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TURBAR LA QUIETUD: Gestos subversivos entre fronteras

TURBAR LA QUIETUD: Gestos subversivos entre fronteras

TURBAR LA QUIETUD. GestoS subversivos entre fronteras es el resultado de un esfuerzo conjunto cuyo fin es apoyar y potenciar la visita de escritoras internacionales y de habla hispana en Houston. La intención de este esfuerzo es la de mantener un diálogo activo con autoras emergentes y establecidas del mundo de habla hispana, como así también ofrecer una oportunidad excepcional para que estudiantes, investigadores y miembros de la comunidad local trabajen de cerca con profesionales conocidos por sus indagaciones estéticas e innovadoras y por el alcance de sus intervenciones estéticas. Agradecemos a nuestras instituciones por confiar en nuestra intuición y por apoyar estas intervenciones que, esperamos, seguirán creciendo y generando más conmoción.

Gisela Heffes . Cristina Rivera Garza . Amaranta Caballero Prado . Marta Aponte Alsina . Gabriela Wiener . Stalina Villarreal . Verónica Gerber Bicecci . Magela Baudoin . Cristina Burneo Salazar . Selva Almada . Claudia Salazar Jiménez . Giovanna Rivero


Visualizing Loss in Latin America: Biopolitics, Waste, and the Urban Environment

Visualizing Loss in Latin America: Biopolitics, Waste, and the Urban Environment

by Gisela Heffes (Author), Grady C. Wray (Translator)

Visualizing Loss in Latin America engages with a varied corpus of textual, visual, and cultural material with specific intersections with the natural world, arguing that Latin American literary and cultural production goes beyond ecocriticism as a theoretical framework of analysis. Gisela Heffes poses the following crucial question: How do we construct a conceptual theoretical apparatus to address issues of value, meaning, tradition, perspective, and language, that contributes substantially to environmental thinking, and that is part and parcel of Latin America? The book draws attention to ecological inequality and establishes a biopolitical, ethics-based reading of Latin American art, film, and literature that operates at the intersection of the built environment and urban settings. Heffes suggests that the aesthetic praxis that emerges in/from Latin America is permeated with a rhetoric of waste―a significant trait that overwhelmingly defines it.


What would Cervantes do? Navigating Post-Truth with Spanish Baroque Literature

What would Cervantes do? Navigating Post-Truth with Spanish Baroque Literature

by David Castillo (Author), William Egginton (Author)

The attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 was a tragic illustration of the existential threat that the viral spread of disinformation poses in the age of social media and twenty-four-hour news. From climate change denialism to the frenzied conspiracy theories and racist mythologies that fuel antidemocratic white nationalist movements in the United States and abroad, What Would Cervantes Do? is a lucid meditation on the key role the humanities must play in dissecting and combatting all forms of disinformation. David Castillo and William Egginton travel back to the early modern period, the first age of inflationary media, in search of historically tested strategies to overcome disinformation and shed light on our post-truth market. Through a series of critical conversations between cultural icons of the twenty-first century and those of the Spanish Golden Age, What Would Cervantes Do? provides a tour-de-force commentary on current politics and popular culture. Offering a diverse range of Cervantist comparative readings of contemporary cultural texts –movies, television shows, and infotainment – alongside ideas and issues from literary and cultural texts of early modern Spain, Castillo and Egginton present a new way of unpacking the logic of contemporary media. What Would Cervantes Do? is an urgent and timely self-help manual for literary scholars and humanists of all stripes, and a powerful toolkit for reality literacy.


The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality

The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality

Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges was madly in love when his life was shattered by painful heartbreak. But the breakdown that followed illuminated an incontrovertible truth—that love is necessarily imbued with loss, that the one doesn’t exist without the other. German physicist Werner Heisenberg was fighting with the scientific establishment on the meaning of the quantum realm’s absurdity when he had his own epiphany—that there is no such thing as a complete, perfect description of reality. Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant pushed the assumptions of human reason to their mind-bending conclusions, but emerged with an idea that crowned a towering philosophical system—that the human mind has fundamental limits, and those limits undergird both our greatest achievements as well as our missteps.

Through fiction, science, and philosophy, the work of these three thinkers coalesced around the powerful, haunting fact that there is an irreconcilable difference between reality “out there” and reality as we experience it. Out of this profound truth comes a multitude of galvanizing ideas: the notion of selfhood, free will, and purpose in human life; the roots of morality, aesthetics, and reason; and the origins and nature of the cosmos itself.  

