This book shines a spotlight on software-centric networks and their emerging service environments. The authors examine the road ahead for connectivity, for both humans and 'things', considering the rapid changes that have shaken the industry. The book analyses major catalytic shifts that are shaping the communications world: softwarization, virtualization, and cloud computing. It guides the reader through a maze of possible architectural choices, driven by discriminating and sometimes conflicting business considerations. The new ICT capabilities lead us toward smarter environments and to an ecosystem where applications are backed up by shared networking facilities, instead of networks that support their own applications. Growing user awareness is a key driver towards the softwarization process. Softwarization disrupts the current status quo for equipment, development, networks, operations and business. It changes radically the value chain and the involved stakeholders. The dilemma is between a 'slow burn' traditional step-by-step approach and a bold transformation of the whole infrastructure and business models. This book is essential reading for those seeking to build user-centric communication networks that support independent agile and smart applications. “The book gives an insightful account of modern telecom networks, pinpointing the radical transformations of the last 20 years. This is the perfect read for those who are interested in the grand challenges of networks and in the socio-economic reasons why the telecom industry to embrace the Internet of Things and cyber-physical systems.” Prof. Antonio Liotta, Eindhoven University of Technology “This book fulfills an urgent need to thoroughly analyze the entanglement of network and software architectures by taking into account the increasing softwarization. It highlights important issues behind today’s business models and opens the road for sustainable future approaches to provide user appreciated valuable services.” Dr. Eng. Hendrik Berndt, former CTO of NTT DOCOMO Communications Laboratories Europe
This book shines a spotlight on software-centric networks and their emerging service environments. The authors examine the road ahead for connectivity, for both humans and 'things', considering the rapid changes that have shaken the industry. The book analyses major catalytic shifts that are shaping the communications world: softwarization, virtualization, and cloud computing. It guides the reader through a maze of possible architectural choices, driven by discriminating and sometimes conflicting business considerations. The new ICT capabilities lead us toward smarter environments and to an ecosystem where applications are backed up by shared networking facilities, instead of networks that support their own applications. Growing user awareness is a key driver towards the softwarization process. Softwarization disrupts the current status quo for equipment, development, networks, operations and business. It changes radically the value chain and the involved stakeholders. The dilemma is between a 'slow burn' traditional step-by-step approach and a bold transformation of the whole infrastructure and business models. This book is essential reading for those seeking to build user-centric communication networks that support independent agile and smart applications. “The book gives an insightful account of modern telecom networks, pinpointing the radical transformations of the last 20 years. This is the perfect read for those who are interested in the grand challenges of networks and in the socio-economic reasons why the telecom industry to embrace the Internet of Things and cyber-physical systems.” Prof. Antonio Liotta, Eindhoven University of Technology “This book fulfills an urgent need to thoroughly analyze the entanglement of network and software architectures by taking into account the increasing softwarization. It highlights important issues behind today’s business models and opens the road for sustainable future approaches to provide user appreciated valuable services.” Dr. Eng. Hendrik Berndt, former CTO of NTT DOCOMO Communications Laboratories Europe
Some researcher has created the vision of the 'data utility' as a key enabler towards ubiquitous and pervasive computing. Decentralization and replication would be the approach to make it resistant against security attacks. This book presents an organic view on the research and technologies, which bring us towards the realization of the vision.
From Simon & Schuster, Knowledge and Politics by Roberto Mangabeira Unger is a philosophical classic. Knowledge and Politics is a 1975 book by philosopher and politician Roberto Mangabeira Unger. In it, Unger criticizes classical liberal doctrine, which originated with European social theorists in the mid-17th century and continues to exercise a tight grip over contemporary thought, as an untenable system of ideas.
Senses and affects, despite what some schools of thought in modern science think, are not only a physiological tool that captures the stimuli present in the world, but are also an apparatus that constantly updates our position in the world. They are material-discursive practices that we employ on a daily basis in the interpretation and evaluation of the world, a material-discursive practice that limits, delimitates, includes and excludes, arranges and rearranges the elements we grasp and interpret within the assemblies in which we are participating. That is why it is so important to understand how we are educated within these material-discursive practices, for this is the first step towards freeing our sense-affective processes and decolonizing our worldview. An archaeology of the senses and affects is aesthetically decolonized. It recognizes that we have been educated within a senso-affective aesthetic that normalizes and colonizes our behaviour. An archaeology of the senses and affects fights against epistemological violence like that manifested in the thinking that people in the past, as well as the present, thought and acted like Westerners.
