Tropelías: Review of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature
Editada desde 1990 por el Área de Teoría de la Literatura y Literatura Comparada de la Universidad de Zaragoza, Tropelías es una revista académica de periodicidad anual que publica artículos científicos y reseñas de libros sobre temas relativos a la teoría literaria, la literatura comparada, la crítica literaria y la historia de la literatura, atendiendo igualmente a los vínculos de la literatura con otros lenguajes artísticos. Se publicaron diecisiete números en papel (hasta 2006) y, en colección anexa, las actas de las primeras siete ediciones del Seminario Pensamiento literario español del siglo XX. Hoy, todos esos volúmenes pueden consultarse en esta misma web. A partir del n.º 18, es una revista electrónica. Desde 2025 continúa su andadura con un nuevo equipo de dirección. ISSN-e 2255-5463 DOI 10.26754/ojs_tropelias/22555463
Los artículos enviados a la revista Tropelías deben ser originales e inéditos, no publicados previamente en cualquier soporte. Únicamente se aceptará material publicado total o parcialmente con anterioridad, o que esté en proceso de evaluación en otra revista, si se hace constar la causa de tal duplicación y se facilita la fuente donde ha aparecido dicho artículo. Las imágenes que se incluyan en los artículos estarán libres de derechos de reproducción y, en caso contrario, los autores deberán presentar los permisos para su publicación y asumir los pagos derivados de ello. Los artículos y reseñas publicados en la revista Tropelías pueden ser incluidos en repositorios temáticos o institucionales desde el momento de su publicación, sin modificación alguna e indicando claramente su procedencia.
Introduction. Some placements of anomaly in recent ibero-american literature
Copyright (c) 2025 Carmen Rodríguez Campo, Mónica Casado-Folgado http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The identity of the writer and his muse in Breakfast at Tiffany's (Blake Edwards, 1961)
The film version of Breakfast at Tiffany's posed a significant change from the literary original, reversing the status of the two main characters. While in the original nouvelle, Holly was a prostitute, in the film, the prostitute was her neighbor, Fred/Paul, although he remained a writer. In this way, writing becomes a somewhat problematic activity that produces serious identity issues that also affect Holly, now the writer's muse.
Copyright (c) 2025 Juan Carlos Pueo http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Mohamed ABRIGHACH, Moros con letras en la costa. Introducción a la literatura marroquí en lengua española. Madrid, Diwan Mayrit, 2024, 297 pp
This contribution is a review of Mohamed Abrighach's work, Moros con letras en la costa. Introducción a la literatura marroquí en lengua española, Madrid, Diwan Mayrit, 2024, 297 pp. Its characteristics, namely the understanding of the literary phenomenon as a historical fact, the attention to the book as an object in a framework of publishing and distribution, the systematic compilation of almost everything previously written about these works and the coherent analysis of them, make it a "new critical base to the study of Hispanophone-African literatures".
Copyright (c) 2025 Luis García-Vela http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This paper demonstrates how a part of current speculative fiction presents the cyborg motif as a monstruous (dis)figuration of the subject that points to a set of profound questions, such as the neocolonial extractivism, the lived traumas, or the importance of showing the issues that historically marginalized groups face, among others. To accomplish this goal, the paper analyses the representation of the cyborg in the recent narrative of the Bolivian American author Edmundo Paz Soldán from the theoretical perspectives of authors such as Brown, Carroll, Haraway, Moraña or Yehya, among others. The pazsoldanian narrative employs the cyborg to problematize the sociohistorical and epistemological legacy of anthropocentric humanism and to revalue the peripheral spaces and social subjects. Thus, it is a figure that enables a reprobation of the status quo and its reconfiguration under a post-human and post-anthropocentric light. From this approach, it reflects critically the culture from which it emerges, inciting an active response to the injustices of the present.
Copyright (c) 2025 Manuel Santana Hernández http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
«Otros tiempos, otras crueldades». Monstruosity and police repression in Griselda Gambaro (1927) and Mariana Enriquez (1978)
In this article we will analyse the stories «Nosferatu» by Griselda Gambaro and «El monstruo» by Mariana Enriquez, with the aim of exploring representations of the monstrous in relation to social violence and police repression. Through the figure of the vampire in Gambaro and the devouring underwater monster in Enriquez, metaphors for power and control emerge. These monstrous creatures, whether victims or perpetrators, symbolise the latent presence of oppression in society and the ways in which authority consumes its victims, reflecting dynamics of terror and submission.