As each of these thinkers shows, every one of us has a fundamentally incomplete picture of the world. But this is to be expected. Only as mortal, finite beings are we able to experience the world in all its richness and breathtaking majesty. We are stranded in a gulf of vast extremes, between the astronomical and the quantum, an abyss of freedom and absolute determinism, and it is in that center where we must make our home. A soaring and lucid reflection on the lives and work of Borges, Heisenberg, and Kant, The Rigor of Angels movingly demonstrates that the mysteries of our place in the world may always loom over us—not as a threat, but as a reminder of our humble humanity.


Brotherly Love: Freemasonry and Male Friendship in Enlightenment France

Brotherly Love: Freemasonry and Male Friendship in Enlightenment France


Imagination: A Very Short Introduction

Imagination: A Very Short Introduction

Imagination: A Very Short Introduction explores imagination as a cognitive power and an essential dimension of human flourishing, demonstrating how imagination plays multiple roles in human cognition and shapes humanity in profound ways. Examining philosophical, evolutionary, and literary perspectives on imagination, the author shows how this facility, while potentially distorting, both frees us from immediate reality and enriches our sense of it, making possible our experience of a meaningful world. Long regarded by philosophers as an elusive and mysterious capacity of the human mind, imagination has been the subject of extraordinary ambivalence, described as both dangerous and divine, as merely peripheral to rationality and as essential to all thinking. Drawing on philosophy, aesthetics, literary and cognitive theory as well as the human sciences, this book engages the dramatic conceptual history of imagination together with contemporary explanations of its role in cognition to explain its importance in everyday life as well as the exquisite creativity of the arts, scientific discovery, and invention. Engaging examples from cave paintings to modern painting, performance art to pop art, physics to phenomenology, technological inventions to literary worlds, the Nazca geoglyphs to dramatic theatre, poetry, and jazz improvisation, the author illuminates with clarity and vision the philosophy of imagination and the stakes of its involvement in human thinking.


Wandering Women: Urban Ecologies of Italian Feminist Filmmaking

Wandering Women: Urban Ecologies of Italian Feminist Filmmaking

Wandering Women explorers the work of eight contemporary Italian women directors from feminist and ecological perspectives: Cecilia Mangini, Mariangela Barbanente, Marina Spada, Francesca Comencini, Alice Rohrwacher, Wilma Labate, Roberta Torre, and Eleonora Danco.

Their films, released in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, tell stories of displacement and liminality that unfold through the act of walking in the city. These urban experiences revisit the trope of flânerie by restoring the agency of the female city walker, thus representing a claim for belonging. 


Images of Quattrocento Florence: Selected Writings in Literature, History, and Art

Images of Quattrocento Florence: Selected Writings in Literature, History, and Art

This anthology provides a panoramic view of fifteenth-century Florence in the words of the city’s own citizens and visitors. The fifty-one selections-many translated into English for the first time-offer fascinating glimpses into Renaissance thought. Together, the documents demonstrate the social, political, religious, and cultural impact Florence had in shaping the Italian and European Renaissance, and they reveal how Florence created, developed, and diffused the mythology of its own origins and glory.The documents point up the divergences in quattrocento accounts of the origins of Florence, and they reveal the importance of the city’s economy, social life, and military success to the formation of its image. The book includes sources that elaborate on the city’s accomplishments in literature and the visual arts, others that present major trends in Florentine religious life, and still others that attest to the acclaim and admiration that Florence evoked from foreign visitors. The editors also provide an informative introduction, a detailed chronology of fifteenth-century Italy, maps, photographs, an annotated bibliography, and a biographical sketch of the author of each document.


Giordano Bruno and the Geometry of Language (Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity)

Giordano Bruno and the Geometry of Language (Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity)

Giordano Bruno and the Geometry of Language brings to the fore a sixteenth-century philosopher’s role in early modern Europe as a bridge between science and literature, or more specifically, between the spatial paradigm of geometry and that of language. Arielle Saiber examines how, to invite what Bruno believed to be an infinite universe-its qualities and vicissitudes-into the world of language, Bruno forged a system of ‘figurative’ vocabularies: number, form, space, and word. This verbal and symbolic system in which geometric figures are seen to underlie rhetorical figures, is what Saiber calls ‘geometric rhetoric.’ Through analysis of Bruno’s writings, Saiber shows how Bruno’s writing necessitates a crafting of space, and is, in essence, a lexicon of spatial concepts. This study constitutes an original contribution both to scholarship on Bruno and to the fields of early modern scientific and literary studies. It also addresses the broader question of what role geometry has in the formation of any language and literature of any place and time.