Books in the Hispanic Studies: Culture and Ideas series

Este libro es el último volumen, de una serie de cuatro, que forman parte de un proyecto de refundación conceptual del pensamiento en América latina. El presente trabajo se ocupa entonces de reconsiderar la noción de empiria, de experiencia y de inmediatez a la luz de las condiciones del antropoceno en la periferia. Por lo mismo se cuestiona, como ya fue el caso en los volúmenes anteriores, toda concepción universal de los conceptos y análisis. Este libro asume de hecho la ausencia de nociones clásicas como frontera, país o sociedad, entre otras. Como también era el caso de los volúmenes anteriores de la serie, este libro supone que la emancipación intelectual es inherente a la reflexión acerca de la inteligibilidad de lo viviente y noviviente.

Este libro analiza la manera en que la basura o desecho, en cuanto concepto así como en cuanto entidad material, determina y constituye un sentido de especulación. Para ello se asume que ya no puede considerarse la noción de especulación como una cualidad abstracta, como una singularidad lexical, so pena de perennizar un conjunto de mecanismos de aprendizaje y elucubración que conducen a un naturalismo filosófico decimonónico ya conocido, característico y dominante, en los ámbitos periféricos del planeta. A consecuencia de este razonamiento, se explora además cómo este sentido de especulación constituiría una forma de determinación de localidad y en torno a la cual se podrían establecer referencias e imaginarios inmediatos.

En el presente volumen se han tomado en consideración testimonios y manifestaciones escritas desde el Medioevo tardío hasta el siglo XX con el fin de contribuir al avance en el estudio de las relaciones entre Gran Bretaña e Irlanda y la Península Ibérica. El patrimonio documental se pone en valor en un escenario internacional, ligado a fenómenos políticos, económicos y sociales, así como a dinámicas transnacionales, para sostener la innovación y el progreso de las sociedades que lo acogen. Los trabajos que aquí se reúnen favorecen la transmisión de este patrimonio heredado, así como la inmersión en una realidad diversa y cambiante que promueve el acceso a la cultura en toda su riqueza. En ellos se dan a conocer aspectos inéditos sobre conversaciones diplomáticas, diálogos políticos y económicos, intercambios culturales y patrimoniales, y encuentros militares y navales, en ocasiones con motivo del enfrentamiento y del conflicto, que dotan de una base sólida a la construcción de la identidad y de los encuentros entre los pueblos.

This book is a diary derived from the careful editing of a vast series of notebooks: a complete yet diverse ensemble of investigations, lecture notes, travel diaries, poems, short fictions, summaries, and projects. Owing to the performance of her writing, the image created shows not only the life of an artist but also the way she transmits her experience, and how she conceives the current state of the arts. Between self-help and an artistic Frankenstein, this book covers ten years of atomized writing, scattered notes which have found their axis many years later. Experience is considered to be a multisensorial collage, and drawing is a modest and subtle companion, but also a powerful tool to transform reality. For the author, writing is pouring life directly into notebooks: a mobile registry which records impressions at any time, and at its own pace.

Respectable Professionals contains contributions about the birth of new professions and the modernization of working practices in old trades in nineteenth-century Spain. The authors consider that professionalism and respectability were the most relevant elements which structured the bourgeois society in the nineteenth century.

Ana Duffy holds a PhD in Latin American Literature from the University of Queensland, Australia. She has worked in various Australian universities as a lecturer and tutor in the fields of Latin American studies and literature, Spanish and, being a writer herself, in creative writing and literary studies.

This book explores the environment and cultural context of Colombian political novels published between 1951 and 1987. Challenging the label of novelas de la violencia the author analyses them as products of their own historical time and takes into account their broader implications, such as their representation of the society they narrate. These novels are shown to be the product of political and ideological issues: the real preoccupations of the writers were the balance of power, social dysfunctionality and the need for reform in a society transitioning from rural to urban. These issues are traced in a close reading of representative novels, in which feature letrados and intellectuals and their role in the evolution of society, culture, literature and power in twentieth-century Colombia. With its critical-theoretical approach, this book constitutes a significant and innovative contribution to the debate on Latin American culture and literature.

