Bücher der Reihe Hispanic Studies: Culture and Ideas

This book explores the creation of knowledge in applied mathematics. It mainly analyses applications of mathematical theories in several contexts. The author analyses the generation of advanced theories that enable people to understand problems in a scientific way, and proposes cognitive models dealing with the observation of human behaviour and its abstraction into comprehensible mathematical models, as this is a main problem in our modern world. This work is directed at people concerned with understanding cognitive processes when tackling complex problems, as it shows the building of knowledge in the making of scientific approaches to any discipline. Using a cross-disciplinary approach, he focuses on the key issues of theories and technologies applicable in a wide variety of contexts, for example in military organizations, in research and development departments and in general strategic planning, as shown in applied cases in Latin America.

In the 1580s, almost a century after Christopher Columbus first set foot in the New World, England could not make any substantial claim to the rich territories there. Less than a century later, England had not only founded an overseas empire but had also managed to challenge her most powerful rivals in the international arena. But before any material success accompanied English New World enterprises, a major campaign of promotion was launched with the clear objective of persuading Englishmen that intervention in the Americas was not only desirable for the national economy but even paramount for their survival as a new and powerful Protestant nation-state. In this book the author explores the metaphors that dominate England¿s discourse on the New World in her attempt to conceptualize it and make it ready for immediate consumption. The creators of England¿s proto-colonial discourse were forced to make use of their rivals¿ prior experience at the same time they tried to present England as radically different, thus conferring legitimacy to English claims over territories that were already occupied. One of the most outstanding consequences of this ideological contest is the emergence of an English national self not only in opposition to the American natives they try to colonise, but also, and more importantly, in contrast to other nations that had been traditionally considered culturally similar.

This book is an edited volume of eleven specially-commissioned essays by a range of established and emerging UK-based Hispanists, which assess recent developments in the disciplines falling under the umbrella of ¿Iberian Studies¿. These essays, which cover a wide range of time periods and geographical areas, but are united by the common question of what it means to ¿Read Iberiä, offer an invigorating critique of many of the critical assumptions shaping the study of Iberian languages and literatures. This volume offers a timely intervention into the debate about the current repositioning of language/literature disciplines within the UK university. Its intellectual starting point is the need for a committed and incisive re-evaluation of the role of literature and the way we teach and research it. The contributors address this issue from a diverse range of linguistic, cultural and theoretical backgrounds, drawing on both familiar and not-so-familiar texts and authors to question common reference points and critical assumptions. The volume offers not only a new and invigorating space for reimagining Iberian Studies from within, but also ¿ through its commitment to interdisciplinary debate ¿ an opportunity to raise the profile of Iberian Studies outside the community of academic Hispanists.

Historical and literary works from the Spanish Golden Age offer a wealth of information about the Spanish view of the conflict in the Netherlands during the Dutch Revolt and the ensuing Eighty Years¿ War (1568-1648). The war in the cold north was to become a fixed component in the lives of the Spaniards of the Golden Age for many years. This book reconstructs the images that the Spanish had of the Netherlands and its inhabitants. These images are inextricably intertwined with the picture that the Spanish constructed of themselves as participants in the conflict. This book follows the developments of these images from the construction of an image of the enemy that reached a climax between 1621 and 1648 and then gradually faded away. Which images and representations circulated the most, and where did they come from? Which rhetoric was used to present them to the public, and in which genres and contexts were they disseminated and preserved? On the basis of a varied collection of sources, war chronicles and plays, as well as pamphlets, poems, historical works and prose writings, the author illustrates the appearance of the Netherlands through Spanish eyes during the course of the Eighty Years¿ War.

This collection of essays looks at the most recent work of Juan Goytisolo from a variety of perspectives and critical stances. The contributors, all specialists in the work of the Spanish author, employ theories of intertextuality, postmodernist irony, queer ethics and even the esoteric science of Huru¿sm to uncover the complexities of Goytisolös creative practice, in particular his radical blurring of the generic boundaries between fiction, autobiography and literary criticism. Such challenging of genre conventions is seen as both integral to the author¿s own questioning of his identity as an expression of his radical dissidence and essential to the response his work evokes in the reader. Life and writing, autobiography and ¿ction, constitute the interconnecting poles of Goytisolös artistic universe. The essays included in this volume explore the varying patterns of con¿uence of these twin strands in the writer¿s later work as a whole, but particularly in novels such as Las semanas del jardín (1997) and Carajicomedia (2000). The essays are set in context by a contribution from Juan Goytisolo himself in which he sums up his philosophy of life and writing as a pursuit of ¿non-prötable knowledge¿.

This book explores European and Argentinean writers' complex relationships with food and wine. It includes examinations of Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Honore de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Italo Svevo, Marcel Schwob, James Joyce, Robert Louis Stevenson, Domingo F. Sarmiento, Lucio V. Mansilla, Roberto J. Payro and Ezequiel Martinez Estrada.

Apologia and Criticism

(Re)Collecting the Past