit. In a lively and amusing manner, these twelve tales from Latin America tell about the pranks and antics of ingenious characters. The characters are often children, but they also include a sly fox, a brave mosquito and a crafty mother of nine children. The brevity and joviality of each tale as well as the entertaining illustrations make this paperback a joyful introduction to Latin American wit and culture. In a simple and straightforward manner, this Spanish translation of Understanding AIDS describes how the AIDS virus is transmitted, who is at risk as well as the disease's damaging effects on the body's immune system.

Each chapter includes a brief story that dramatizes important aspects about AIDS and discussion questions that focus on important issues about this disease. Las civilizaciones de Asia. La Europa de la edad media. Europe of the Middle Ages. Francois Davot and Michael Welply. Historia de los Hombres Zaragoza: Editorial Luis Vives, This outstanding series, originally published by Casterman Publishers in Paris, France, relates the history of humankind from its origins until modern times.

Young readers will be pleased by the excellent quality of each volume-numerous photographs, drawings, charts and maps; easy-to-read text; brief chapters; chronology of events, and an index. This is definitely the way to expose hitherto uninterested students to the achievements of humankind. Esplendor de la antigua Mixteca. Splendor of the Ancient Mixtecs. This is a most readable introduction to the Mixtec culture of southwestern Mexico.

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It includes chapters on the origin, history, codexes, jewels and calendar of the Mixtecs. Numerous color photographs further testify to the splendor of this ancient civilization. Alethia Compania Editorial, In a most readable and straightforward manner, the author asks his readers if they truly know love and if they understand the rules in a loving relationship. The author stresses that love is ruled by common sense, good judgment and lots of work. Adolescents -and all readers-can definitely benefit by this simply written, well-organized book that explains the importance of love in our lives.

Ediciones de la Torre, It includes samples of some of his most popular works, such as Poeta en Nueva York and La zapatera prodigiosa as well as excerpts of some of his plays and popular songs. The Joy of Loving. Carlos Valencia Editores, These fifty-five poems for young readers express in an honest and refreshing manner special feelings about first love.

They tell about the joys of unexpected meetings, the sadness of unfair competition, the excitement of brief encounters, and other special moments of early adolescence. El hombre y la luna. Man and the Moon. Translated by Victor Pozanco. This title, originally published by Macmillan in Great Britain in , describes the history of the exploration of the moon by man as well as the problems that had to be overcome before the landing of Apollo on the moons surface.

It must be noted that this volume includes missions to the moon up to December, Nevertheless, the high quality of the numerous illustrations, photographs and charts in color and the simple text make this volume of interest to scientists-to-be. El joven naturalista en la costa.

The Young Naturalist on the Coast. El joven naturalista en las riberas. The Young Naturalist on the River side. Young readers are encouraged to explore and observe the wide variety of animal and vegetable life on the coast and on the river side. Like previous titles in this most attractive series, originally published in Great Britain, they include engaging, colorful illustrations, easy-to-read charts, and informative texts with suggested activities that guide readers to a better understanding of nature.

Remo Berselli and Mario Tamer. Translated from the Italian by Manuel Barbadillo. From Cell to Man. Translated by Teodoro Larriba. Los reptiles conquistan la tierra. Reptiles Conquer the Earth. Historia de la Vida sobre la Tierra. Ediciones SM, 1 Brief chapters, simple descriptions and clear charts and watercolor illustrations make this history of life on Earth, originally published in Italy in , a marvelous way to introduce adolescents to the evolution of the vertebrates. The attractive format of this series, including appealing covers and good quality paper, will engage the interest of most readers.

Mammals and the Future of Evolution. Nacimiento de la estatua de la libertad. How They Built the Statue of Liberty. Translated by Margarite Cavandoli. Originally published in the U. In an easy-flowing narrative, it describes the planning and construction that resulted in one of the great technical achievements of the nineteenth century. The simple, black and white illustrations provide the right amount of detail and background information.

The use of ser and estar often creates problems for both teachers and students. Most textbooks outline in great detail the rules for using ser and estar. While these rules are generally accurate and clear, they tend to provide more information than can be processed by the typical Spanish language learner, especially regarding the many uses of ser. The second main problem lies in the use of the dichotomy of permanent and temporary to distinguish ser from estar.