Benito Perez Galdos (1843-1920) is revered as Spain's greatest nineteenth-century author. Writing in the realist tradition of Dickens, Zola and Balzac, he described life in Madrid with unequalled fidelity. In addition, he was unique among novelists of his time in his knowledge of medicine, revealed in his depictions of mental and physical disease. While critical analyses of his novels abound, this book is the first detailed study of the medicine that appears in his novels and newspaper articles. Galdos acquired his medical knowledge at a time of great changes: anaesthesia and antisepsis were developed, and the germs responsible for many human diseases identified. French medicine was especially influential, though increasing international exchange resulted in new ideas also being adopted from England, Germany and Italy. The author of this study analyses Galdos's network of medical contacts, together with some of the sources available to them. Subjects such as epidemic disease, madness and children's diseases are examined and the light they throw upon the medicine of the time is discussed. The concluding chapter of the book assesses the significance of Galdos's depictions of disease and of doctors.

Los estudios comparativos de Federico Garcia Lorca y Salvador Dali han tendido a concentrarse en aspectos biograficos. Este libro supera tal enfoque analizando la representacion del narcisismo, el genio y la violencia en los poemas, las pinturas, las conferencias y las autobiografias de Lorca y Dali. Tales temas se examinan principalmente desde las opticas del psicoanalisis, la psicologia analitica, el surrealismo, la psiquiatria, la filosofia y la antropologia. El interes de este libro tambien radica en aquello que revela con respecto a la percepcion de la creatividad segun la intelectualidad modernista y en el analisis de la poesia de Dali, que aun constituye una tarea novedosa en el campo de los estudios culturales. En resumen, la autora explora el tema de la formacion del sujeto artistico en la epoca vanguardista. Puede el narcisismo de Dali y Lorca desvelar una tendencia sexual concreta? De donde viene el concepto del genio de Dali y como se compara al duende lorquiano? Que oculta la violencia poetica de ambos artistas en relacion a la naturaleza hibrida de la modernidad?

Cesar Aira es uno de los autores mas importantes e influyentes de la literatura argentina contemporanea. En su obra prolifica la construccion del sentido ha sido desde el principio una coordenada problematica. Esta problematica central - descuidada por la critica - en su narrativa es la que constituye el nucleo de este estudio: como interpretar una obra que distorsiona continuamente nuestro horizonte hermeneutico? Como se construye el sentido en una literatura que recicla, desarticula y abandona codigos muy heterogeneos y que, por ende, parece subvertir nuestras hipotesis de lectura? Este libro intentara contestar estas preguntas al examinar el funcionamiento de los estereotipos y los topicos autorreferenciales en un corpus representativo. La posibilidad de una legibilidad de un yo autorial en las mascaras autoficcionales desplegadas a lo largo de esta obra resultara ser una de las claves mas importantes para cualquier tentativa de desentranamiento de esta hermeneutica trastornada.

This book provides a critical and context-sensitive reading of corporeality in the narrative fiction of Merce Rodoreda, through the perspectives of art and film theory, feminism, literary criticism, spatial studies, and nationalist theory. The text approaches Rodoreda as a Catalan woman writer whose work engages with and explores formulaic and normative notions of the gendered body in a particular cultural, geographical and political space. The study covers four main areas: corporeality as surface, image and texture; the relationship between the body and space; the idea of the culturally and politically constructed body as limit; and the concept of the abject or open body. The author places Rodoreda's work in dialogue with a range of texts, media, modes of representation and discourses in order to examine how her artistic vision is both integrated with and a mediator of material experience in the twentieth century.

This book explores the concept of displacement in the fiction produced by the Chilean writer Isabel Allende between 1982 and 2000. Displacement, understood in the author's analysis to encompass social, geographical, linguistic and cultural phenomena, is argued to play a consistently central role in Allende's fictional output of this period. Close readings of Allende's texts illustrate the abiding importance of displacement and reconcile two apparently contradictory trends in her writing: as the settings of her fiction have become more international, questions of individual identity have gained in importance. This discussion employs displacement as a means of engaging with critical debates both on Allende's individual texts and on her status as an original writer. After examining in detail the seven works of fiction written by Allende during this period, the book concludes with reflections on the general trajectory of her work in this genre.

