EDITORIAL

Welcome to the 23rd issue of La Palabra journal, in which we continue to work on disseminating research results in the general field of literature. We have advanced in the journal's archiving process, after its acceptance into a number of data bases that give greater visibility to the works published. Nevertheless, the bittersweet taste of this task is evident, in finding that we seem to be heading towards a world where form is more important than content. In the last evaluation of our journal by Publindex --the Colombian Archiving System for Academic Journals in Science and Technology--, we "missed" obtaining category B for one article: we needed to have published 11 articles of type 1, 2 and 3 in the last year, and the final result, according to the evaluation, was that only 10 were accepted, which were considered to correspond to this typology.

Given this experience, it is urgent to ask who has the power to define the typology of an article without familiarity with the writing of the article, its context, or the inquiry it emerges from: its research questions, its discipline, and the research passion necessary to write any of the articles sent to a journal like ours. Perhaps in fields of the Social Sciences, Applied Sciences and in other disciplines --which possess an epistemological status less closely related with digression, reflection, variation, polysemy, and the construction of possible worlds-- a closed typology is pertinent, given that work in these areas intrinsically implies objectivity, for which it is more reasonable to talk about precise classifications.

Nevertheless, in the field of Humanities, and even more, in the field of Literature, these classifications of today's scientific and academic world truly miss the point; because the majority of the time, there is no possible correspondence between such formalist pretensions and the presumption of an absolute truth.

Once again, Mihail Bakhtin's statement in The dialogical principle regarding the inferiority complex of the human sciences with respect to the natural sciences is made evident; only, this time, with an increment of oppression due to formal productivity measures and journal evaluation techniques, that seem not to include a reflection on the journal's contents, current academic panorama or true contribution to society and culture.

We insist once again, that if we have accepted this game of productivity measurement and evaluation, it is because, unfortunately, this is the most adequate route to give visibility to our publication. We commit to continuing in this struggle, nevertheless we reaffirm our critical position with respect to this work; and in the meantime, we present the reader with the articles that compose this issue. The following four sections were constituted for issue 23, based on the different articles presented for peer review, which passed the different evaluation stages:

The first sections: "Colombian Literature" contains two articles. One is a reflection on the diverse elements that compose the novel La otra raya del tigre [The other stripe of the tiger], based on Nestor García Canclini's concept of "cultural hybridization". The second article is an analysis of Piedad Bonnet's poetry which focuses on the themes of childhood, memory, eroticism and the city.

The second section, "Chilean Literature" contains two articles dedicated to the poetry of Cecilia Vicuña and to the erotic short stories of Andrea Maturana. In the light of these two articles, we find an original contribution to the field of Chilean Literature studies, due to the fact that these two writers are not very well known in other Latin American countries. In addition, these articles portray a reflection contextualized in the time in which these works were written, with the backdrop or under the shadow of the dictatorship, without which it still seems impossible to speak about the Chilean literature of the XX century.

The third section is called "Latin American Literature", and is composed by an article about the letters written by Juan Rulfo to his wife Clara between the periods of 1944 and 1950, when Rulfo moved to Mexico City to work in a factory, a period in which he feels a permanent longing for that love that he holds at a distance. The second article is an approximation to the concept of identity in the novel Macunaíma, by the Brazilian writer Mario de Andrade.

The fourth section contains the results of a research project developed at the UPTC Masters in Literature, where the author explores the concept of feminine oppression and its relation with literary writing. Finally, we find a review of a book published by Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas in Bogotá, about a study of the novel in Colombia between 1998 and 2008, and a translation into French of the short story "Litchis de Madagascar" [Madagascar Litchis] by the writer from Bogotá: Alberto Bejarano.

Thus we present our readers with issue 23 of La Palabra journal, in the hope that it will be read, commented and criticized.

Witton Becerra Mayorga
Editor