In this fascinating book, the author traces the careers, ideas, discoveries, and inventions of two renowned scientists, Athanasius Kircher and Galileo Galilei, one a Jesuit, the other a sincere man of faith whose relations with the Jesuits deteriorated badly. The Author documents Kircher’s often intuitive work in many areas, including translating the hieroglyphs, developing sundials, and inventing the magic lantern, and explains how Kircher was a forerunner of Darwin in suggesting that animal species evolve. Galileo’s work on scales, telescopes, and sun spots is mapped and discussed, and care is taken to place his discoveries within their cultural environment. While Galileo is without doubt the “winner” in the comparison with Kircher, the latter achieved extraordinary insights by unconventional means. For all Galileo’s fine work, the author believes that scientists do need to regain the power of dreaming, vindicating Kirchner’s view.
Some aspects of the physics of many-body systems arbitrarily away from equilibrium, mainly the characterization and irreversible evolution of their macroscopic state, are considered. The present status of phenomenological irreversible thermodynamics is described. An approach for building a statistical thermodynamics - dubbed Informational-Statistical-Thermodynamics - based on a non-equilibrium statistical ensemble formalism is presented. The formalism can be considered as encompassed within the scope of the so-called Predictive Statistical Mechanics, in which the predictability of future states in terms of the knowledge of present and past states, and the question of historicity in the case of systems with complex behaviour, is its main characteristic. The book is recommended for researchers in the area of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, as well as a textbook for advanced courses for graduate students in the area of condensed matter physics.
Nonviolent methods of action have been a powerful tool since the early twentieth century for social protest and revolutionary social and political change, and there is diffuse awareness that nonviolence is an efficient spontaneous choice of movements, individuals and whole nations. Yet from a conceptual standpoint, nonviolence struggles to engage with key contemporary political issues: the role of religion in a post-secular world; the crisis of democracy; and the use of supposedly ‘nonviolent techniques’ for violent aims. Drawing on classic thinkers and contemporary authors, in particular the Italian philosopher Aldo Capitini, this book shows that nonviolence is inherently a non-systematic and flexible system with no pure, immaculate thought at its core. Instead, at the core of nonviolence there is praxis, which is impure because while it aims at freedom and plurality it is made of less than perfect actions performed in an imperfect environment by flawed individuals. Offering a more progressive, transformative and at the same time pluralistic concept of nonviolence, this book is an original conceptual analysis of political theory which will appeal to students of international relations, global politics, security studies, peace studies and democratic theory.
The history of European integration did not begin in the aftermath of the 20th century AD: only the epilogue of a very long political, religious and socio-cultural formation process that started with the great adventure of Alexander the Great and his impromptu universal empire. In the centuries that followed, Europe became a land of immigration of peoples of Asian origin and Indo-European matrix, who found themselves on a continent that had emerged from the ice and occupied their own 'living space'. People still essentially present today who recognise themselves in Europe as an entity that retains its own characteristic identity in political, religious and historical-cultural terms. This book tells the story of the forces and ideas that enabled different 'gentes' to integrate and live together through facts, characters, thoughts, faiths, royal dynasties and power struggles. The text is conceived with a plural thematic structure that aims to reflect the various European 'souls' and offer each specific interpretation. The Introduction sets out principles, concepts, questions, but also the philosophical/cultural paths along which the overall European culture was formed, even if not entirely homogeneous and for long periods dramatically conflicting, highlighting the turning milestones of the common continental thought thanks to an oriental and classical philosophical discourse. Part One, on the other hand, recounts the history of European events, personalities and evolutionary lines, with a Greek historical approach, relating them to the action and function of the Empire (especially the Christian one), which over the centuries 'attracted' the various peoples settled in Europe and trained them in a model of civilisation and socio-political organisation still visible today in every corner of the continent: the formation of the European states and nations now included in the EU is thus the product of the 'budding' of the Empire over two thousand years. Part Two examines the evolution of European legal and political thought using the method of Roman jurist treatises, following the development of the function of auctoritas, from its first configuration in the ancient Res Publica of Rome through the medieval, renaissance and modern eras to demonstrate the continuity of its conceptual reworking in every political and legal form of power established at every