Research and Innovation

The notion of a socially engaged dandyism – let alone a political one – seems to be antithetical to the definition proposed by Charles Baudelaire, that “A Dandy does nothing. Can you imagine a Dandy speaking to the people, except to scoff?” Yet it is from within the inherently political framework of a cultural revolution, undertaken in the first half of the nineteenth century by young adepts of the Romantic movement, that many of the poses and clichés surrounding the figure of the fin-de-siècle dandy originate. Examining the texts that Gautier, Borel, and their peers publish during this period, as well as satirical articles written about them in the press, this essay theorizes the young Romantics’ transgressive self-fashioning in the aftermath of Hernani as a kind of militant dandyism.

L’article se penche sur la problématique de la secondarité dans une œuvre considérée comme secondaire dans le corpus nervalien – son premier récit en prose, paru en 1832 sous le titre de « La Main de Gloire, histoire macaronique ». Trace de l’éphémère camaraderie du bousingo, ce conte, où dominent l’autoparodie et la dénégation, laisse deviner un jeune Nerval aux prises avec les préoccupations de sa génération et représentant génial de « l’école du désenchantement ».

This study investigates the function of smiling intensity as a non-discrete marker of humor in conversation. The smiling intensity of participants in 8 conversational dyads was measured relative to the occurrence of humorous and non-humorous events in the conversation. A relationship was found between higher smiling intensity and the occurrence of humorous events across conversations, thus confirming the value of smiling as a marker of humor. The results show that the occurrence of humor correlates positively with an increase of smiling intensity relative to the baseline of the conversation and it is foreshadowed by a localized increase of smiling both generally and when humor is predictable. Moreover, during humorous events, participants displayed framing smiling patterns, often preceded or followed by smiling accommodation or inverted smiling gestures, which are representative of the conversational dynamics of the dyad and the ongoing negotiation of meaning.

"Entre alambradas y exilios. Sangrías de las Españas y terapias de Vichy" [Between Barbed Wire and Exile. Spanish Sangrías and Vichy Therapies] by José María Naharro-Calderón, Professor of Spanish Literature, Iberian Cultures & Exile Studies at the University of Maryland, discusses the complex historical memories that surround the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) exile narratives around concentration camps, identity and political confrontations. They resurface again through planetary violences and diasporas, populisms, post-truths, brexit, elections in the USA, or constitutional challenges in Spain (Catalonia, Basque Country.) This detailed study explores diasporas and concentration camp experiences reflected in essay and literary contributions (Celso Amieva, Manuel Andújar, Max Aub, Otilia Castellví, Eugenio Ímaz, Eulalio Ferrer, 1956 Literature Nobel recipient and UM Professor Juan Ramón Jiménez, Silvia Mistral, Mercè Rodoreda, Jorge Semprún, etc.,) image and film (Mario Camus, María Luisa Elío, Fernando Fernán Gómez, Jomí García Ascot, Agustí Villaronga,) comic books (Manuel Altarriba, Josep Bartolí, Kim, Paco Roca,) and photography (Robert Capa, Agustí Centelles, Manuel Moros, Gerda Taro.) It also studies kitsch best sellers (Javier Cercas, Arturo Pérez Reverte, Andrés Trapiello), and the democratic contradictions that lead to freedoms suppressions and concentration camps, such as in 1939 France, as well as the pending questions of Francoist memories: "The Uncivil Mountain" or the Valley of the Fallen outside Madrid. Last but not least, it evaluates Spain’s Transition to democracy and today’s terrorist and nationalist challenges, paving the debate away from ineffective Vichy type therapies and/or Spanish sangrías.

Thoroughly based on a close reading of the primary sources (including the often neglected early versions of the treatise), this book challenges the traditional notion of Il Cortegiano as an abstract work of art. Through a careful analysis of the structural changes and thematic developments that occur in the treatise, this book shows that the primary object of Il Libro del Cortegiano is to describe the ways in which despotism exerts its power and influence within the court under the veil of figurative language.

In this article I demonstrate that De Campos’s translation theory of “Trancreation” subverted the hierarchical categories and values that have structured the field of world literature. Positioning himself as an intellectual from an ‘ex-centric’ literaryculture, situated outside of the centers of global circulation, De Campos critiqued the unequal weight usually assigned to translated and original texts, author and translator, established and ascending traditions. I argue that De Campos’s response to the standing inequality that characterizes translational exchanges involved a literary solution. As a creative act in its own right, the theory of transcreation offered an aesthetic answer to the problems of authenticity, influence and literary dependence.

Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, no. 26, 2017, pp. 461-481

Through a comparative study of Bartolomeo Sacchi's De principe (1471), De optimo cive (1474), and an in-depth analysis of lesser-known treatises on the virtue of magnificentia, this article shows that in Florence, as in other Italian cities where humanists played a vital role in the production of propaganda for the regime, humanism served as an effective instrument for the Medici to consolidate their power.

This article on Neapolitan humanism in fifteenth century Italy examines the notion of majesty as it is described in rhetorical terms by Giovanni Pontano in his De principe liber. It shows the important role that humanist education played in the Kingdom of Naples in the construction and articulation of the public image of the prince, illustrating the close link between rhetoric and morality, and between ideal models of human conduct and the realistic world of politics.

This article examines the relationship between the magazines Cadernos Brasileiros (1959 - 1970) and Mundo Nuevo (1967 - 1971) in the 1960s and 70s. It problematizes the processes of South-South exchange by examining the triangulation of Brazilian and Hispanic American cultural relations, which in the case studied, relied on material and logistical support of the United States. If on the one hand the support of the United states undermined the credibility of Latin American cultural magazines, on the other hand, it also opened opportunities for editors, cultural producers, and writers to advance their own agenda of literary internationalization and the cultural integration of Latin America.

Thinking World Literature from Lusophone Perspectives, special issue of Journal of Lusophone Studies, 2021. (accepted)

The article addresses circulation and exchange in the Global South by examining the case of Biblioteca Ayacucho (1973), a transnational collection of over 500 books from several Latin American countries. It discusses Ayacucho’ strategies of transnationalization which, in addition to book publishing, also relied on networks of intellectual collaboration and exchange. By engaging Latin American specialists and relying on local scholarship, Ayacucho offered an inclusive model of world literature that allies both distant and close reading in the construction of a transnational literature. As such, it defied established assumptions about literary circulation and center-based conceptions of world literature.

DOI: 10.1163/24056480-20210001