Jorge Luis Borges was profoundly interested in the ill-defined and shape-shifting traditions of mysticism. However, previous studies of Borges have not focused on the writer's close interest in mysticism and mystical texts, especially in the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). This book examines the relationship between Borges' own recorded mystical experiences and his appraisal of Swedenborg and other mystics. It asks the essential question of whether Borges was a mystic by analysing his writings, including short stories, essays, poems and interviews, alongside scholarly writings on mysticism by figures such as William James. The book locates Borges within the scholarship of mysticism by evaluating his many assertions and suggestions as to what is or is not a mystic and, in so doing, analyses the influence of James and Ralph Waldo Emerson on Borges' reading of Swedenborg and mysticism. The author argues further that Swedenborg constitutes a far richer presence in Borges' work than scholarship has hitherto acknowledged, and assesses the presence of Swedenborg in Borges' aesthetics, ethics and poetics.

This book examines the relevance of the concepts of space and place to the work of Jorge Luis Borges. The core of the book is a series of readings of key Borges texts viewed from the perspective of human spatiality. Issues that arise include the dichotomy between 'lived space' and abstract mapping, the relevance of a 'sense of place' to Borges's work, the impact of place on identity, the importance of context to our sense of who we are, the role played by space and place in the exercise of power, and the ways in which certain of Borges's stories invite us to reflect on our 'place in the universe'. In the course of this discussion, crucial questions about the interpretation of the Argentine author's work are addressed and some important issues that have largely been overlooked are considered. The book begins by outlining cross-disciplinary discussions of space and place and their impact on the study of literature and concludes with a theoretical reflection on approaches to the issue of space in Borges, extrapolating points of relevance to the theme of literary spatiality generally.

A film institute was the first cultural institution to be created by the new Cuban revolutionary government in 1959. One of its aims was to create a new cinema to suit the needs of the Revolution in a climate of transformation and renewal. During the same period, issues of gender equality and gender relations became important as the Revolution attempted to eradicate some of the negative social tendencies of the past. Through the prism of the gender debate, Cuban cinema both reflected and shaped some of the central ideological concerns on the island at this time. This book brings together these two extremely significant aspects of the Cuban revolutionary process by examining issues of gender and gender relations in six Cuban films produced between 1974 and 1990. Using close textual analysis and theoretical insights from feminism and postmodernism, the author argues that the portrayal of aspects of gender relations in Cuban cinema developed along a progressive path, from expressions of the modern to expressions of the postmodern.

En todas las áreas, las personas con voluntad de cambio y desarrollo social utilizan las formas artísticas y la creatividad para conmover la esfera pública, atraer la atención, tomar poder sobre los espacios urbanos y generar nuevos lenguajes y voces sociales. El activismo artístico involucra a personalidades creadoras de todas las culturas, se enraíza en ideas políticas esenciales, moviliza ideas de cambio e igualdad social e interesa a las generaciones más jóvenes, en un espíritu que rompe las barreras académicas y las distinciones profesionales. La creatividad activista con frecuencia ha sido percibida como próxima a la categoría del outsider art que engloba el arte producido por no artistas donde el contexto específico sería la protesta política y/o la experimentación social. El artivismo tiene sus raíces en las vanguardias artísticas (dada, futurismo, surrealismo, etc.) y el posterior desarrollo y auge en la década de los años sesenta y setenta del pasado siglo (performance, happening, body art, land art, video art o arte conceptual), que, muchas veces, nace de una especie de desmaterialización del objeto artístico. Este libro se centra en prácticas de creatividad activista de España, Chile, Perú, Reino Unido, Colombia, etc. que tienen que ver con los actuales fenómenos de crisis discursiva, ideológica, política, económica, financiera. Entender el artivismo, un concepto que, nada más pronunciarlo, despierta un amplio abanico de sensaciones.