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标题：Spanish-American Travelers at Niagara Falls, 1824-1894: A ‘Real’ Confrontation with Nature and Language
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作者：Catherine Vallejo
期刊名称：DECIMONÓNICA
印刷版ISSN：1554-6535
出版年度：2015
卷号：12
期号：1
页码：67
出版社：Utah State University
摘要：In the nineteenth century, many of the intellectuals from Spanish America who traveledto the United Status included a visit to Niagara Falls, a ‘sublime’ experience (as per Burkeand Lyotard) that also produced a need in them to write about it. I maintain that thesetexts demonstrate that the impact of the scene was such that it fundamentally took awaythe writer-traveler’s capacity to express himself in language, a capacity they all struggledto recover. Based on the narratives of ten travelers who visited Niagara in the seventyyears between 1824 (José María Heredia) and 1894 (Paul Groussac), this essay examinesthe experiences of these travelers, which were felt as confrontations: with being in theUnited States, with the powerful natural phenomenon, with the sublime, but above allwith their (lack of) verbal expressive faculty, an especially significant struggle for theseindividuals, who were all (Latin-American) writers. In their totality, these texts formulatethe re-construction of the subject through language, as per the proposals of Jacques Lacanand other contemporary thinkers.