Copyright (c) 2025 Sara Barberán Abad http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
(Re)formulations of the Monstrousness and Isolation at «Et vaig donar ulls i vas mirar les tenebres»
Solà gathers from the Catalan popular tradition the elements with which they construct a story full of beasts, through a house and over time, narrating the isolation of its inhabitants and the relationship that these women establish with the devil in all its forms and its effects. Although the play of deformities is a common element in many stories, present us with the violence to which non-normative and dissident bodies are subjected in many past —and present— contexts. The home being at the same time both an element of protection and of castration of the subjects who inhabit it and, starting from the indiscriminate mutilation and the monstrification of the Norm over the subjects, this text will address the affective and fantastic elements and the mutability of the memory, as well as the possibilities that isolation can offer, understood as a space for experimenting with alterities and for changing the paradigm of the feminine monster in the time frame covered by the novel.
Copyright (c) 2025 Jose Manuel Llopis Piquero http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
«I Was Born With Wings For a Reason»: Trans Witch Figurations in Hurricaine Season (Melchor, 2017) and Brujas (Lozano, 2021)
In recent years, Latin American women narrators have demonstrated a growing interest in themes and motifs related to horror frameworks, with a notable emphasis on the representation of the monstrous. The figure of the witch, often reinterpreted or updated, has been chosen by various authors to address issues of gender and sexuality. In this context, this article analyzes the trans witch characters created by the Mexican authors Fernanda Melchor in Temporada de huracanes (2017) and Brenda Lozano with Brujas (2021). To do so, we will align key theoretical perspectives on the monstrous with the developments in trans studies concerning this figure and apply them to the aforementioned novels. We conclude that these works dialogue with the main theoretical strands of both traditions and contribute, in a novel way, to the re-actualisation of the witch from a liberating perspective on trans identity, analogous to the process of its feminist reinterpretation.
Copyright (c) 2025 Iris de Benito Mesa, Juan Martínez Gil http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The conquest of collectivity through a memory with transformative potential: Al fondo de la escena (2011), by María Teresa Cervantes
The recent publication of the complete works of María Teresa Cervantes, edited by Fran Garcerá with a prologue by Francisco Díaz de Castro, by Torremozas publishing house, represents a valuable rescue of her extensive poetic career. This volume of almost a thousand pages covers a large part of the first decades of the 21st century, showing that Cervantes' poetic work intensified beyond the 1950s and 1960s, when she was linked to the mid-century generation. Her poetry is characterised by a personal commitment in the face of an unfavourable present for women poets, similar to that of contemporaries such as Carmen Conde, Concha Lagos and María Beneyto. Her voluntary exile to Paris and Germany, escaping from an oppressive family environment, influenced her style and led her to adopt an outsider's perspective. His training in languages and his experience of the 1968 revolution enriched his later work with reflections of universal scope. From first years of the XXIst century, her poetry was oriented towards the memory of youth and homeland, undertaking a recovery of the past in order to understand the present in an elegiac key and through notions of experientiality from a phenomenological perspective. This paper analyses Al fondo de la escena (2011) from the perspective of remembrance as collective memory, underlining the need to re-evaluate Cervantes within literary historiography in order to avoid new exclusions.
Copyright (c) 2025 María Eugenia Alava Carrascal http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The hermeneutic experience of dialogue in Hermann Broch's Der Tod des Vergil
This article is a hermeneutic reading of the conversation between Augustus and Virgil in Hermann Broch's novel Der Tod des Vergil (1945) [The Death of Virgil]. Drawing on the hermeneutic conceptions of dialogue put forward by Gadamer and Szondi, we question the nature of the dialogue between the emperor and the poet about the fate of the Aeneid, and whether or not understanding is possible. The dialectical oscillation resulting from the hermeneutic analysis deployed leads us, beyond the two canonically established interpretations (Weigand and Komar), to propose an alternative interpretation of Virgil's final decision to hand over his manuscript. This interpretation illuminates the relationship between literature and power.
Copyright (c) 2025 Etna Miró http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Bolivian identity through the contemporary tales: Wilmer Urrelo and Giovanna Rivero
Bolivia is a country marked by a situation of marginalization and dissidence, a forgotten country within the richness and multiculturalism of Latin America, which is becoming increasingly prominent in the literary world and is also marked by a culture and a way of thinking of Aymara origin that has much to tell. In addition to the reasons mentioned above, those that urge us to talk about this country are: the disparity of voices, which is marked by a series of common elements such as identity issues and by a series of stigmatizing elements established in society. Another reason may be its role in current literature, as a literary identity in current evolution and expansion, which stands out for the fact that it has found in the short story a literary genre that is conducive to it, which is also intimately linked to its national tradition. The tales selected for this approach are two short stories: one by Wilmer Urrelo Zárate, entitled ¿Será este el momento de quemar a quien tanto temo? and another by Giovanna Rivero entitled Pasó como un espíritu. Both stories offer us a perspective of a problematic past and a dystopian future, which seem, in a way, to have a conversation with each other as they are set against each other; they are also closely related to themes that are very much present today. In such a way that, from the analysis of both stories, we can obtain a panoramic view of the events that have been shaping an identity marked by clear variegation, the result of the non-assimilation of the different identities that make up this plurinational state.
