- Rebeca Gualberto Valverde is assistant professor at the Complutense University of Madrid, where she teaches at the De... moreRebeca Gualberto Valverde is assistant professor at the Complutense University of Madrid, where she teaches at the Department of English Studies. In 2015 she completed her PhD in Literary Studies with honours at the Complutense University of Madrid, where she also got her BA in English in 2009 and her MA in Literary Studies in 2010. With the financial aid of a UCM scholarship, she carried out part of her doctoral research at the University of Edinburgh, UK, where she stayed as a visiting postgraduate student in 2013. Besides her literary and philological background, Prof. Gualberto also has work experience and an academic background in education. She holds a MA in Teaching by UNED (National Distance Education University) and has taught in the field of education in the Faculty of Humanities at Isabel I International University and in the Department of Education, Behaviour and Society at the European University of Madrid. Her academic interests and fields of research mostly focus on the study of myths and of mythical representation in literature as a critical prism to explore literature and culture from a social, political and ideological perspective. She is especially interested the applying myth-criticism to literature of modernism, and currently exploring the new field of metamodernsit studies.edit
At the dawn of 'ecocriticism' as a discipline of study within the Humanities, Glotfelty and Fromm (1996), in the first general reader in the matter, defined it as the critical practice that examines the relationship between literary and... more
At the dawn of 'ecocriticism' as a discipline of study within the Humanities, Glotfelty and Fromm (1996), in the first general reader in the matter, defined it as the critical practice that examines the relationship between literary and cultural studies and the natural world. In general terms, during the past two decades, ecocriticism has denounced the anthropocentric and instrumental appropriation of nature that has for so long legitimized human exploitation of the nonhuman world. Exposing the logic of domination that articulates the very power relationships that both connect and separate human culture and natural life, recent trends in ecocriticism have raised awareness of the 'otherisation' of nature (Huggan and Tiffin, 2015), pointing out the need of assessing insurgent discourses that—converging with counter-discourses of race, gender or class— realize the empowerment of nature from its subaltern position. But such empowerment of nature first requires that the sundering of human and nonhuman realms is overcome since, as Kate Rigby explains, only by regaining " a sense of the inextricability of nature and culture, physis and techne, earth and artifact—consumption and destruction—would be to move beyond (…) the arrogance of humanism " (2002, p. 152). Yet, recognizing such inextricable relationship between human and natural while overcoming the arrogance of anthropocentrism entails the ecocritical admission that all cultural discourses are in fact exploitative of nature. Rigby states it clearly while explaining, " culture constructs the prism through which we know nature " (p. 154). We comprehend nature when we apprehend the world through language and representation, but nature precedes and exceeds words; it is therefore " real " (1992, p. 32) and separated by an abyss from the symbolic networks of culture that write, master, assign a meaning to and attempt to set nature in order. From this perspective, culture is not exactly the end of nature as much as it is an appropriation and colonization of nature. Culture masters, dominates and instrumentalizes the natural world. However, in a time when the " end of nature " that Bill McKibben prophesized in 1989 has been certified, when we know for a fact that it is indeed a different Earth we are living in—because by changing the climate there is not a corner of the planet that has not been affected by our actions—the evidence of global ecological endangerment compels the ecocritical debate to install environmental ethics and concerns at the crux of humanistic research. The critical enterprise is far from easy though. The argument that cultural representations of nature establish a relationship of domination and exploitation of human discourse over nonhuman reality is extendible to the critical task. As humanist critics, our regard of nature in literary and artistic representation is instrumental and anthropocentric. But the time has come to
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Most critics of Bernard Malamud's The Natural (1952) have focused their analysis of the novel on probing the obvious mythical allusions in the text that combine Arthurian mythology and baseball folklore. More recent discussions, however,... more
Most critics of Bernard Malamud's The Natural (1952) have focused their analysis of the novel on probing the obvious mythical allusions in the text that combine Arthurian mythology and baseball folklore. More recent discussions, however, have raised the issue of the novel's symbolic ambiguity which for so long has vexed Malamud scholars. As a response to this debate, the aim of this study is to address such indeterminacy by revisiting and bringing up to date a myth-critical interpretation on the novel, exploring how the mythical artifacts in Malamud's text construe mechanisms of uncertainty and ambivalence that express an unsettling vision of postwar American society, which in turn deserves renewed critical attention.