Both of these can be seen as permanent, which suggests the use of ser: A cursory look at textbooks shows that there are as many as eight uses of ser outlined; however the choice of ser can be reduced by focusing on the memorization of the uses of estar. Most devices aiming to outline the use of ser and estar focus on both verbs, while the present device focuses on one verb only: Position, Location , Action, Condition, and Emotion.

The following are examples of each category of estar use:. The usefulness of this five part mneumonic device is supported by Miller's psychological research on immediate memory. If students focus on the uses of estar , the selection of ser becomes a matter of elimination. If one needs to express something that is not one of the five -tion words, then one must use ser.

Mneumonic devices such as acronyms are helpful to teachers in providing explanations to students for learning rules for structure and usage. Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition. After just a few weeks of class they absorb, often subconsciously, several such patterns of comparison. This absorption process is obviously fundamental to learning Spanish, for it enables students to discover new words, or at least make educated guesses at them, by extrapolating from patterns they already know. Instead of learning vocabulary in discrete units, they are learning it systematically in large networks of significance.

As their prowess at using patterns to discover words improves, so does every facet of their use of Spanish. A person who learns to induce unknown vocabulary words will listen, read, write, and especially, speak, far more effectively than one who does not. Indeed, even when one becomes fluent in the language, this technique will remain useful.

Even Spanish teachers find themselves making educated guesses at words from time to time. While students often tend to intuit cog nates, there is much that teachers can do to help them improve their intuitive abilities Above all, teachers can encourage students to search actively for cognate patterns and use them to great advantage as they learn the language. The purpose of this paper is to suggest four ways to help students make intelligent guesses and expand their personal vocabularies through the induction of cognate patterns:. Teachers can enhance the subconscious absorption process mentioned above by making students consciously aware of cognate patterns and how these patterns can help them learn new vocabulary.

B capacity -- la capacidad reality -- la realidad city -- la ciudad formality --? The teacher can introduce the first few Spanish words in each group, pronouncing them in order to establish the correct pronunciation, and asking the students to repeat. Then the teacher can simply ask people to guess the Spanish equivalents of the English words for which no Spanish equivalent is given. In this way the word is first heard, then reinforced as people read, say, and write it. Spanish-English cognates look so much alike that the possibility of interference from the native language is great.

When all the words in a group have been guessed, the discovery process can go on if the students are asked to suggest other English words that might have similar cognates. In this way, coming up with the English words and guessing the Spanish becomes an exciting game.

Nor will the cognates always mean quite the same thing; sometimes the teacher will have to explain the differences between the Spanish and English words. The teacher can always point these words out as they come up, however, and warn the students to be especially careful in learning them. The main points to get across about cognates are 1 that there are thou sands of them in Spanish and English, and 2 that with a knowledge of some of them, one can correctly induce many others. Besides learning new words, students are also learning a valuable lesson in gender and spelling through this guessing game.

All the items cited above, for example, are feminine nouns. While they will encounter some exceptions to this rule, it will help them remember the gender of hundreds of words. Again, there will be some cases where these rules will not apply, but it is much more useful to internalize rules like these than to know the few exceptions to them. Since most Spanish texts list vocabulary at the end of each chapter by grammatical function, it can be a revelation to students to see cognates together.

Instead of wading through another list of nouns or verbs or adjectives, they see words that, brought together, reveal a method to the madness of the language. They see that many words can be learned in a systematic way. Teaching from a list of cognates can, for several reasons, be especially productive on the first day of an introductory class. It provides a good first lesson in pronunciation, because differences between the sound systems of the two languages become dramatically apparent when cognates are compared.

Also, this activity immediately challenges the students to do something with the language, to use Spanish right from the start. A final reason for working with a dittoed cognate list on the first day of class is purely practical: Of course the teacher can work on cognates in this way at various points in the term, but it is best to do it at least once during the first few weeks, so that students learn the habit of recognizing and making use of cognate patterns early on.

Furthermore, it can be a useful exercise at the introductory, intermediate, and even the advanced levels. In their excellent second-year college reader Album , for example, Rebecca Valette and Joy Renjilian-Burgy focus many of their vocabulary exercises on cognates selected from stories by major literary figures from Spain and Latin America. As is readily apparent from the examples given thus far, English words that have easily recognizable cognates in Spanish tend to be erudite words of Greek or Latin origin.

