April 2011
Latin American
Literature & the Environment
Dear OMETECA friends and subscribers,
I am pleased to announce the publication of OMETECA
Journal Volume 16, a special issue on Latin American
Literature and the Environment under
the direction of our Guest Editor Beatriz Rivera-Barnes, Penn State University.
We hope you will
want to receive this new special issue, and to support the efforts of the
Ometeca Institute. Subscriptions for this special volume are US$20
per volume for individuals and US$35.00 for institutions in the U.S., Canada, Mexico;
US$30.00 for individuals and US$40.00 for institutions in Europe, Australia, and
Japan; US$22.00 for individuals and US$28.00 for institutions elsewhere.
Send orders to: Ometeca Institute:
Here is the preface by our guest editor: I feel honored to have been granted the
opportunity to serve as guest editor of the 2011 issue of the Ometeca Journal. I was pleasantly surprised
to have received many submissions for this issue both from scholars familiar
with Ometeca, and from having posted
a call for papers in the ASLE (Association for the Studies of Literature and
the Environment) website. The result speaks for itself: a collection of
remarkable essays. Unfortunately, I was not able to include all accepted essays in this volume and do hope that those
authors who submitted excellent papers not included here for lack of space will
consider submitting the same papers for the 2012 edition of Ometeca.
The goal of this volume on Latin American
Literature and the environment is to provide our readers with multiple
approaches to the Latin American landscape. In the spirit of Ometeca, authors
were invited to explore the many connections between the humanities and the
sciences. Each and every one of the essays presented here can be considered a
unique way of scrutinizing specific ecological implications and the
relationship between man and nature, or nature and culture, in a text. Some of
the questions involved in the papers compiled in this volume are: How does a
text represent the physical world? What moral questions are raised relative to
man’s interaction with nature? How does a text bring the reader’s awareness to
a specific ecosystem? The hope is that such an approach will prove that
deforestation and pollution are tangible and measurable realities, shed light
on how to preserve the remaining forests, control or curve pollution, promote
conservation, and also contribute to a dialogue between the arts and the
sciences.
Again, this has been a most rewarding
experience for me. I am looking forward to
the next Ometeca conference in Madrid in 2012 (please see the Call for Papers
in this issue) and, indeed, to all further opportunities to
contribute to Ometeca's various scholarly
endeavors.
— Beatriz
Rivera-Barnes, Penn State University
Table of
Contents: Articles
Amazonian El Dorados and the Nation: Euclides
da Cunha’s À Margem da História and
José Eustasio Rivera’s La Vorágine, by Rex P. Nielson: p. 16
Negotiating Colonial
Roots and Gendered Places: Machismo and Feminism in Esmeralda Santiago’s América’s Dream, by Alison Van Nyhuis: p. 32
Houssay, canon literario argentino, by Ariel
Barrios Medina: p. 57
“Scientific American”: Histories, Fictions, and Representations, by Sam Smiley: p. 95
Teaching Realism in the Age of Second Life, by Dale J. Pratt: p. 108
Marrying Old and New, by Harriet Turner: p. 113
“The Corrected Pessimist”: Reading Ramón y Cajal as Real through Second Life, by Juan Carlos Martín: p. 117
21st-Century Second Life and the 19th-Century Urtext, or Virtual Reality and Illustrated Narrative: What Aristotle Might Have Said, by Stephen Miller: p. 122
Literary Realism, On and Off the Grid (Teaching Realism in the Age of Second Life®), by Hazel Gold : p. 125
Uncertainty,
Models, Environment, And Effective Answers to
Environmental Deterioration, by Teresa
Kwiatkowska and Wojciech Szatzschneider:
p. 131
Don Quijote and Second Lifen, by Kevin S. Larsen: p. 146
Nuevos escenarios
para la educación y el aprendizaje, by Cristina M. Pogliani, Nora Okulik, and Alicia
H. Jubert: p. 152
Don Juan versus Bacteriology: Competing
Narrative Explanations of the 1918-19 “Spanish” Flu Epidemic in Spain, by Ryan
Davis: p. 171
El
lugar de las humanidades en la educación superior: la propuesta de José
Ingenieros, by Cristina Beatriz Fernández: p. 190
El Desarrollo de las Competencias
Comunicacionales en la Educación del Ingeniero Industrial, by Eduardo A. Castro: p. 205
Book Reviews/Reseñas
A Review of Postpoesía. Hacia un nuevo paradigma, by Fernández Mallo. Madrid: Anagrama,year, 2009, 200 p. Reviewed by Luis I. Prádanos, Texas Tech University: p. 230
Ometeca (ISSN
1041-3650) is a refereed scholarly publication devoted to the relations of the
humanities and science. It publishes theoretical articles on the relations of
humanities and science in general; critical studies on science in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian literatures and cultures; and sciencepoetry. Ometeca publishes in three
languages, English, Portuguese, and Spanish.
Contributions to Ometeca will be welcomed from
throughout the world, in English, Spanish or Portuguese. Manuscripts, following
submission and style requirements described in www.ometeca.org, should be
forwarded to: Jerry Hoeg, Editor, Penn
State-Fayette, P.O. Box 519, Uniontown, PA 15401, U.S.A., 724-430-4265, Email: jvh1@psu.edu
The Ometeca Institute
is a non-profit organization devoted to the study of the relationship of the
humanities and science. “Ometeca” is a word from the Nahuatl (Aztec)
language meaning two in one: humanities and science.
The Ometeca Institute has had Working Session conferences in Santa Fe,
New Mexico and New Brunswick, New Jersey; Puebla, Mexico; San Ramón, Costa
Rica; Cumaná, Venezuela; Buenos Aires and Pinamar, Argentina; Mexico City; San Juan, Puerto Rico, St.
Petersburg, Florida, and at the University of Wyoming, Laramie. Our next conference (working session) will be
in Madrid, Spain 2012 (go to www.ometeca.org
for information). In a working session all papers to be presented are
circulated in advance. In this way, all participants can discuss and contribute
to the development of new theoretical approaches.
All best wishes,
James D. Anderson
Treasurer
& Managing Editor