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This article explores, from the standpoint of socio-political myth-criticism, the processes of revision and adaptation carried out in Gary Owen’s 2015 play Iphigenia in Splott. The play, a dramatic monologue composed in the rhythms of... more
This article explores, from the standpoint of socio-political myth-criticism, the processes of revision and adaptation carried out in Gary Owen’s 2015 play Iphigenia in Splott. The play, a dramatic monologue composed in the rhythms of slam poetry, rewrites the classical Greek myth of Iphigenia in order to denounce the profound injustice of the sacrifices demanded by austerity policies in Europe—and more specifically, in Britain—in the recession following the financial crash of 2008. Reassessing contemporary social, economic and political issues that have resulted in the marginalisation and dehumanisation of the British working class, this study probes the dramatic and mythical artefacts in Owen’s harrowing monologue by looking back to Euripides’s Iphigenia in Aulis, the classical play which inspires the title of Owen’s piece and which serves as the mythical and literary background for the story of Effie. The aim is to demonstrate how Owen’s innovative adaptation of the sacrifice of ...
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The aim of this study is to suggest a new assessment of Katherine Anne Porter’s semi-autobiographical account of her near-death experience with the 1918 flu, Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), considered by many as the paradigmatic American... more
The aim of this study is to suggest a new assessment of Katherine Anne Porter’s semi-autobiographical account of her near-death experience with the 1918 flu, Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), considered by many as the paradigmatic American narrative of that pandemic. Following the trend set by most critics of Porter, this article explores the intersections of memory and fiction in the novella, but shifting attention to our present-day response, assessed as a critical tool that provides renewed insight into the mysteries of Porter’s late-modernist text. Revisited in a context in which cultural memories of the 1918 influenza have been awakened by our own traumatic experience with COVID-19, this article seeks to probe the uncertainties in Porter’s aestheticized trauma narrative. The aim is to investigate the hypothesis that our contemporary reading of Pale Horse, Pale Rider illuminates the modernist obscurities in the text and, in consequence, raises the possibility of transcending the li...
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The aim of this paper is to reassess John Steinbeck’s presence and significance within American modernism by advancing a myth-critical reading of his early novel “To a God Unknown” (1933). Considering the interplay between this novel and... more
The aim of this paper is to reassess John Steinbeck’s presence and significance within American modernism by advancing a myth-critical reading of his early novel “To a God Unknown” (1933). Considering the interplay between this novel and the precedent literary tradition and other contextual aspects that might have influenced Steinbeck’s text, this study explores Steinbeck’s often disregarded novel as an eloquent demonstration of the malleability of myths characteristic of Anglo-American modernism. Taking myth-ritualism—the most prominent approach to myth at the time—as a critical prism to reappraise Steinbeck’s own reshaping of modernist aesthetics, this article examines recurrent frustrated and misguided ritual patterns along with the rewriting of flouted mythical motifs as a series of aesthetic choices that give shape and meaning to a state of stagnation common to the post-war American literary landscapes, but now exacerbated as it has finally spread, as a plague of perverse remyt...
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En la ultima decada hemos asistido al creciente protagonismo de los estudios transatlanticos, dialogos criticos sobre un variado numero de disciplinas entre academicos de ambos lados del oceano. Este volumen recoge la XI edicion de las... more
En la ultima decada hemos asistido al creciente protagonismo de los estudios transatlanticos, dialogos criticos sobre un variado numero de disciplinas entre academicos de ambos lados del oceano. Este volumen recoge la XI edicion de las Jornadas Internacionales de Estudios de la Mujer que abordaron la existencia de cuestiones de genero desde el caracter pluridisciplinar de los estudios transatlanticos, en la creencia de que el interes etico de la igualdad trasciende, tambien, fronteras y oceanos.
