We propose to study Marcel Proust’s text ‘The Death of Baldassare Silvande’ included in his early work The Pleasures and the Days [1896] in the light of his reading of Lev Tolstoy’s nouvelle The Death of Ivan Ilyich [1886]. Some scholarship has already recognised the direct relationship between the two published works and argues that Proust, through his early literary writings, imitated Tolstoy’s narrative. However, in the present study, from an aesthetic-hermeneutic reading and with a compar...

This article proposes a study of the gaze and the visible in the work of the Mexican writer José Revueltas (1914-1976) based on an analysis of some of the most recurrent optical devices in his narrative: convex mirrors, the oblique gaze and the eye of the cyclops. These “depraved perspectives” will lead, in the late work written in confinement, to a visual device with deep baroque roots: anamorphosis, a visual device that requires the decentring of the point of view in order to restore the me...

M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! showcases an anti-narrative quality that prompts unsettling feelings linked to the gaps of an African presence in the archives related to the Middle Passage. By opening said archive, poetry gains a restorative feature that triggers an undoing of written language and its violence as well as a reintroduction of the voices of the victims back into the collective memory. This article proposes an approximation to Philip’s poetry through the lens of submerged hauntology a...

Anne Sexton's poetry, as is the case with that of Sylvia Plath and other poets representative of the confessional movement from the 20th century, is usually constrained to interpretations focused on her personal life (Gill, 2013: 10). Although the autobiographical nature of her work is an element to consider when approaching her poems, engaging in a reading that focuses on this aspect alone excludes the possibility of inserting it within a broader social framework. For this reason, I propose ...