Copyright (c) 2025 Félix López Hernández http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Towards a Transmedial Reception of a Novel and its Film Adaptation: Santiago Roncagliolo's La pena máxima
Santiago Roncagliolo’s La pena máxima (2014) explores the link between football and national identities in Peru and Argentina, highlighting how their totalitarian regimes used the 1978 World Cup to improve their reputations. Given that this novel was adapted for the cinema (Michel Gómez, 2022), the question arises of how these problematic national images are reproduced in the movie and how they are interpreted by the critics for both media in Peru. Unlike the reviews of the novel, those that focus on the film concentrate on the formal aspects and do not delve as deeply into the social and political implications of the plot. In this way, the reception not only seems to be influenced by the medium to which it refers, but also ends up shaping the national images themselves.
Copyright (c) 2025 Erwin Snauwaert, Lara Delchambre http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Via Lucis: the monstrous poetics of the self or how the tragic crosses the body through the profanation of the sacred
The crisis of language in contemporary times has led to a paradigm shift in the arts that translates into a systematically deformed aesthetic with the display of the tragic on the body through the abject. This is materialised in the violence linked to the notion of the monster, which implies the reconfiguration of what we understand by beauty not only from an aesthetic point of view, but also from an epistemological one. With this in mind, in Via Lucis (2015) Angélica Liddell questions her own existence through the exploration of corporeal limits. The mystical-sublime experience that makes resurrection possible is expressed with the artist’s damaged body, combining aesthetic enjoyment with the forbidden and the visceral from the dimension of the divine. In this vein, a deformed vision of the religious ideology is presented through the autolytic and the grotesque. In this way, the aim is to reflect on how suffering is experienced in and on the body in conflict with the aim of transcending to the plane of the sacred through an imperious need for self-destruction.
Copyright (c) 2025 Carla Vilariño Viaño http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
New beauty: Woman, Ominous and Monstrosity
This article analyses the canon of female beauty as an outstanding form of contemporary symbolic violence. Relevant women writers rebel against its imposition, defending a monstrous new beauty hostile to stereotypes. I will analyse its exhibitionist and ominous character, interested in taking part of the museum and based on the praise of imperfection.
Copyright (c) 2025 Francisca Noguerol Jiménez http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Gethen as Yin Utopia: Taoism in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness
This article analyzes Taoism in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) from a philosophical, ethical and ecological perspective. Based on these concepts, the author explains how she constructs a "yin utopia". This relationship between utopia, Taoism, and the possible world influences the construction of charecters, the relationships between them, and the spatiotemporal concepts proposed, with implications of gender, nature, and government that formally influence the very structure of the novel. For this analysis, I propose a methodology constructed from Taoist theories and Le Guin's writings on them, which could be applied to other works with "yin utopias", both by Le Guin and by other authors.
Copyright (c) 2025 Paula López Gómez http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
From "Today, we're having dinner, family!" to "Today, we're having family for dinner!". Monstrous maternities in El cielo de la selva (2023), by Elaine Vilar Madruga
In the realm of gender studies and feminist movements, numerous artistic expressions challenge the hermeticism traditionally linked to the paradigm of motherhood, exposing its fissures and complexities. A notable example is El cielo de la selva (2023) by Elaine Vilar Madruga. Accordingly, this study aims to analyse the progressive deconstruction of the Victorian concept of the «Angel of the House» to account for new configurations of the maternal role. It will also explore how, in the face of a harrowing reality marked by drug trafficking and violence against subaltern subjects, the female figure employs monstrosity as her primary form of resistance
Copyright (c) 2025 Marina Capasso http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The impulse of reading through dance: a study beyond words
The present study introduces the importance that comparative literature has in promoting the reading habit among university students. The link between the chosen disciplines is optimal to achieve the main objective of this work, which is to enjoy reading. On this learning path, the group will discover the relevance of literature when it comes to promoting critical thinking and reading comprehension, as well as the ability to reflect. In this sense, literary texts are explained through scenic representations, where literature and dance combine in a didactic, dynamic and interdisciplinary way. So, this proposal will be worked on with a group of students from the Official Degree in Primary Education, students who are between 21 and 47 years old and who will discover a new way of approach literature, where the plurality of methodological approaches will facilitate creativity and innovation in the teaching-learning process. Likewise, the fundamental role that the variety of approaches and methods plays in the promotion of literature both inside and outside the classroom is confirmed, where reading constitute a pleasure and personal enjoyment.