latitude of Europe, up to the so-called 'modern states' of today's democratic and constitutional republics. Part Three is a synthesis of the history of Christianity, from the events of the first 'communities' formed in the imperial age and then spread to the whole of Europe thanks to the evangelical action of the missionary monks and the policy of Christianization of the peoples of Europe conducted by the Empire and the institutional Church, under the sign of the biblical eschatological vision of 'salvation for all believers in Christ' which has an evident Jewish matrix and draws strength from the unique figure in human history of Jesus of Nazareth. The story also deals with the events that have marked the history of the Christian Church in every era, from the original conceptual controversies to imperial dogmatism, from the confrontation between the different 'churches' that arose in Europe in the Middle Ages to the struggles between Papacy and Empire, up to the Protest and Reformation that shaped the state of Christian religiosity today. Part Four is a cryptic narrative that seeks to 'unveil' (and thus end the evolutionary process underway) European history by its cultural roots, its founding myths and the journey of the 'European people', inspired by a Celtic metaphysical approach: only by delving into the various 'mysteries' collected in Eastern Greek cosmogony, in ancient Greco-Roman mythology, in the biblical letter and again in the most famous medieval legends narrated by the Chanson de geste, can one Translator: Alessandra Cervetti PUBLISHER: TEKTIME
Militarizing Culture is a rousing critique of the increasing infiltration of military culture into American society by leading cultural commentator. Despite its pervasiveness, González insists that warfare is not an inevitable part of human nature, and charts a path toward the decommissioning of culture.
Published in 1499 and centered on the figure of a bawd and witch, Fernando de Rojas' dark and disturbing Celestina was destined to become the most suppressed classic in Spanish literary history. Routinely ignored in Spanish letters, the book nonetheless echoes through contemporary Spanish and Latin American literature. This is the phenomenon that Celestina's Brood explores. Roberto González Echevarría, one of the most eminent and influential critics of Hispanic literature writing today, uses Rojas' text as his starting point to offer an exploration of modernity in the Hispanic literary tradition, and of the Baroque as an expression of the modern. His analysis of Celestina reveals the relentless probing of the limits of language and morality that mark the work as the beginning of literary modernity in Spanish, and the start of a tradition distinguished by a penchant for the excesses of the Baroque. González Echevarría pursues this tradition and its meaning through the works of major figures such as Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, Alejo Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Nicolás Guillén, and Severo Sarduy, as well as through the works of lesser-known authors. By revealing continuities of the Baroque, Celestina's Brood cuts across conventional distinctions between Spanish and Latin American literary traditions to show their profound and previously unimagined affinity.
Traditionally a critical component of the education of any architect was to draw the ruins of ancient Rome, reconstructing either from ancient sources or, more often, pure fantasy, what the original structures must have looked like. From this training emerged generations of architects imbued with the aesthetic ideals that would form the Neoclassical and Beaux-Arts building styles. In this magnificently printed volume are reproduced some of the most extraordinarily handsome drawings of the ruins of ancient Rome made by French "Prix de Rome" architects from 1775 through 1925. Accompanied by text that explains how the Prix de Rome was awarded and the significance of the prize in the history of architecture, as well as how the study of ancient models formed the basis for nineteenth- and early twentieth-century architectural styles, these drawings provide an invaluable understanding of how the modern imagination recorded and transformed ancient fragments into a modern architectural idiom.
This proposed text appears to be a good introduction to evolutionary computation for use in applied statistics research. The authors draw from a vast base of knowledge about the current literature in both the design of evolutionary algorithms and statistical techniques. Modern statistical research is on the threshold of solving increasingly complex problems in high dimensions, and the generalization of its methodology to parameters whose estimators do not follow mathematically simple distributions is underway. Many of these challenges involve optimizing functions for which analytic solutions are infeasible. Evolutionary algorithms represent a powerful and easily understood means of approximating the optimum value in a variety of settings. The proposed text seeks to guide readers through the crucial issues of optimization problems in statistical settings and the implementation of tailored methods (including both stand-alone evolutionary algorithms and hybrid crosses of these procedures with standard statistical algorithms like Metropolis-Hastings) in a variety of applications. This book would serve as an excellent reference work for statistical researchers at an advanced graduate level or beyond, particularly those with a strong background in computer science.
