ALPHA. Journal of Arts, Literature and Philosophy
ALPHA. Journal of Arts, Literature and Philosophy is an open-access academic publication edited by the Department of Humanities and Arts of the Universidad de Los Lagos. Since its founding, its aim has been to promote and strengthen dialogue and the exchange of original research articles in Literature, Linguistics, and Philosophy in Spanish. This scope includes collaborations in the arts, cultural studies, critical theory, or topics that, while not belonging exclusively to one of these areas, serve as meeting points and spaces for strengthen these fields of interest. The journal publishes research articles in digital format on a biannual basis, which are evaluated throughout a double-blind peer review system, free of charge to authors. ALPHA is institutionally funded and is indexed in Web of Science, Scopus, SciELO, The MLA International Bibliography, among other international databases.
Departamento de Humanidades y Arte. Universidad de los Lagos.
How well do we distinguish AI-generated voices versus human-generated voices? The context of phone scams
Current technology allows for artificial voice generation. There are numerous software programs available on the web for free that allow reproducing voices from a simple sample of an original speaker. These applications have already been used to conduct telephone scams. We evaluated the performance of non-expert listeners in distinguishing familiar human voices versus voices generated by artificial intelligence (AI) under real-life conditions.
Auditory recognition by non-expert listeners
Copyright (c) 2026 Claudia Rosas, Mateo Castro, Jorge Guzmán https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Quantitative patterns in chilean poems between the 19th and 21st centuries
A quantitative stylometric analysis of Chilean poetry is presented based on a specialized corpus, Corpus de Poesía Chilena (Corpoch), an approach that has advanced significantly since the foundational work of Franco Moretti (Goodwin and Holbo, 2011; Moretti, 2005). This project –unprecedented in providing a systematic corpus– aims to furnish scholars of Chilean poetry with trends, patterns, regularities, and exceptions grounded in robust evidence through computational routines (Yu, 2008; Marchetti, Sprugnoli and Tonelli, 2014) that apply recent advances in Computational and Corpus Linguistics to poetry produced in Chile between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries.
Copyright (c) 2026 Ricardo Martínez-Gamboa, Valeria Araya-Lopetegui, Daniel Mora Melanchthon, Nicolás Acosta, Suyli Aprosio Baricic https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Review of the phonetic-phonological inventory of Aymara spoken in Chile and its vitality: a study based on acoustic and spectrographic analysis
This work aims to analyze the phones and phonemes of Aymara spoken in Chile. Based on a sample of 17,938 sounds of this language, the goal is to propose an inventory based on Poblete and Salas (1997) and through the realization of acoustic-statistical studies, spectrographic analysis, with special attention to the vitality of the phonemes. The results indicate that all phonemes are phonetically realized as expected, that the variations agree with what has been reported in previous studies, and that, in phonological terms, the language remains highly vital.
Aymara, phonemes, allophones, phonological vitality
Copyright (c) 2025 Daniela Mena Sanhueza, Darío Fuentes Grandón, Mauricio Figueroa Candia
Processing rt of grammatical colocations in learners of Spanish as a foreign language
A main concern in cognitive research in second language acquisition is to determine how the L2 is processed in real time. This study presents the results of an experiment that analyzes processing rt (reaction time) of grammatical collocations in anglophone learners and native speakers (NS) of Spanish. The objective was to examine whether those units (e.g. reírse de) tend to be processed more rapidly than their non-collocational counterparts (e.g. reírse a). The results suggest that the collocational attribute favors processing speed in both groups, and that it tends to be more analytical in learners. These findings underscore the importance of grammatical collocation teaching and support their psychological validation.
Copyright (c) 2025 René Oportus, Jorge Maluenda Albornoz
Representations of indigenous people in contemporary chilean comics: A survey of publications between 1998-2023
This article examines the representation of indigenous peoples in Chilean comics published between 1998 and 2023, analyzing 57 identified titles. The study reveals a significant increase in the production and diversification of these narratives, coinciding with sociopolitical changes in Chile that have reconfigured the relationships between the state and indigenous peoples. A predominance of representations of the Mapuche people (59.6%) is observed, followed by the Selk'nam (19.3%) and Rapa Nui (8.8%). The analysis covers format, temporality, target audience, and genre, evidencing a trend toward more complex and multidimensional narratives. This new scenario of comic production is critically discussed as a space for cultural negotiation, identity construction, and the articulation of alternative narratives.
