A dynamic critical and philosophical study of modern North American and Latin American cultures via art, architecture, philosophy and mathematics.
Moving with an unusual ease of movement among literature, music, art, architecture, mathematics, and philosophy, this richly illustrated study enters into the "electromagnetic field" between Latin America and North America with two essays examining the intellectual and creative landscapes throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In “Under the Sign of Jonah,” Fernando Zalamea explores how nineteenth-century North American culture adopted and transformed the legacy of romanticism, offering insightful readings of the work of Herman Melville, Albert Pinkham Ryder, and Charles Sanders Peirce, among others, before turning to romantic problematics in Edgar Varèse's music, Frank Gehry's architecture, and the conceptual mathematics of William Lawvere. In “The Borders and the Pendulum” Zalamea addresses Latin America in continual dialogue with "major" culture from the margins, discussing the movement from a universalist panoscopy, which imagined an integrated American culture, to a mid-century microscopy focused on the regional to late twentieth-century responses, to postmodernism in the form of a telescopy that operates both a differentiation into the local and a transversal integration into universal modernity.
With this book, Zalamea offers an indispensable guide to the transits and syntheses not only between the Americas, but between the romantic, the modern, and the contemporary, supplying the attentive reader with all the equipment they need to venture off the beaten paths of (post)modernity.