British Fiction and the Struggle Against Work offers an account of British literary responses to work from the 1950s to the onset of the financial crisis of 2008/9. Roberto del Valle Alcalá argues that throughout this period, working-class writing developed new strategies of resistance against the social discipline imposed by capitalist work. As the latter becomes an increasingly pervasive and inescapable form of control and as its nature grows abstract, diffuse, and precarious, writing about it acquires a new antagonistic quality, producing new forms of subjective autonomy and new imaginaries of a possible life beyond its purview. By tracing a genealogy of working-class authors and texts that in various ways defined themselves against the social discipline imposed by post-war capitalism, this book analyses the strategies adopted by workers in their attempts to identify and combat the source of their oppression. Drawing on the work of a wide range of theorists including Deleuze and Guattari, Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri, Alcalá offers a systematic and innovative account of British literary treatments of work. The book includes close readings of fiction by Alan Sillitoe, David Storey, Nell Dunn, Pat Barker, James Kelman, Irvine Welsh, Monica Ali, and Joanna Kavenna.
Using case studies drawn from Latin America, Africa, India and Eastern Europe, this volume examines the role of courts as a channel for social transformation for excluded sectors of society in contemporary democracies. With a focus on social rights litigation in post-authoritarian regimes or in the context of fragile state control, the authors assess the role of judicial processes in altering (or perpetuating) social and economic inequalities and power relations in society. Drawing on interdisciplinary expertise in the fields of law, political theory, and political science, the chapters address theoretical debates and present empirical case studies to examine recent trends in social rights litigation.
Elio Petri (1929-1982) was one of the most commercially successful and critically revered Italian directors ever. A cultured intellectual and a politically committed filmmaker, Petri made award-winning movies that touched controversial social, religious, and political themes, such as the Mafia in We Still Kill the Old Way (1967), police brutality in Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970), and workers' struggles in Lulu the Tool (1971). His work also explored genre in a thought-provoking and refreshing manner with a taste for irony and the grotesque: among his best works are the science fiction satire The 10th Victim (1965), the ghost story A Quiet Place in the Country (1968), and the grotesque giallo Todo modo (1976). This book examines Elio Petri's life and career, and places his work within the social and political context of postwar Italian culture, politics, and cinema. It includes a detailed production history and critical analysis of each of his films, plenty of never-before-seen bits of information recovered from the Italian ministerial archives, and an in-depth discussion of the director's unfilmed projects.
In an eclectic career spanning four decades, Italian director Riccardo Freda (1909-1999) produced films of remarkable technical skill and powerful visual style, including the swashbuckler Black Eagle (1946), an adaptation of Les Miserables (1947), the peplum Theodora, Slave Empress (1954) and a number of cult-favorite Gothic and horror films such as I Vampiri (1957), The Horrible Dr. Hichcock (1962) and The Ghost (1963). Freda was first championed in the 1960s by French critics who labeled him "the European Raoul Walsh," and enjoyed growing critical esteem over the years. This book covers his life and career for the first time in English, with detailed analyses of his films and exclusive interviews with his collaborators and family.
From the internationally acclaimed author of The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony comes one of the most significant books in recent years on a writer of perennial interest–a virtuoso interpretation of the work of Franz Kafka. What are Kafka’s fictions about? Are they dreams? Allegories? Symbols? Countless answers have been offered, but the essential mystery remains intact. Setting out on his own exploration, Roberto Calasso enters the flow, the tortuous movement, the physiology of Kafka’s work to discover why K. and Josef K.–the protagonists of The Castle and The Trial–are so radically different from any other character in the history of the novel, and to determine who, in the end, is K. The culmination of Calasso’s lifelong fascination with Kafka’s work, K. is also an unprecedented consideration of the mystery of Kafka himself.
Sant'Egidio, a Catholic social movement rooted in "the gospel and friendship," pursues projects such as peacemaking efforts that brought an end to civil wars in Mozambique and Burundi in the 1990s. This book describes Sant'Egidio's DREAM project, which was established in 2002. DREAM stands for Drug Resource Enhancement Against AIDS and Malnutrition. Put simply, the program addressed the AIDS crisis through the same means that had shown success in the developed world: a "triple therapy" of antiretroviral drugs, which enable people with HIV to live relatively healthy lives for decades"--
Forty-nine steps" refers to the Talmudic doctrine that there are forty-nine steps to meaning in every passage of the Torah. Employing this interpretive approach, Calasso offers a "secret history" of European literature and philosophy in the wake of Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud. Calasso analyzes how figures ranging from Gustav Flaubert, Gottfried Benn, Karl Kraus, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, Bertolt Brecht, and Theodor Adorno has contributed to, or been emblematic of, the current state of Western thought. This book's theme, writ large, is the power of fable - specifically, its persistence in art and literature despite its exclusion from orthodox philosophy."--BOOK JACKET.