Copyright (c) 2025 María de Gracia Rodríguez Fernández http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Manuel Álvarez Ortega's intertextual bestiary (1967-1980)
This paper aims to address intertextuality between Manuel Álvarez Ortega and French authors he read and translated, such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Lautréamont, Jules Laforgue and André Breton, through the contrastive reading of certain symbolic animals. The analysis is based on the assumptions of animal studies, zoopoetics, and the concepts of humanity, animality, and monstrosity. Through this preliminary approach, centered on the aquatic and insect world, the goal is to confirm the implicit monstrosity conveyed in these figures through hybridism between the human, the animal, the rational and the instinctive, as well as to transcend the animal symbolism previously imposed by Western culture and anthropocentric views.
Copyright (c) 2025 Daniel González Gallego http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Yukio Mishima's "Confessions of a Mask" (1949)
This article analyzes the role that homosexuality plays in Yukio Mishima’s bildungsroman Confessions of a Mask. To do so, both the paratext and the literary form have been enquired into. In addition, this article focuses on the experiences lived by the main character in order to prove that his sexual orientation generates tension regarding form and content and that this tension results in the questioning of heteronormativity.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ane Matres García http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Elizabeth Costello ex machina: narrative tedium and metaleptic game in "Slow Man"
This article explores, from the perspective of cognitive literary studies, the process of reception and difficult literary transportation of the figure of the real or empirical reader of the novel Slow Man by J. M. Coetzee. To do this, the metaleptic game produced by the appearance of its fictional writer, Elizabeth Costello, is addressed when it comes to explicitly combating throughout the pages of the novel the narrative tedium in which its protagonist, Paul Rayment, is immersed.
Copyright (c) 2025 Jose Valenzuela http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
"Palace of the Peacock". Wilson Harris and the scansion of language
Wilson Harris's first novel, The Palace of the Peacock (1960), narrates the journey of a river expedition through the jungles of Guyana. This novel has been read as being determined by the search for identity or a kind of destined truth, represented by the almost symbolic-mystical journey of characters in whose development they understand themselves. In contrast to an identitarian reading, the essay proposes that Harris has no ownership of language and no language of his own. Thus, Issues of passage, threshold, and crossing run through the narrative. Grammar, semantics, and syntax are twisted. Like the temporality of the story, the syntactic relations enter into a sort of ellipsis or spiral. Thus, rather than expression of a previous content, fulfillment or reconstitution, language is limbo. If there is no originary language, The Palace of the Peacock thus names the scansion of language
Copyright (c) 2025 Javier Pavez http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Fantastic poetry in Mexico: three nocturnes by Xavier Villaurrutia
This article is a fantastic reading of three nocturnes by the Mexican poet Xavier Villaurrutia. Through some guidelines of the author's poetics, a link is established with the definitions of the theory of the fantastic, essentially based on the idea of ​​confrontation between the real and the impossible. This link is described in the three selected poems (“Nocturno en que habla la muerte”, “Nocturno miedo” and “Nocturno en que nada se oye”), which involve different modes and levels of manifestation of the fantastic system. Finally, through the analysis of the poems, a broader exploration of Mexican fantastic poetry is suggested, regarding a couple of examples.
Copyright (c) 2025 Alexis Márquez Ayala http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Liberated Tongue of Elaine Vilar Madruga: Heroism, Sexuality and Gender in "La tiranía de las moscas" (2021)
This article explores contemporary Cuban narrative written by women, focusing on the figure of Elaine Vilar Madruga, a prominent representative of the new Generation 0.1. Through an analysis of her novel La tiranía de las moscas (2021), we examine the categories of heroism, sexuality, and gender —three constants that permeate Cuban literature of the revolutionary period. In this case, the author constructs new ways of thinking to challenge power and the established system through an innovative and critical perspective that enriches the current literary landscape.
