Laurie Garriga at NeMLA
Laurie Garriga, a doctoral student in our Hispanic Language & Literatures program, presented this year at the Northeast Modern Language Association conference. Way to go Laurie!
The title of her presentation was: “Transatlantic Longing: Memory & Nostalgia in Contemporary Spain & Latin America.”
From her abstract:
For centuries, people have been experiencing the devastating loss of a place, and all in it, that meant the world to them. What can be done when the bulk of what we have decided to stow away––all the information we have dearly set in our home as the foundation for memory––is no longer there upon our return? One does as exiles and migrants have always done, and continue to do up to present day: fragments are collected, memory and identity resettled in the image of what was lost halfway around the world.
This project aims to analyze Juan Ramón Jimenez’ response to the loss of his homeland (as well as his library, personal belongings and manuscripts which were ransacked in his Madrid apartment) by studying his peripatetic exile in the Americas and the archive, Sala Zenobia-Juan Ramón, he founded in Puerto Rico. A place where the poet tried recovered what was lost in Spain and at same time where he erected a monument to his gained perspective, that of writer who now considers his work and life within the realms of a transatlantic and panhispanic experience.