This unique work presents one of the most significant organ failure condition – cardiocirculatory shock – and the prominent role of Methylene Blue (MB). Through their extensive experience, the authors’ consider that the lifesaving feature of MB is still underestimated. For this reason they outline key concepts of MB, mentioning essential experimental data, yet focusing mainly on its application in the care of critically ill patients. In an easy-to-read format, the 18 chapters were organized in a didactically structured order, distributed in four parts. The first part introduces the general conceptual aspects and physiology of the endothelium. The second part presents the particularities of endothelial dysfunction in different types of shock. Methylene blue is discussed in detail in the third part. In the fourth part, particular situations of endothelial dysfunction, such as heart surgery and organ transplantation, are described. Additionally, the two complementary subjects of acid-base balance and the therapeutic use of inhaled nitric oxide are mentioned. Finally, looking for therapeutic alternatives for what we classify as "vasoplegic endothelial dysfunction", MB remains promising as an adjuvant to sympathomimetic amines. The combination of three recently proposed concepts may be useful in obtaining better results against the high mortality rates in critically ill patients. These three concepts are "wide-spectrum vasopressors", vasopressor economy strategies, and microcirculation protection against the harmful effects of using high concentrations of amines. This book ́s translational approach will appeal to a variety of readers within the health specialties of medicine, biomedicine, physiotherapy, nursing, odontology, and basic science.
The Italian community in Artificial Life and Evolutionary computation has grown remarkably in recent years, and this book is the first broad collection of its major interests and achievements (including contributions from foreign countries). The contributions in Artificial Life as well as in Evolutionary Computation allow one to see the deep connections between the two fields. The topics addressed are extremely relevant for present day research in Artificial Life and in Evolutionary Computation, which include important contributions from very well-known researchers. The volume provides a very broad picture of the Italian activities in this field. Sample Chapter(s). Chapter 1: Cognitive Dynamics in an Automata Gas (906 KB). Contents: Diffusion of Shapes (R S Shaw & N H Packard); FDC-Based Particle Swarm Optimization (A Azzini et al.); An Evolutionary Predictive Approach to Design High Dimensional Experiments (D De March et al.); Prefrontal Cortex and Action Sequences: A Review on Neural Computational Models (I Gaudiello et al.); Bio-Inspired ICT for Evolutionary Emotional Intelligence (M Villamira & P Cipresso); Cooperation in Corvids: A Simulative Study with Evolved Robots (O Miglino et al.); Distributed Processes in a Agent-Based Model of Innovation (L Ansaloni et al.); Imaginary or Actual Artificial Worlds Using a New Tool in the ABM Perspective (P Terna); Dynamics of Interconnected Boolean Networks with Scale-Free Topology (C Damiani et al.); Semi-Synthetical Minimal Cells (P Stano & P L Luisi); and other papers. Readership: Graduate students, academics and researchers in the field of complex systems, artificial intelligence and robotics.
At last, the first systematic guide to the growing jungle of citation indices and other bibliometric indicators. Written with the aim of providing a complete and unbiased overview of all available statistical measures for scientific productivity, the core of this reference is an alphabetical dictionary of indices and other algorithms used to evaluate the importance and impact of researchers and their institutions. In 150 major articles, the authors describe all indices in strictly mathematical terms without passing judgement on their relative merit. From widely used measures, such as the journal impact factor or the h-index, to highly specialized indices, all indicators currently in use in the sciences and humanities are described, and their application explained. The introductory section and the appendix contain a wealth of valuable supporting information on data sources, tools and techniques for bibliometric and scientometric analysis - for individual researchers as well as their funders and publishers.
An essential visual guide for artists to the mastery and use of advanced human anatomy skills in the creation of figurative art. Dynamic Human Anatomy picks up where Basic Human Anatomy leaves off and offers artists and art students a deeper understanding of anatomy, including anatomy in motion, and how that essential skill is applied to the creation of fine figurative art.