Copyright (c) 2025 Cristina Asencio Serrano http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Wild Vulnerability of Paul B. Preciado in "Dysphoria Mundi"
Autotheory as a genre serves to encompass all artistic productions (not only literary) that overcome the friction between theory and art through self-representation. This line has a strong presence in postfeminist thought and manifests a revitalization of philosophy, art, and activism from a provocative and reivindicative autotheoretical approach. As a literary genre, it is defined and expanded in the 21st century, but it has illustrious precedents in writings framed in the theoretical paradigm shift of the second half of the 20th century. Dysphoria Mundi is a fragmentary book that partakes in philosophy and personal diary. Preciado criticizes traditional identity politics and proposes that gender dysphoria is not a mental illness, but a political and aesthetic inadequacy. He suggests a new form of subjectivation that transcends binary categories, advocating for a new language and a revolution in progress.
Copyright (c) 2025 Javier Alonso Prieto http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
"She had brought her thighs to her belly, opened her legs like a book”. Rewritings of Apollinaire in “South of the Eyelids” by Enrique Vila-Matas
This article focuses on the episodes of violence and sex in Enrique Vila-Matas's novel South of the Eyelids (1980), issues that make this novel a unique text in his entire body of work. Episodes that are another example of the poetics of intertextuality so characteristic of Vila-Matas’ work, which are appropriations of Guillaume Apollinaire’s novel The Eleven Thousand Dicks.
Guillaume Apollinaire's The Thousand Eleven Dicks
Copyright (c) 2025 T´ua Blesa http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Francisco Nieva and Carlos Edmundo de Ory
From the rich archive of Carlos Edmundo de Ory we delve into his friendship with Francisco Nieva. They both met in 1948 in Madrid, when Nieva was a painter. Between 1948 and 1950 they lived a very intense friendship and even lived under the same roof, as Ory stayed at Pilar Nieva's house. Several poems by Ory and drawings by Nieva date from those years that portray their relationship, their evenings with Emilia Palomo, Carlos' girlfriend at the time, and the erotic fantasies, confidences, pranks and ceremonies shared by two imaginative and artistically ambitious young people who considered themselves "little brothers in the milk of Satan." The last literary fruit of that relationship could be Nieva's Lady Tártara (released in 1980), a farce and calamity feature written in 1970 whose protagonist Ary, according to an unpublished text by Nieva, was inspired by Ory, although Nieva never confessed this to his old friend.
Relationship between C. E. de Ory and Francisco Nieva
Post-avant-garde poetry and painting in Spain
Copyright (c) 2025 Ana Sofía Pérez-Bustamante Mourier http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Monster he was. Luisgé Martín's Conquest of Identity in El amor del revés (2016)
Luisgé Martín's autobiography El amor del revés (2016) is a paradigmatic example in Spanish literature of how hegemonic discourses affect the construction of identity, as it narrates the long process of self-acceptance as a gay man experienced by its protagonist. To analyse that process, this article focuses on the manifestations of the abject and the monstrous that appear throughout the text and which refer to the author's perception of himself before recognising his sexuality.
Copyright (c) 2025 Oier Quincoces http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Daniel MORTIER, Le Plaisir de lire des romans. Paris: Garnier, 2023, 257 pp.
The Pleasure of Reading Novels is the latest work by comparatist Daniel Mortier (1947-2019), a specialist in the reception of Brecht in France, the final draft of which could only be completed thanks to the collaboration of family and disciples, due to the premature disappearance of the author. Based on the specific experience of readers, this monograph aims to investigate in a synthetic but complete way, from different analytical perspectives, the processes that make reading novels pleasurable.
Copyright (c) 2025 Miguel A. Olmos http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Lewis Carroll and Alicie under the sign of Cervantes
This article examines the connections between English and Spanish literature through an analysis of space, characters, and metafiction, comparing Miguel de Cervantes and Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605–1615) with Lewis Carroll and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871). These three novels and their authors share analogous elements related to the dreams experienced by the protagonists of the stories. These aspects are explored through a comparative narratological and thematological analysis.
Copyright (c) 2025 Alejandro Hernández Pérez http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Abstract: An exploration of Poet in New York based on Lorca's will to construct the work. The duration of its elaboration is considered, in order to question the architecture of the collection of poems, the lines of force that sustain it, under the sign of a mythification of the number ten, which orphically writes childhood, from the paradox of a timelessness with its own time. Herein lies the role of Lorca's 'panorama', a factor of secret and numerical unifications, a profoundly poetic gesture that gives a new and liberating meaning to life and to the voice. Keywords: Lorca, New York, structuring, symbol, Orphism, childhood.
Copyright (c) 2025 Laurence Breysse Chanet http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Introduction: Another sentimental education: forms and stories for other lifes
Copyright (c) 2025 Erea Fernández Folgueiras, Andrea Navacerrada http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0