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This book studies the various narrative shades of love in twentieth-century Latin American fiction. It examines writings by Isabel Allende, Roberto Arlt, García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa. The author provides a close textual reading of each novel and discusses how humans make sense of their lives through love. He shifts the focus of these writings from political violence and historical disillusionment to the illusion of love.An important contribution to Latin American literary criticism, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of literature, history, Latin American literature, philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, comparative literature, and sociology.

This book aims at explaining romantic love between straight adults through literary texts of the western canon from the nineteenth and twentieth century. Each chapter comes with a multidisciplinary approach in which protagonists are mutilated in their quest for loving as alternative to annihilation. The book emphasizes love as an obsession, thus as an exploration of the mind. From the passion-myth of Tristan and Isolde to the nihilist modernist representations, the western world has created a perverse concept of love. A love for nothingness, for death. Narcissistic and at times destructive, love is gained by overcoming obstacles. If without obstacles there is no love, then love becomes love for obstacles. Within this masochistic frame, love, falling in love, being loved always stand at the edge of pathology. At its core this book narrates a love story, more precisely a story of loves, the haunting evocation of a desire that by its very nature cannot be fulfilled. Inherent in the nature of love is a subtle dialectical activity between presence and absence, between creation and destruction, reality and void. Accordingly, the narrative raises questions that the past two centuries were incapable of answering. Does love only last the time of a kiss? Is its promise fatally destined to dissolve? What about violence? Physical, emotional, temporal. Is it an ineliminable part of love or its most extreme profanation? And what is the mystery that accompanies loves that know how to last without resigning themselves to the death of desire? It is to answer some of these questions that I wrote this text. Love is an unconscious process that dominates reason and destroys it when reason cannot be a mode of communication. Hence, the amorous romance is madness and this text is written as a loud reminder.

This book is moved by two main questions. Is Love a matter of beauty or mortality? In other words, is love an ethical ideal? Also, modernity understood as the age of mechanical reproduction, has shaped not simply our cities but our very same way of feeling. How has our conception of love changed, if it has, in the past two centuries? This book is to address these questions. It is not to trace the evolution of the idea of love in Western culture, from Plato to the present day. It aims to bring to the surface different shades of love lingering at the heart of Western culture to rehabilitate the myth of love to its original credibility. Our confused civilization has split love into sensual and moral aspects but to be aware of it is perhaps to defeat a dilemma that seems so unnatural. This book is about how we make sense of our lives through love and how nineteenth and twentieth-century literature records it.

The Modernity of Chinese Postmodern Literature is an unprecedented comparative study of postmodern Chinese literature and continental European modernism. This book deconstructs and reconstructs central works of post-1976 Chinese literature and the main texts of European modernism to uncover a striking conceptual similarity between these two literary corpuses. Scholars and postgraduate students in the humanities comprise this work's primary audience. However, all those interested in contemporary China will find in it an accessible key to decode China's present and past.

This edited collection brings together a range of essays that examine the maze of Chinese postmodernity. The essays explore the global expansion of capital as a structural crisis represented in art and literature. It ultimately acknowledges the ambiguity of Chinese postmodernity, the overlapping cultural paradigms of Confucian ethics and a capitalist economy, residual of Maoism, socialist relations, and individualist philosophy.

This book charts ideas European intellectuals (mostly from Great Britain, France, Germany and Italy) put forward to solve the problem of war during the first half of the twentieth century: a period that began with the Anglo-Boer war and that ended with the explosion of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Such ideas do not belong to a homogeneous tradition of thought, but can be understood as a unique discourse that takes different characteristics according to the point of view of each author and of the specific historical situation.

In circostanze rocambolesche, entra a far parte della Stax. Nel giro di pochi anni, grazie a un numero impressionante di concerti e a una serie di incisioni divenute storiche, Otis Redding diventerà la stella, il cuore e l'anima del soul di Memphis e, più in generale, del Southern Soul.Quando morì tragicamente nel dicembre del 1967, non solo era all'apice della carriera, ma era pronto a scrivere una nuova e importante pagina della sua vicenda artistica. Tre mesi dopo la sua scomparsa (Sittin'On the) Dock of the Bay, una sorta di testamento in musica, parole e anima, arriverà al primo posto delle classifiche internazionali.Lavoratore infaticabile, uomo generoso e gentile, nessuno ha trasmesso la passione del soul come lui.Alberto CastelliDal 1983 al 2014 ha lavorato per Radio Rai (Radio 1-2-3) conducendo, tra gli altri, programmi quali Stereonotte, I Concerti di Suoni & Ultrasuoni, Radio 1 Musica, Battiti, Fuochi, File Urbani. Ha scritto per molte testate tra cui “Il Mucchio Selvag- gio”, “Fare Musica”, “Rockstar”, “Blow Up”, “Repubblica XL”. Ha diretto Radio Centro Suono, Radio Città Futura, Kataweb Radio. Ha prodotto dischi, lavorato come manager, fondato e diretto etichette discografiche Dal 1995 al 2011 è stato consulente per il gruppo Editoriale “L'Espresso”. Ha pubblicato Soul People (2004) e Africa Unite (2005).

Lungo tutto l'arco del Novecento si trovano significativi esempi di come l'opposizione non violenta ma risoluta all'oppressione politica possa risultare efficace. Il più ovvio è certo quello della lotta degli indiani per l'indipendenza dall'Impero Britannico; ma si possono ricordare anche, tra gli altri, i casi della dissidenza anticomunista nell'Europa orientale, della lotta per l'emancipazione dei neri negli Stati Uniti e in Sud Africa, e del dissenso nei confronti dei regimi autoritari in America Latina. In particolare, la resistenza non violenta si è rivelata capace di mettere in crisi quei regimi che, pur essendo oppressivi, sono in qualche misura sensibili alla forza dell'opinione pubblica. In altre parole, contro un potere violento ma non completamente irresponsabile nei confronti dei governati, lo sciopero, la non collaborazione e il fermo rifiuto di obbedire a norme ritenute ingiuste hanno spesso ottenuto notevoli risultati. Più complesso è invece giudicare l'efficacia della non violenza contro un regime capace di controllare in modo capillare la società attraverso il terrore (regime di polizia, deportazione e sterminio di massa) e la manipolazione profonda delle coscienze. In particolare è almeno dubbio che la resistenza non violenta avrebbe sortito buoni risultati contro un regime del tutto indisponibile a riconoscere ai propri oppositori il diritto di esistere come quello nazista. Eppure, perfino contro la dominazione eccezionalmente brutale di Hitler, vi è stato chi ha proposto la lotta disarmata, considerando la non violenza come l'unico modo davvero utile di condurre il conflitto. In questo contributo intendo esaminare le ragioni su cui tre intellettuali europei – Bart de Ligt, Simone Weil e Aldo Capitini – hanno fondato una simile decisione.