Dossier: Representaciones sociales en la narrativa gráfica contemporánea
Copyright (c) 2025 Tomás Gaete Altamirano, María Loreto Castro, Sebastián Vargas Pérez
From the non-being of the colonized subject to being in Frantz Fanon. Decolonization towards another humanism
Gender and Violence in Ernesto “El Chango” García Cabral’s Cartoons (1920-1939)
This paper delves into the illustrations of Mexican artist Ernesto "El Chango" García Cabral (1890-1968), focusing on depictions of violence in the gender relations. By analyzing his graphics from the 1920s to 1939, the study explores how García Cabral employs the art deco style to portray the "modern girl" of the upper classes. While overlooking the social transformations experienced by women from other social strata, he leverages his high media exposure to diversify the imagery of the period, critiquing the new bourgeoisie and remnants of the Porfiriato regime. Thus, this research sheds light on the non-canonical cultural production of the time and the ideological stances within post-revolutionary Mexico, specifically in relation to gender representations.
Copyright (c) 2025 Maricruz Castro Ricalde
Labor nomadism: a proposal to real Condorito as a metaphor for job insecurity in the era of globalization
This article proposes a reading of the Chilean comic strip Condorito as a metaphor for labor precarity in the era of globalization. Drawing on Ulrich Beck’s labor theory—particularly his notions of the risk society, precarization, and individualization—the study conducts a content analysis of a corpus of 456 comic strips published between 1955 and 2023. The findings reveal that the comic portrays labor subjectivities constantly exposed to structural instability, where employment is persistently at risk of loss and professional trajectories unfold under conditions of uncertainty, flexibility, and informality. The multiplicity of occupations assumed by the characters does not lead to upward mobility but rather to a constant exposure to unemployment and insecurity. At the same time, the individualization of labor relations erodes collective mediations and forces subjects into “do-it-yourself” biographies in which entrepreneurship and indebtedness emerge as dominant forms of subjectivation. From this perspective, Condorito functions as a cultural archive that mirrors the transformations of Chilean labor over the past seven decades and illuminates, through the lens of popular culture, the social effects and subjective configurations that late modernity projects onto the world of work.
The contemporary mapuche graphic narrative. From the Bulletins to the work of Pedro Melinao
With an aesthetic and intercultural approach, this work investigates how the ancestral Mapuche visual language is updated in the new media and discursive canons of contemporary graphic narrative, taking as reference the first Bulletins to the work of the architect and visual artist Pedro Melinao, limited to his Malón Weblog. In these works we can observe a graphic humor oriented towards political criticism, a direct style marked by a realistic aesthetic, and a function of reaffirmation and visibility of cultural identity. Particularly, Melinao’s work is characterized by traditional and historical scenes, portraiture, and visual metaphors that expose the relationship of intercultural conflict through stereotypical traits of one person and another. At the level of the discursive canon, it generates conceptual devices with a Mapuche imprint, redefining the western canon; and, at a cultural level, it introduces a political reading of actions and events from the perspective of azmapu or Mapuche regulations. In summary, these works update elements of ancestral expressions, and, from their discursive specificity, expand the characteristics of contemporary artistic expressions, energizing the current system of Mapuche art and literature.
Copyright (c) 2025 Mabel Egle García-Barrera
REVISTA ALPHA: CUATRO DÉCADAS DE DIÁLOGO INTERDISCIPLINARIO
Copyright (c) 2025 Óscar Garrido Álvarez. Rector Universidad de Los Lagos
Hamlet FERNÁNDEZ DÍAZ, Estética violada. Teoría de la recepción de las prácticas artísticas posmodernas. São Carlos: Pedro & João Editores, 2024. 319 pp.
Copyright (c) 2025 Yessy Villavicencio Simón
Josefina ARAOS, Daniel MANSUY, Catalina SILES, Manfred SVENSSON, Deshacer el cuerpo. Cuatro objeciones a la agenda trans. Instituto de Estudios de la Sociedad, 2025. 172 pp.
Copyright (c) 2025 Linet Hernández Moredo
Wisdom, People, Humanity: for an examination of Gastón Soublette's work
Our work explores the scope of wisdom as a central paradigm in the work of Gastón Soublette, proposing its link with the consecutive paradigms of people and humanity. Starting from the author's express interest in wisdom as a horizon differentiated from academic philosophy, our research advances towards an elucidation of wisdom in Soublette as an improper, transhistorical question essentially determined by nature. Highlighting respectively the “sense” and the “law of analogy” as the object and strategy of wisdom, our work delves into the relationships between wisdom and indigenous and popular cultures as a manifestations of plain humanity. In this way, the problem of an archetypology of the human opens up, illuminated by Soublette through the figure of Christ and the wise men of prehistoric China.
