Macedonio Fern Ndez Between Literature Philosophy And The Avant Garde

At Macedonio Fernández's funeral in 1952, Jorge Luis Borges delivered the following elegy: “In those years I imitated him to the point of transcription, to the point of devout and passionate plagiarism. I felt: Macedonio is metaphysics, Macedonio is literature.” This is the first book available in English that collects essays by the world's leading scholars on Macedonio Fernández, one of Borges's most important mentors and a still enigmatic thinker of the early 20th century. Macedonio's philosophy, metaphysics, ethics, and experimental writing laid the foundations for Borges's own theoretical and literary matrix. Nonetheless, Borges helped shape a myth of Macedonio as a thinker who could not translate his oratorial geniality into written intelligibility. So, despite the centrality of Macedonio to Borges's thought, his work has remained almost unknown to English-speaking readers. Contributors to this volume demonstrate, however, that this myth reduces the complexities of Macedonio's life and creative process, as each chapter shines new light on his texts. Conceived as both a companion for new readers of Macedonio's writings and an invitation for specialists to revisit his work through new perspectives, essays in this volume provide extensive background and bibliographical references, as well as English translations of Macedonio's original texts. This collection seeks to serve as a catalyst for the continued discovery and rediscovery of Macedonio Fernández's texts and the ways they might help us to rediscover the singularities of our own present moment.

In City/Art, anthropologists, literary and cultural critics, a philosopher, and an architect explore how creative practices continually reconstruct the urban scene in Latin America. The contributors, all Latin Americanists, describe how creativity—broadly conceived to encompass urban design, museums, graffiti, film, music, literature, architecture, performance art, and more—combines with nationalist rhetoric and historical discourse to define Latin American cities. Taken together, the essays model different ways of approaching Latin America’s urban centers not only as places that inspire and house creative practices but also as ongoing collective creative endeavors themselves. The essays range from an examination of how differences of scale and point of view affect people’s experience of everyday life in Mexico City to a reflection on the transformation of a prison into a shopping mall in Uruguay, and from an analysis of Buenos Aires’s preoccupation with its own status and cultural identity to a consideration of what Miami means to Cubans in the United States. Contributors delve into the aspirations embodied in the modernist urbanism of Brasília and the work of Lotty Rosenfeld, a Santiago performance artist who addresses the intersections of art, urban landscapes, and daily life. One author assesses the political possibilities of public art through an analysis of subway-station mosaics and Julio Cortázar’s short story “Graffiti,” while others look at the representation of Buenos Aires as a “Jewish elsewhere” in twentieth-century fiction and at two different responses to urban crisis in Rio de Janeiro. The collection closes with an essay by a member of the São Paulo urban intervention group Arte/Cidade, which invades office buildings, de-industrialized sites, and other vacant areas to install collectively produced works of art. Like that group, City/Art provides original, alternative perspectives on specific urban sites so that they can be seen anew. Contributors. Hugo Achugar, Rebecca E. Biron, Nelson Brissac Peixoto, Néstor García Canclini, Adrián Gorelik, James Holston, Amy Kaminsky, Samuel Neal Lockhart, José Quiroga, Nelly Richard, Marcy Schwartz, George Yúdice

Under a system of oligarchy, Argentina evolved from a dictator-dominated backwater to the leading nation in Latin America. This book examines this evolution by studying three political movements: Mitrismo, led by Bartolomé Mitre, Roquismo, under General Julio A. Roca, which ruled from the 1860s to 1910; and Radicalismo, a movement that sought to replace the oligarchy with a more democratic system.

This long out-of-print anthology, edited by Mary Stofflet and Michael Crane and published in 1984, is the authoritative work on correspondence art. This anthology was compiled during the peak of correspondence art activity, with contributions from many of the medium's major players. Contributors: Ken Friedman, Dick Higgins, Ulises Carrion, Judith A. Hoffberg, Marily Ekdahl Ravicz, Jean-Marc Poinsot, Thomas Cassidy, Milan Knizak, Klaus Groh, Kenneth Coutts-Smith, Richard Craven, A.M. Fine, Tomas Schmit, Thomas Albright, Anna Banana, Andrzej Partum, Stephan Kukowski, Robert Reehfeldt, Steve Hitchcock, Edgardo-Antonio Vigo, Geoffrey Cook, Gaglione 1940-2040, C.E. Loeffler, Ken Friedman, Georg M. Gugelberger, James Warren Felter, and Peter Frank.

These core issues are theorized further in an afterword by Abril Trigo, who takes the preceding chapters as a point of departure for a discussion of the dialectics of identity in the Latin/o American global city. --Book Jacket.

An analysis of selected texts that are viewed as cultural responses to military tyranny, and especially to the military dictatorship in Argentina between 1976 and 1983, this important work studies the process of institutional redemocratization. Basing his discussion on the principle that a literary work constitutes a "rewriting" of the sociohistorical text, Foster examines a range of essays and novels for the ways in which they structure an interpretation of sociopolitical events. Of particular concern is the ideological framing of the literary work and the semiotic complications that arise in the rewriting of a complex and often elusive historical past. Foster pays special attention to the contributions of feminist writing and discusses two dramatic texts by women. There are also references to other dimensions of subalternity, especially within the framework of the military's tight ideological array of "enemies of the fatherland" whose cultural production suffered repression. Foster discusses the works of such authors as Enrique Medina, Marta Lynch, Griselda Gambaro, Ricardo Piglia, and Alejandra Pizarnik, among others. By focusing on major literary texts produced during a time of censorship and other forms of repression, Foster provides a deeper understanding of Argentine culture. Scholars and students of Latin American literature in general, and humanists and social scientists specializing in Argentina in particular, will welcome this insightful new contribution.

When the Past Is Always Present: Emotional Traumatization, Causes, and Cures introduces several new ideas about trauma and trauma treatment. The first of these is that another way to treat disorders arising from the mind/brain may be to use the senses. This idea, which is at the core of psychosensory therapy, forms what the author considers the "third pillar" of trauma treatment (the first and second pillars being psychotherapy and psychopharmacology). Psychosensory therapy postulates that sensory input—for example, touch—creates extrasensory activity that alters brain function and the way we respond to stimuli. The second idea presented in this book is that traumatization is encoded in the amygdala only under special circumstances. Thus, by understanding what makes an individual resistant to traumatization we can offer a way of preventing it. The third idea is that traumatization occurs because we cannot find a haven during the event. This is the cornerstone of havening, the particular form of psychosensory therapy described in the book. Using evolutionary biological principles and recently published neuroscientific studies, this book outlines in detail how havening touch de-links the emotional experience from a trauma, essentially making it just an ordinary memory. Once done, the event no longer causes distress.