T U C S P S

Sandra Messinger Cypess

Professor of Latin American Literatures

University of Maryland

Friday, October 23, 2009

2:00-2:30pm Reception

2:30-3:30pm Keynote Presentation

Presentation title: "Love and War Don't Mix: Elena Garro and Octavio Paz in the Spanish Civil War"

Cypess is Professor of Latin American Literatures and former Chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Maryland, College Park She has published numerous studies on the figure of "La Malinche," including her book La Malinche in Mexican Literature: From History to Myth (U Texas P, 1991).  Professor Cypess is co-editor of the section on Drama for the Handbook of Latin American Studies.  She is also co-editor of Essays in Honor of Frank Dauster with Kirsten Nigro, (Juan de la Cuesta Press, 1995); Modern Women Writers:  A Bibliography of Criticism and Interpretation:  Part I, South America, with Rachelle Moore, MLS, and David Kohut, MLS, (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1989); and editor of Studies in Romance Languages and Literatures:  Essays Critical and Contextual, (Coronado Press:  Lawrence, Kansas, 1979).  Her presentation is based on a chapter from her latest book project, tentatively titled "Uncivil Wars: The Battle for Cultural Memory in Mexico through the Works of Elena Garro and Octavio Paz."

Her areas of research interest include Mexican Literature and Cultural Studies; Theatre and Performance Studies; Literary Theory; Feminist theories. These interests motivated her book on La Malinche, considered one of the most important texts on that cultural figure. It is the first in-depth study tracing this powerful icon in texts from the conquest period to the present day. It is also the first study to delineate the transformation of this historical figure into a literary sign with multiple significations. While the focus of the work is based on the literary depiction of La Malinche, she shows that the symbol of La Malinche has changed over time through the impact of sociopolitical events on the literary expression.

Author of numerous studies on the theatre of Latin American, she contributed the chapter on Latin American theatre for The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature, edited by Enrique Pupo-Walker and Roberto González-Echevarría.  Her chapter on Caribbean Theatre appears in A History of Literature in the Caribbean, the primary reference book in this area. She was selected as one of the editors of the drama section for the Handbook of Latin American Studies.  She has written essays on the Mexican dramatists Xavier Villaurrutia, Elena Garro, Emilio Carballido, Sergio Magaña, Sabina Berman, and the Argentines Samuel Eichelbaum, Griselda Gambaro, and Eduardo Rovner, as well as the Puerto Ricans Myrna Casas and Luis Rafael Sánchez.  Her work in theatre explores how examples from this genre offer important representations of critiques of official history as well as subversions of traditional gender relations.

Elena Garro's narratives Los recuerdos del porvenir and "La culpa es de los tlaxcaltecos" led Cypess to uncover the Malinche paradigm in those texts, motivating her to examine the figure diachronically in texts from the Conquest period to the present-day. Once again the work of Garro is the basis of her most recent project, which is a study of the representation of the various wars that inform the texts of Garro and her former husband, the Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz.  As cultural critics, both Paz and Garro wrote about problems and events that relate to gender, ethnicity, and Mexican national identity.  In this project the concept of war is the central theme around which their similarities and differences are explored.  The canonical texts on the theme of war have been written by men, and only recently have women writers attacked the subject, especially as their active roles in war zones have increased. In Mexican literary history, Paz's writings on a wide range of topics are canonical, while Elena Garro is one of the key women writers whose major texts in several genres cover a number of the significant wars that Mexicans have been involved with: the Conquest, the Mexican Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, and the Tlatelolco Massacre of 1968. In examining how these two different writers contribute to the formation of cultural memory about these wars, Cypess once again considers questions of agency, authority, gender, and ideology as factors in cultural production and representation.