Soublette, Wisdom, People, Humanity, Sense
Comparative analysis of chinese language teaching research between China and spanish-speaking countries
This research applies the visual analysis software Citespace to conduct a statistical and comparative analysis of Chinese language teaching (CLT) until this moment in Spanish-speaking countries by using two databases: China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) and Dialnet from Spain. This analysis focuses on the publication year, authorship, co-authorship, keyword clustering, and other relevant article indicators, etc. It aims to summarize the differences and similarities in CLT in Spanish-speaking countries between China and Spanish-speaking countries nowadays. The research reveals that academic studies on CLT in Spanish-speaking countries are quite similar between China and Spain. Research in both China and Spain regarding CLT in Spanish-speaking countries is increasing and has underlaid fruitful results. However, differences have been found in the depth, breadth, and interdisciplinary perspectives of such research. Through the analysis of CLT in both regions, this study concludes that both need to strengthen and integrate cooperation and exchange in the academic field of CLT to leverage their respective strengths and learn from each other.
Copyright (c) 2025 Liang Qian, Ming Yang, Chen Hao
Study on the style of translation of the culture-specific items of the Analects (Lunyu): analysis based on the parallel corpus compiling the versions of Pérez Arroyo and Suárez Girard
The study of translation style is becoming increasingly significant in the field of Corpus-Based Translation Studies (CBTS). This research, grounded in a self-constructed parallel corpus, aims to analyze the stylistic profiles in the translation of culture-specific items in the Analects (Lunyu) by Pérez Arroyo (1999) and Suárez Girard (1997). This corpus, created through a combination of quantitative and qualitative methodologies, allows us to explore the stylistic characteristics at the lexical, syntactic, and discursive levels, and to identify the similarities and particularities among the translated versions, as well as the trends followed by the translators in addressing culture-specific items. Based on the results obtained, suggestions are provided for the translation of culture-specific items with the goal of enhancing future translations of this Confucian classic.
You too, Obama? The argumentative force of the label Conspiracy theory
In this article I analyze the explicit use of the label conspiracy theory in political communication from the argumentative point of view. I am not interested here in the content of any specific conspiracy theory, but in the kind of argumentative force the label has when used by a political speaker to refer to opponents. The examples discussed are public statements by two contemporary center-left American leaders. To show the kind of argumentative force that the label conspiracy theory conveys when used in political discourse, I reconstruct the speakers’ arguments using Walton diagrams. I also apply Tindale's rhetorical notion of making present and Govier’s ideas about logical and social oppositions to advance the idea that a social dynamic based on a radical dichotomy is at play as soon as the label conspiracy theory is mentioned.
Copyright (c) 2025 Cristián Santibáñez Yáñez
Mainländer, Spinoza’s reader: meetings and disagreements with pantheism
Mainländer’s philosophy is strongly inspired by Schopenhauer’s pessimism. However, he also deeply admired Spinoza for his life and work. This article defends the thesis that Mainländer, despite rejecting pantheism for scientific reasons, inherits fundamental conceptions from Spinoza to his system: the concept of substance, the nature of politics and the suicide of God. To do this: (i) the denial of God in the world is explained as a scientific necessity; (ii) what Mainländer understands by pantheism is described, and; (iii) the influence of Spinoza on Mainländer is analyzed. It is concluded that for a more appropriate understanding of Mainländer’s philosophy, it is necessary to distance him from the shadow of Schopenhauer and consider the various sources that gave rise to his thought.
Denaturalizing the purposes of commercial exchange: the limits of profit and usury in Thomas Aquinas
The purpose of this text is to show how Aquinas understands economic activity based on the need that subjects have to exchange goods and solve the shortcomings of life and, at the same time, establishes a clear distinction between the desire for profit and the satisfaction of needs. This means that for Aquinas the desire for enrichment and profit is not part of human nature, since it must be directed to the supreme good and not to the satisfaction of needs through the market.
Introduction to the polian approach to the mental limit: a Poposal
Knowledge is the most powerful human tool for opening up to reality. What is the scope of this tool? What is its most important limit? Leonardo Polo detects in the very functioning of human knowledge what he calls mental limit. Its main consequence is that it hinders our access to reality, supplanting real being by mental presence. Polo explains that recognizing this problem is the first step to solve it. This article proposes an accessible approach to the Polian method, explaining the context in which it arises and using, for that purpose, a didactic text by García Morente.
Copyright (c) 2025 Pablo Sahagún-Kunhardt
The theory of justice in the work of José Ortega y Gasset.