A general but useful rule-of thumb in the game of extrapolating cognates is that the abstract or learned words in English usually have corresponding cognates in Spanish, while the common, concrete, everyday words usually do not. It is important to point this rule out to the students and reiterate it as they attempt to discover new patterns. Students should learn that an erudite word is likely to be a cognate, and that it is therefore always worth a guess.

An elementary Spanish class should not become a course in historical linguistics, but students find it interesting to know the basis for this rule-of-thumb. In essence, most erudite English words were borrowed from Latin, from which Spanish evolved, while the every day words are usually Germanic in origin. Banta sums it up this way:. Throughout the Middle Ages, Latin was the language of technology, history, philosophy, religion, literature, education, diplomacy, first as the vehicle of Roman culture and then of Christianity and the pervasive influence of the church.

Anyone who wrote at all was trained to write in Latin, and, if an attempt was made to write in English or German Anglo-Saxon or Old High German , the writer borrowed Latin vocabulary freely. A second wave of heavy borrowing from Latin occurred during the period of Humanism ca. The Norman French nearly succeeded in making their speech the language of England; even though modern English is a Germanic language in structure, an estimated seventy percent of its vocabulary is Latin in origin, often through French.

Inductive learning strategies may also be encouraged through testing. One might, for example, offer an extra-credit question requiring the students to guess one or more words that conform to a pattern already introduced. If, for example, a test requires students to know words such as dentista and pianista , and if it has been explained that the ista suffix on a noun often indicates profession, an extra credit question might be: Also, teachers should consider giving partial credit for a good guess on an answer to any test question if the student demonstrates an awareness of a relevant cognate pattern.

While this answer is not exactly correct, it would probably be understood in context by a native speaker of Spanish, and it conforms to a common suffix pattern that can indicate profession. It is not the equivalent of the English, but it is in the same linguistic vicinity, so to speak. Such errors deserve some credit, for they show that students are taking advantage of the linguistic resources at their disposal to try to communicate.

Teachers should recognize and reward such efforts. A good guess should always count for something in the game of cognates. The habit of searching for words, and the awareness that it is possible to find them on one's own without resorting to a dictionary, encourage students to participate actively in the process of learning vocabulary. Since language study necessarily involves much memorization of vocabulary, inductive strategies can lighten the load of this kind of work.

Indeed, learning vocabulary patterns and using them to guess words is an exciting mental game that makes every class session livelier, more interesting, more challenging. Instead of being told new words, students learn to discover Spanish for themselves Allen, Edward David and Rebecca M. New York Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Program development for attracting and retaining students is not the exclusive concern of those teaching Portuguese. Certainly, instructors of languages with large enrollments also must address this concern.

But minor programs, like Portuguese, have been especially resourceful in making their programs known on college and university campuses. Most of the efforts over the past thirty years have focused on building visibility for Portuguese and on creating a cultural community for those who decided to study the language. The history of that resourcefulness provides valuable examples to others who might want to start a Portuguese program.

Recent developments in French and Spanish applied linguistics have produced new teaching methodologies that are now being adapted for use in Portuguese. Soon these new materials, that can strengthen program development from within the classroom, will be accessible to all Portuguese instructors. The potential of these new teaching materials to do a better job preparing students and building bridges between lower- and upper-division classes bodes well for small programs like Portuguese.

It has been ten years since Bobby Chamberlain edited Building a Portuguese Program , a collection of essays by distinguished scholars and teachers of Portuguese. The collection offers a thirty-year history of patience and dedication on the part of those who struggled to introduce Portuguese on campuses nation-wide. It is a testimony to the perseverance of its contributors, but it is also a handbook of useful information for future program builders.

Proof of this can be seen in the number of panel discussions dedicated to program development that regularly appear on conference programs both at the national and regional level Several contributors offer explanations as to why Portuguese programs are always being built. This means , of course, that Portuguese programs are less able to defend themselves against budget cuts, or hiring demands for other languages, to name only the most common pressures exerted by administrators and even colleagues. Unfortunately the position of being a minor language does not seem to be changing.

He comments that Portuguese does not enjoy visibility at the secondary level since it is only taught in a few high schools on the East and West coast. Students do not think about enrolling in Portuguese classes at a post-secondary institution because they probably have never heard of it before. Portuguese does not have a large or vocal group of native speakers living in the U.