The main purpose of this book is to provide the first comprehensive analysis of suicide in psychiatric patients. 95 per cent of those who commit suicide had a psychiatric disorder and yet suicide is rarely investigated in psychiatric patients. The book provides a relevant contribution to the prediction and prevention of suicide. This is a first book devoted to the subject with comprehensive chapters, including epidemiology, risk factors, preventive strategies and available treatments.
Arguing that the virtual body is something new—namely, an entity that from an ontological perspective has only recently entered the world—Roberto Diodato considers the implications of this kind of body for aesthetics. Virtual bodies insert themselves into the space opened up by the famous distinction in Aristotle's Physics between natural and artificial beings—they are both. They are beings that are simultaneously events; they are images that are at once internal and external; they are ontological hybrids that exist only in the interaction between logical-computational text and human bodies endowed with technological prostheses. Pursuing this line of thought, Diodato reconfigures classic aesthetic concepts such as mimesis, representation, the relation between illusion and reality, the nature of images and imagination, and the theory of sensory knowledge.
The novel Don Quixote, written in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, is widely considered to be one of the greatest fictional works in the entire canon of Western literature. At once farcical and deeply philosophical, Cervantes' novel and its characters have become integrated into the cultures of the Western Hemisphere, influencing language and modern thought while inspiring art and artists such as Richard Strauss and Pablo Picasso. Based on Professor Roberto González Echevarría's popular open course at Yale University, this essential guide to the enduring Spanish classic facilitates a close reading of Don Quixote in the artistic and historical context of renaissance and baroque Spain while exploring why Cervantes' masterwork is still widely read and relevant today. González Echevarría addresses the novel's major themes and demonstrates how the story of an aging, deluded would-be knight-errant embodies that most modern of predicaments: the individual's dissatisfaction with the world in which he lives, and his struggle to make that world mesh with his desires.
Unger criticizes the dominant, rationalizing style of legal doctrine, with its obsessional focus upon adjudication and its urge to suppress or contain conflict or contradiction in law. He shows how we can turn legal analysis into a way of talking about the alternative institutional futures of a democratic society. The programmatic proposals of Unger's Politics are here placed within a wider field of possibilities.
31 January 1941:The tide of the Desert War in North Africa has turned against Italy, which has attacked British-occupied Egypt. The Italian northern front has collapsed and their army is in full retreat west towards Tripoli. Meanwhile in the far south among some isolated hills, two small mobile Special Forces units of the belligerent nations, the Compagnia Autosahariana di Cufra and T Patrol of the Long Range Desert Group, clash. This story was to become known as the incident at Jebel Sherif. 26 November 2006: After a long journey from the north, another small group rediscovers the same hills. This is the story of the incident at Jebel Sherif. For the first time, all available reports and accounts have been gathered and evaluated. An interview with a NZ veteran and the assistance of the LRDG Patrol Commander's son, together with two recent visits to the location, have allowed the authors to draw the most probable conclusions about the sequence of events. The book provides not only full details about the incident at Jebel Sherif, but also contains a dramatic account of the desert journey to and from this very remote location. This book is intended as a memorial to those - of any nation - who suffered and lost their lives during the years of the colonial occupation of Libya, the Second World War and all the conflicts that followed."--Publisher's description.
A luminous history of Cuba’s most dynamic and defining rituals and the ever-improvisational character of Cuban culture In the Cuban town of Sagua la Grande, a young Roberto González Echevarría peers out the window of his family home on the morning of the Nochebuena fiesta as preparations begin for the slaughter of a feast day pig. The author recalls “watching them at a distance, though thinking, fearing, that once I grew older I would have to participate in the whole event.” Now an acclaimed scholar of Latin American literature, González Echevarría returns to the rituals that defined his young life in Cuban Fiestas. Drawing from art, literature, film, and even the national sport of baseball, he vividly reveals the fiesta as a dynamic force of both destruction and renewal in the life of a people. Roberto González Echevarría masterfully exposes the distinctive elements of the fiesta cubana that give depth and coherence to more than two centuries of Cuban cultural life. Reaching back to nineteenth-century traditions of Cuban art and literature, and augmenting them, in the twentieth, with the arts of narrative, the esthetic performances of sport and entertainment in nightclubs, on the baseball diamond, and in movie theaters, Cuban Fiestas renders the lilting strains of the fiesta and drum beats of the passage of time as keys to understanding the dynamic quality of Cuban culture. González Echevarría’s explorations are also illuminated by autobiographical vignettes that unveil the ever-shifting impact of the fiesta on the author’s own story of exile and return.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.