The following pages deal with the theory of justice in the work of José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) based on a careful reading of the new edition of his Complete Works. We will take a tour of the entire work of the philosopher of vital reason, from his youth to his intellectual maturity, which is when the idea of justice, as well as his reflection on law and rights, gain in intensity.In the first period, Ortega conceived justice in an enlightened sense and from the idealism of his youth, influenced by the moral or practical philosophy of Kant. In a second moment of his thought, the Spanish philosopher will explore the idea of justice, as well as law and right, from his estimative theory or philosophy of values, as well as from his sociology. One of the aspects that we will show is the validity of his thought in this 21st century, since Ortega proposed the idea of global or sidereal justice.
José Ortega y Gasset; Sociology; philosophy; justice; law; values.
Copyright (c) 2025 Alejandro De Haro Honrubia
The morenos of the tarapaqueño desert. Dance and music in the chilean north
The dances that participate in the religious festival of Tirana, in northern Chile, are presented in a great diversity of types and styles that respond to an ancient Andean tradition. Their documented presence dates back to the end of the 19th century and their persistence in Tarapacan religiosity is due to the fact that they are bearers of a message related to the redemption of marginalized castes and classes. Underlying its sound, choreutic and choreographic expressions is the drama of colonial slavery, the social exclusion of the republican periods and the saltpeter culture. This article reveals the different typologies and expressions of the brown dances that participate in the Tirana festival and towns in the Tarapacan foothills, their development in this territory and why they are an important part of the identity of northern Chile.
Morenos, religious dances, northern Chile, La Tirana.
Copyright (c) 2025 Jean Franco DAPONTE, Nicole Cortés Aliaga, Alberto Díaz Araya
Chronicles of the strange, alterities of the orden: the first American trip of Miguel Delibes (Chile, 1955)
The following essay evaluates the chronicles of the first American trip by journalist and writer, Miguel Delibes, with the aim of analyzing the perception of otherness, vis a vis the strange, of one who plans to make a diagnosis of the continent by a brief transatlantic visit. As an “indian chronicler” the traveler configures different stereotypical prototypes of the Southern Cone of America, all while he projects both an environmental conservationist as well as a humanist discourse.
Notes on poetry and law in Ennio Moltedo and José Watanabe
This paper explores the relationship between poetry and law in two different poetry collections: Ennio Moltedo's La Noche (1999) and Jose Watanabe's Antígona (2000). The transformation of space or territory in the context of the authoritarian persistence of neoliberal Chile and the enslavement of bodies in the context of Fujimori's political brutality in Peru are two examples of how these relations allow writing to confront other realities. The weight of the law will be persistently represented in both spatiality and corporeality, giving rise to poetry as a language that would allow the subjects to heal from the failures that these procedures have created.
Poetry; Law; Ennio Moltedo; José Watanabe
"Um assumido barroco”: Una vuelta a Medusario desde Brasil y Portugal
Almost thirty years after the publication of Medusario (1996), a fundamental anthology of Latin American neo-baroque poetry, this article re-examines its legacy with a focus on the relevance and participation of Brazilian and Portuguese movements around the concept of neo-baroque. Based on the inclusion of Brazilian poets in this collection, the text problematises the scant attention that Latin American criticism has paid to baroque and neo-baroque traditions in the Portuguese language. It proposes that the recuperations of the baroque undertaken by Brazilian concretists and Portuguese experimental poets in the second half of the twentieth century shed light on aspects often neglected in the Hispanic American reception of the neo-baroque, such as visuality, combinatory play and the transgression of semiotic codes. In dialogue with authors such as Haroldo de Campos, Ana Hatherly and E. M. de Melo e Castro, it is argued that Portuguese experimental poetry offers an early response to objections raised in the critical apparatus of Medusario regarding syntactic suppression in concretism. Finally, the article argues that a broader neo-baroque genealogy —one that includes the Lusophone traditions— allows us to complexify the very notion of Latin American neo-baroque and to question its geo-cultural and linguistic limits.
neobarroco; poesía experimental; concretismo; tradición lusófona; visualidad poética.
Copyright (c) 2026 Felipe Ignacio Becerra Calderón, Felipe Cussen https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Gladys MENDÍA. En la desnudez de la luz. Brevísima antología arbitraria. Poetas venezolanas de la década del sesenta, LP5 Editora, 2022, 212 pp.