A, except for a few regions on each coast. Finally, according to Harmon, the name of the language does not bring to mind an image of global importance, nor of cultural refinement While Harmon does not offer suggestions as to how to change these handicapping conditions, he, like the other contributors to Chamberlain's edition, has numerous useful suggestions on how to counteract them. All the contributors agree that in order to gain both financial and administrative support from the university community one has to increase visibility.

Here visibility means campus awareness that Portuguese is taught and that it is a valuable language to study. Among the suggestions made are the following applications of mass media advertisement: After a basic awareness of the program has been established, most of the contributors advise that language requirements be changed to include Portuguese for Latin American Studies programs, that scheduling of classes be done at attractive times, that overflow students from other languages be directed to the Portuguese classes, and that scholarship and fellowship moneys be found to support Portuguese students.

Finally, all the contributors stress the need for teaching excellence and resourcefulness, but they do not give specific details on how to develop these qualities. The academic environment that served as a background for Chamberlain's collection has changed in the years since its publication. Unlike the period in the seventies when foreign language enrollment, like military service, became voluntary in many institutions, most students of the eighties will be required to enroll in a foreign language.

For Liberal Arts majors at the University of Tennessee, language requirements both for admission and for graduation have been reinstated. Furthermore, the School of Communications has recently in creased its foreign language requirement to two years. Rumors have also circulated that the Business school is contemplating the addition of foreign languages to its curriculum. These requirements are sending students into language classrooms, including Portuguese classrooms, in increasing numbers.

The fact is that the majority of students at Tennessee must take one or two years of a foreign language in order to satisfy their basic curricular requirements These increased enrollments are a potential source for program development in all the foreign languages, but they are of special importance to smaller language programs like Portuguese. Greater enrollment can lead to a greater presence on campus which in turn can bring the recognition of administrators. More introductory level classes can also mean a larger base from which to build enrollment in upper-division classes.

As is the case with other Portuguese programs nationwide, Tennessee is asking how it can ensure that some of these additional students will contribute to the long term growth and health of the program. Although they do not give details, Chamberlain's contributors stress the importance of developing superior teaching skills and materials.

There is, however, more to superior teaching than individual desire. Instructors must have good materials and good teacher training. With the recent theoretical and methodological developments in applied linguistics, new teaching approaches and teaching tools are now available to Portuguese teachers. Much of the research and development of teaching methodologies and materials that have had an impact on those working in Portuguese has been done by Tracy Terrell and several other individuals in applied linguistics.

They have been aided in their task by parallel technological advances in computers and video. Most of the work and the resulting textbooks, videotapes, and software represent efforts in the major languages, especially Spanish and French. However, a new video textbook, Travessia , and an activity-based curriculum now offer Portuguese instructors access to the same kinds of innovative materials as those used in the major languages.

After studying Krashen's monitor theory of second language competence and performance as cited by Terrell , Terrell determines that language is learned through acquisition Both the video-textbook and the activity based curriculum rely on authentic materials using cultural information that is interesting and informative and they both encourage students to engage in communicating in realistic linguistic environments.

Both have adopted Terrell's views and have put into practice his techniques for communicating in the classroom and for building confidence among beginning language learners. Ocougne reports that the classroom activities provide the environment in which to 1 introduce new vocabulary, 2 provide comprehensible input that can be used by students to acquire language skill, 3 create opportunities for oral production, and 4 create a sense of unity among class members that encourages language acquisition.

The curriculum comprises thematic units based on topics of interest to the students. These units are organized in order of difficulty so that students begin speaking about personal characteristics, then progress to experiences they have had, and finally end the term expressing personal opinions. Within each topic area, grammatical and cultural units are introduced as they are needed for a particular activity. The major characteristic of the activity based curriculum is its emphasis on group activities, which foster interaction and a sense of security, and on activities that involve hands-on learning.

For example, in the unit on food only two activities in a list of twelve involve an actual presentation of information: The advanced activities require a more sophisticated use of the language. For example, students discuss which famous person each student would invite to dinner and why, where the guests would be seated, and what the menu would be. One especially noteworthy activity for this unit provides the students with an opportunity to see how their language skills are understood and carried out by others. Students form groups and write out a list of instructions, like those in a recipe, for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Then they use what they have written to direct the teacher's actions.

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