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In her novel El muchacho de los senos de goma (2007), Sylvia Iparraguirre presents a verisimilar rendering of different antinomies pertaining to the Argentine capital in recent years that reflect the consequential effects of globalization. In effect, her work decisively and clearly treats economic, social, and even psychological dichotomies that have been asserted by a select body of scholars as factual ramifications of the mentioned global phenomenon over Buenos Aires and its inhabitants towards the end of the past century. Taking as its cue, as it were, both the salient and also more esoteric impacts of neoliberal economic policies during said time period, the cited novel proffers a correlative discourse that mimetically represents not just the visually discernible repercussions of globalization but it is noteworthy that Iparraguirre delves also into the elusive facets of the human psyche. In this way, her writing distinguishes itself for its ambitious attempt to achieve, albeit through the hypothetical lens of narrative fiction, a more comprehensive and thus more realistic depiction. Due to its life-like and inclusive illustrations of the historical issues described above, Iparraguirre's novel provides an intriguingly coherent and vivid representation of a critical era for Argentina, or rather its most populated city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay begins by examining the rhetorical significance of the guillotine, an important symbol during the Romantic Period. Lacefield argues that the guillotine symbolized a range of modern ontological juxtapositions and antinomies during the period. Moreover, she argues that the guillotine influenced Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein through Giovanni Aldini, a scientist who experimented on guillotined corpses during the French Revolution and inspired Shelley's characterization of Victor Frankenstein. Given the importance of the guillotine as a powerful metaphor for anxieties emergent during this period, Lacefield employs it as a clue signaling a labyrinth of modern meanings embedded in Shelley's novel, as well as the films they anticipated. In particular, Lacefield analyzes the significance of the guillotine slice itself-the uneasy, indeterminate line that simultaneously separates and joins categories such as life/death, mind/body, spirit/matter, and nature/technology. Lacefield's interdisciplinary analysis analyzes motifs of decapitation/ dismemberment in Frankenstein and then moves into a discussion of the novel's exploration of the ontological categories specified above. For example, Frankenstein's Creature, as a kind of cyborg, exists on the contested theoretical "slice" within a number of antinomies: nature/tech, human/ inhuman (alive/dead), matter/spirit, etc. These are interesting juxtapositions that point to tensions within each set of categories, and Lacefield discusses the relevance of such dichotomies for questions of modernity posed by materialist theory and technological innovation. Additionally, she incorporates a discussion of films that fuse Shelley's themes with appeals to twentieth-century and post-millennium audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's insights on the relativist presentation of Russian poet Alexander Pushkin in the book "Walks With Pushkin," by Andrey Sinyavsky. The author says that Sinyavsky was accused by the book's critics with Russophobia as he portrayed Pushkin as a relativist poet of nonsense and a vampire, who poaches on others' view. He says that his depiction of Pushkin only shows his antinomic poles, but not his total disagreement with relativism. He says that the book shows Pushkin as a post-modernist poet, who defies ideals of good, evil, and morality to be subjective. Moreover, he adds that such depiction of Pushkin shows his freedom, which turns the book usefulness as a postmodernist manifesto.

This essay focuses on fault lines and contradictions in author Theodor W. Adorno's theory and practice of immanent critique. Immanent criticism pursues the logic of its aporias, the insolubility of the task itself. In such antinomies criticism perceives those of society. A successful work, according to immanent criticism, is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions. Confronted with this kind of work, the verdict mere ideology loses its meaning.

Discusses the works of the 20th-century writer Erich Auerbach. Absence of footnotes in "Mimesis"; Engagement with certain antinomies; Formal opposition of high to low style; Gradual shedding of a transcendentalist ontology, as realism comes of age.