New Books by Dartmouth Authors: Spanish and Portuguese

Spanish & Portuguese (Spitta)

Manu es una niña tan alegre como las olas de las playas de su Quisqueya, y tan cálida como el abrazo de su abuela. Aunque feliz, tiene que dejar la vida que conoce atrás e irse a vivir a Queen, NY, con su mamá y su medio hermano. Allí todo es ajeno, distinto, ¿o no? ¡Acompaña a Manu en este viaje, en esta, su nueva historia!

La obra y el legado del excepcional hispanista George Ticknor (1791-1871) es el objeto de estudio en este volumen colectivo. Su amor a las lenguas clásicas y modernas comenzó en Dartmouth College (1807) y continuó durante su estancia de tres años en la universidad alemana de Gotinga, donde completó su educación con el notable historiador Friedrich Bouterwek. Tras una serie de viajes por Europa, incluida una estancia de seis meses en España, regresó a su Boston natal para hacerse cargo de la primera cátedra de lenguas románicas (francés y español) en Harvard. Durante casi dos décadas Ticknor contribuyó a fortalecer el campo de las lenguas modernas, o vivas, y el estudio de la literatura desde la erudición y los métodos filológicos más influyentes del día. Además de su Syllabus of a Course of Lectures on the History and Criticism of Spanish Literature (1823), The Best Methods of Teaching the Living Languages (1832), Ticknor publicó la monumental History of Spanish Literature en 3 volúmenes (1849), que, basada en la noción de "espíritu nacional" del idealismo alemán, sirvió para establecer el campo del hispanismo en los Estados Unidos, alcanzando gran repercusión también en España e Hispanoamérica. Ticknor fue también un gran bibliófilo y un defensor del acceso a la cultura de las capas sociales menos favorecidas; resultado de este compromiso fue su labor esencial en la fundación de la Biblioteca Pública de Boston en 1848. Los participantes en este volumen también exploran la actividad mentora de Ticknor con historiadores de la talla de William H. Prescott, la resonancia de su legado en figuras como Archer M. Huntington, fundador de la Hispanic Society of America, en Nueva York, así como el establecimiento de los estudios hispánicos en las universidades americanas durante el siglo XIX.

An endearing story about a young girl and her curly hair.

Elena Garro and Mexico's Modern Dreams uses Elena Garro's eccentric life and work as a lens through which to examine mid-twentieth-century Mexican intellectuals' desire to reconcile mexicanidad with modernidad. The famously scandalous first wife of Nobel Prize winner poet Octavio Paz, and an award-winning author in her own right, Garro constructed a mysterious and often contradictory persona through her very public participation in Mexican political conflicts. Herself an anxious and contentious Mexican writer, Elena Garro elicited profound political and aesthetic anxiety in her Mexican readers. She confused the personal and the public in her creative fictions as well as in her vision of Mexican modernity. This violation of key distinctions rendered her largely illegible to her contemporaries. That illegibility serves as a symptom of unacknowledged desires that motivate twentieth-century views of national modernity. Taken together, Garro's public persona and critical perspective expose the anxieties regarding ethnicity, gender, economic class, and professional identity that define Mexican modernity. Blending cultural studies and detailed literary analysis with political and intellectual history, Mexico's Modern Dreams argues that, in addition to the intriguing gossip she elicited in literary and political circles, Garro produced a radical critique of Mexican modernity. Her critique applies as well to the nation's twenty-first-century crisis of globalization, state power, and pervasive violence.

Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Studies
Spanish and Portuguese

*Best Humanities Book of 2016, Latin American Studies Association (LASA)

Spanish and Portuguese

*2010 Transdisciplinary Humanities Book Award, Institute for Humanities Research (IHR), Arizona State University

Most scholars study postrevolutionary Mexico as a period in which cultural production significantly shaped national identity through murals, novels, essays, and other artifacts that registered the changing political and social realities in the wake of the Revolution. In Biocosmism, Jorge Quintana Navarrete shifts the focus to examine how a group of scientists, artists, and philosophers conceived the manifold relations of the human species with cosmological forces and nonhuman entities (animals, plants, inorganic matter, and celestial bodies, among others).

Drawing from recent theoretical trends in new materialisms, biopolitics, and posthumanism, this book traces for the first time the intellectual constellation of biocosmism or biocosmic thought: the study of universal life understood as the vital vibrancy that animates everything in the cosmos from inorganic matter to living organisms to outer space. It combines both analysis of unexplored areas--such as Alfonso L. Herrera's plasmogeny--and innovative readings of canonical texts like Vasconcelos's La raza cósmica to examine how biocosmism produced a wide array of utopian projects and theorizations that continue to challenge anthropocentric, biopolitical frameworks.