Two wonderful presentations yesterday. Leslie Bayers, our own graduate student, gave a talk in the Poetics Seminar about visuality in contemporary Peruvian poetry. She has trained herself to read this poetry, which draws on everthing from Borges and Charles Olson to Inca traditions.

Then Laura Freixas gave a talk about how the Spanish press reviews novels written by women. The semiotic code is a very simple one: "masculine = good; feminine bad."

Thus a favorable review of a woman's novel will say: "it's not like those other, bad books that we normally associate with women's writing."

An unfavorable review of a book written by a man will say "it appeals to the female reader."

A positive review of a man's book will make no mention of gender.

A negative review of a woman's novel will associate the badness of the book with the author's femininity.

It could be one of the Greimasian squares--if I only remembered how to do them.