El propósito que persigue la elaboración de una antología, estriba en el hecho de convocar voces así como estilos y tendencias de autores que pertenecen a una determinada época. A través del tiempo las antologías han estado medidas y resguardadas, además por un discurso hegemónico, a ratos establecidos también por una voz que las convoca, incluso, determinadas por esquemas que en ocasiones no dice su naturaleza. Es por ello que se hace necesaria la incursión de una antología donde no solo prime la convocatoria, sino otros aspectos, además de ofrecernos, a los lectores, lo que llamó Szpilbarg (2022) el capital simbólico. No obstante, es importante tener en cuenta que las antologías pueden también ofrecer una visión general de los escritores que se convocan, aparte de revisar su costado histórico que servirá de puente para las investigaciones futuras en el campo literario.
Copyright (c) 2025 Juan Joel Linares Simancas
On the Explicitation of adversative relation in literary translation from chinese to spanish
This paper studies the syntactic explicitation of adversative logical relations in literary translation from Chinese to Spanish. Taking four modern Chinese literary works and their respective Spanish translated texts for example, we use a corpus-based quantitative method to describe the translation of adversative sentences and the use of Spanish adversative conjunctions. The results support the hypothesis of the explicitation of the adversative relations. The qualitative approach is further applied to explain the motivations of the explicitation. This study shows that the main factors that affect the degree of explicitness in the target text include: (1) the inherent characteristics of the translation, (2) the differences between Chinese and Spanish in the expression of logical relationships, (3) the use of adversative conjunctions in the source text, (4) the subjectivity of translator, such as attention given to target readers, the adopted translation strategy and methods.
The scotist dualism between nature and freedom and its consequences in Philosophy and Modern Culture
We propose to investigate here an aspect of Duns Scotus’s thought, which seems relevant to us in the formation of modern philosophy and culture, namely: his dualistic conception of freedom and nature, understood as contra-distinct or opposed. This scotist metaphysical and anthropological contrast was received and continued in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries until it influenced modern philosophy and culture (this dichotomy is very clear in Descartes and Kant, for example). We attempt a critical analysis of this conception of freedom and –so as not to remain only critical– we propose what it would be to conceive the relationship between freedom and nature in a non-voluntaristic way, that is, in terms of a more balanced complementarity.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ignacio Miralbell Guerín
The latin american reception of La deshumanización del arte of Ortega y Gasset’s. The humanist answer
This article explores the way in which José Ortega y Gasset’s La deshumanización del arte (1925) was read and discussed in Latin America by Enrique Molina from a humanist perspective. The study is mainly concerned with the meaning that Ortega’s essay gives to the autonomous condition of modern art and the reasons why his ideas stand in an ethical opposition to humanism’s position regarding the nature of human being, culture, and the life of the spirit. In the end, what seems to be at stake in this quarrel is a philosophical and cultural debate on Latin America’s process of modernization and the meaning of the concept of “progress” as an ideal.
Copyright (c) 2025 Alejandro Valenzuela Aldridge
The lived body and feminism: contributions to thinking about problems of intersubjective life
The concept of "proper body" or "lived body" proposed by phenomenology has allowed the recognition of the fundamental experience of "being a body" as opposed to "having a body", that is, of being an embodied existence. The aim of this paper is to present the main elements of the phenomenological concept of the body, as developed by authors such as Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein, Merleau-Ponty and Michel Henry, and then to discuss this concept in the light of the contributions made by classical and contemporary feminist philosophers such as Simone de Beauvoir or Iris Marion Young among others. In this way we will review some fundamental ideas that feminism and gender studies have contributed to the reflection on women's bodies, highlighting the recognition of cultural and patriarchal mandates on the constitution of the female body, roles, identity and self-image. Finally, we will list some of the issues and problems that are open to reflection on the female body, in particular, the canons of beauty, fat bodies, and the body in old age.
The Argos of a thousand eyes and the immanent intuition of the spirit. The work of art as a sign of the spirit in Hegel
Starting from the encyclopaedic determination of the ideal, this paper analyses the Anschauung or intuition as a medium or form (Form) proper to art, problematising this determination based on the inclusion of representation as a figurative representation (bildliches Vorstellen) or as a figurative thought (vorbildliche Gedanke). It is then argued that in turn a double sense of Anschauung would be at play, and that in art the sensible immediacy of the first intuition, alien to the spirit, is overcome and replaced by the spiritual or spirit's own immediacy, i.e., it is replaced by an immediacy immanent to the spirit. At this point, an explanation of the signifying power of language is introduced to clarify the meaning of the sign in Hegel. Finally, it is proposed that, based on the distinction between the two senses of Anschauung and bearing in mind the meaning of the sign in Hegel, an understanding of the task of art can be achieved, namely that the work of art ceases to be a symbol and becomes a sign of the spirit or the Argos of a thousand eyes.
Copyright (c) 2025 Italo Debernardi Cárcamo