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The aim of this article is to probe instances of dramatic self-construction through the performance of disobedience as enacted by the female protagonists of Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam, critically exploring, in close relation... more
The aim of this article is to probe instances of dramatic self-construction through the performance of disobedience as enacted by the female protagonists of Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam, critically exploring, in close relation to one another, Mariam’s changing self-presentation from public loquacity to purposeful stoic silence, and Salome’s transgression of the sex-gender system. As will be argued, these two performances of female subjectivity trigger a current of social change by destabilizing the naturalized patriarchal authority that sustains political order. For, as it will be explored, the public self-construction of feminine identities in Cary’s play—mostly through the utterance of a public speech—creates a dramatic and textual space in which rebellious and transformative notions of female selfhood can negotiate the timely tensions between moral permanence and political change.
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El objetivo general de este proyecto de investigacion es explorar, a partir de la interpretacion mitocritica de un corpus de obras seleccionadas, el proceso de representacion y reinterpretacion del mito arturico de la Tierra Baldia en... more
El objetivo general de este proyecto de investigacion es explorar, a partir de la interpretacion mitocritica de un corpus de obras seleccionadas, el proceso de representacion y reinterpretacion del mito arturico de la Tierra Baldia en diferentes etapas de la tradicion literaria en lengua inglesa. Con ello, este trabajo analiza criticamente las repercusiones ideologicas que tiene la utilizacion de los relatos miticos en la practica literaria. Asi, esta tesis doctoral somete a examen la hipotesis de que, en efecto, los mitos articulan ideologias de poder dominantes, las cuales operan como garantes del orden politico-social de una determinada comunidad. Frente a esto, la representacion literaria del mito puede analizarse como una representacion subversiva (o subvertida, al menos) de aquel, lo cual resulta en la formacion de narraciones que funcionan como contra-discursos que desafian y se oponen a los discursos dominantes en torno al orden social y a la estabilidad politica contenidos ...
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espanolThe Turn of the Screw (1898) es un texto marcado por la ambivalencia, asi como por la confluencia de realidades aparentemente contradictorias. Se trata de un texto ambiguo a todos los efectos que ha generado un debate critico muy... more
espanolThe Turn of the Screw (1898) es un texto marcado por la ambivalencia, asi como por la confluencia de realidades aparentemente contradictorias. Se trata de un texto ambiguo a todos los efectos que ha generado un debate critico muy controvertido a lo largo de decadas. El objetivo de este articulo es revaluar la novella desde el paradigma de lo ‘fantastico’, tal y como este queda formulado por Tzvetan Todorov en 1970, para asi integrar puntos de vista tradicionalmente opuestos. En efecto, las caracteristicas de lo fantastico identificadas por Todorov se asocian generalmente a los rasgos mas comunes de la ficcion gotica; sin embargo, este articulo arguye que los elementos fantasticos que Todorov atribuye a The Turn of the Screw son simultaneamente goticos y modernistas, y por tanto establecen un continuo de significado que puede de hecho armonizar acercamientos criticos que, convencionalmente, se han considerado no ya divergentes, sino irreconciliables. EnglishHenry James’s The T...
This article aims to reassess F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic The Great Gatsby (1925), taking into consideration the myth-critical hypotheses of philosopher René Girard. Specifically, this essay will analyse the concepts of mimetic desire,... more
This article aims to reassess F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic The Great Gatsby (1925), taking into consideration the myth-critical hypotheses of philosopher René Girard. Specifically, this essay will analyse the concepts of mimetic desire, resentment and reprisal violence as emotional components of myth, paying close attention to how the reinterpreted mythical pattern of the novel influences the depiction of such emotions as social traits of corruption. Finally, this article will challenge interpretations that have regarded Gatsby as a successful scapegoat-figure, examining instead how the mythical meanings and structures of the text stage an emotional crisis of frustrated desire and antagonism that ultimately offers no hope of communal restoration.