What is an academic journal today?

An academic journal is a web of knowledge. A lattice of relations. A field of resonance. A room of dialogue between strangers who devote their lives to the study of literature. A loudspeaker for the authors of the Americas and the world to ask: What is literature? Where is it leading? What is literary research? What questions does it pursue? What topics and reflections concern and unite us? Why do we insist that literature is a space for political thought, for rupture and resistance, for thinking, rethinking and reinventing life and our ways of being in the world? What is the importance of literature and literary education today, in the context of the authoritarian systems that begin to dominate the Americas again? What revolutions does poetic language propose?

It is a pleasure to present issue 33 of La Palabra journal, which unites a series of Argentine, Brasilian, Spanish and Colombian researchers, narrative writers and poets. We begin with a section on Science and Literature, which tracks down questions and developments of science fiction in Brazil, Argentina and Spain, by means of writers like André Carneiro, Oliverio Coelho, Gerônimo Monteiro, Raquel de Queiroz and others. How do science and poetry articulate to produce new possibilities for language? What kind of political reflection is generated from the post apocalyptic imaginaries of current Latin American science fiction? What are the influences between literature and cinema, and viceversa, for the construction of an aesthetics of science fiction in non English speaking countries?

The following section, Fantastic Literature reflects on the evolution of the concept of the "double" as a key element of fantastic literature, in the context of postmodern Latin American narrative.

The section Literature and gender contrasts two articles that reflect on the situated condition of gender discourse in a German novel and in a Spanish book of short stories. Here, we can see how queer discourse, as well as the reconstruction of subaltern voices of Andaluzian rural women construct spaces to re-think the local, where gender identity becomes a weapon for political struggle.

The section Pedagogy of Literature reflects on a problem that is important to La Palabra journal: how do we teach literature, based on what theories and methods? In this case, a proposal for the formation of the literary competence is presented, through reading animation, based on reception aesthetics.

Last but not least, the section Creative writing is pure fire. Here, the space of literary research is counterpointed with various documents that account for the presence of a living poetry, in creation and invention. It opens with a unpublished sample of the most recent poetry of the Colombian poet Andrea Cote; followed by a lucid interview between Cote and the poet Maria Paz Guerrero, which reflects on the poet's work with language, Colombian poetry and the place of women, as well as what are the new aesthetic paths Cote is exploring in her poetry. The section ends with a review of the powerful poetry book recently published by Maria Paz Guerrero, Dios también es una perra [God is also a bitch].

This variety of approaches, modes and perspectives for thinking about literature nourish us daily and inspire us to keep working. Thank you to the authors and their hard work, to the editorial assistant Luz Mary Cuervo for her dedication, to the translator, proofreader, diagrammer, peer reviewers and all the rest of the editorial team. We hope this issue will be widely read, studied and cited by our readers.