Written on February 23, 2010 by Felicia Appenteng in Arts & Cultures & Societies, IE Humanities Center, Literature
The IE School of Arts and Humanities is delighted to announce the presentation of the book, Papá Espía, written by Jimmy Burns Marañón. The book has recently been translated into Spanish. The book presentation will take place on Wednesday, February 24th at 19.30 at the Fundación Ortega y Gasset. This captivating book tells the story of the author's father and the secret life that he led in Spain during the Second World War.
To learn more about the author and his book, please click here.
Written on February 22, 2010 by Felicia Appenteng in Arts & Cultures & Societies, Literature
Posted by David Remnick at the New Yorker
Annette Gordon-Reed's "The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family" won more medals, it seemed, than Michael Phelps: the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, the Frederick Douglass Book Prize. And there is justice in that—if you missed it when it first appeared, you'd be doing yourself an enormous favor reading it now that it has appeared in paperback. It's an astonishing work of American history. Trained as a lawyer, Gordon-Reed carries out her mission with extraordinary skill, confronting not only the once-concealed details of Thomas Jefferson's biography, but also, at the most elemental, themes of the American story: slavery, race, identity, the lives of women, family structures, the behavior and understandings of the Founding Fathers, the way history is written. As skilled in storytelling as she is in the forensics of research, Gordon-Reed is fearless in her exploration of eighteenth-century Virginia and the contradictions of Jefferson's private and public attitudes toward race and slavery. At the same time, her tone is dispassionate; she has no tendency to scold, only to reveal. At least as fascinating is her treatment of the complex and varied lives of the slaves, in general, and the Hemings family, in particular, as well as the relationship with Sally Hemings, the half-sister of his late wife.
Visit our new Book Club landing page!
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/bookclub/2010/02/david-remnick-selects.html#ixzz0gG64wS11
Written on January 29, 2010 by Blanca Riestra in Arts & Cultures & Societies, IE Humanities Center, Literature
Pocos autores han habitado el imaginario colectivo de generaciones como J.D.Salinger. Con él, -fallecido ayer a los 91 años en Cornish, donde vivía recluido-, desaparece toda una época y una manera de entender la literatura completamente personal y difícil de emular.
Autor de un puñado de libros pequeños, completamente desprovistos de palabrería, pero llenos de sed de verdad y de rabia adolescente, la obra de Salinger conserva toda su fuerza, su ambigüedad. Cincuenta años después, Salinger todavía hace evidente la mezquindad de un mundo cultural parasitado, como dice Menéndez Salmón, por la palabrería y por los egos.
http://www.publico.es/culturas/289910/rey/tinglado
"I hope to hell that when I do die somebody has the sense to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetary. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody."
Written on January 18, 2010 by Felicia Appenteng in Arts & Cultures & Societies, Literature, Philosophy
Alain de Botton is the author of The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work.
If a Martian came to Earth and tried to understand what human beings do just from reading most literature published today, he would come away with the extraordinary impression that we basically spend our time falling in love, squabbling with our families, and occasionally murdering one another. But of course, what we really do is go to work — and yet this "work" is unseen; it is literally invisible, and it is so in part because it is rarely represented in art. If it does appear in consciousness, it does so via the business pages of newspapers, it does so as an economic phenomenon, rather than as a broader human phenomenon.
Two centuries ago, our forebears would have known the precise history and source of almost every one of the limited number of things they ate and owned. They would have been familiar with the pig, the carpenter, the weaver, the loom and the dairymaid. The range of items available for purchase may have grown exponentially since then, but our understanding of their genesis has grown ever more obscure. We are now as imaginatively disconnected from the production and distribution of our goods as we are practically in reach of them, a process of alienation which has stripped us of opportunities for wonder, gratitude and guilt.
Written on January 15, 2010 by Felicia Appenteng in Arts & Cultures & Societies, Literature
Las visitas del público al complejo científico del Retiro serán potenciadas
RAFAEL FRAGUAS - Madrid - 12/01/2010
Madrid se encuentra, desde ayer, un poco más cerca de las estrellas. Tal cercanía se debe a la rehabilitación del Real Observatorio Astronómico (www.oan.es), en el confín meridional del parque del Retiro, que fue inaugurado oficialmente ayer por Felipe de Borbón, príncipe de Asturias, y por José Blanco, ministro de Fomento.
El reacomodo de tres edificios de la bicentenaria sede del meridiano cero de España y catedral de la Ciencia, ideados en clave neoclásica por Juan de Villanueva en 1790, ha durado 10 años. Incorpora la reconstrucción del telescopio que el músico astrónomo germano-británico y descubridor del planeta Urano Wilhelm Herschel (1738-1822) construyó por encargo del monarca español Carlos IV para el mirador astral madrileño, en los albores del siglo XIX. El agente de aquel encargo fue el marino y científico José Mendoza.
The IE Humanities Center is a member of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, an association dedicated to the fostering of knowledge related to the humanities and interpretive social sciences.
The IE Humanities Center is also a member of European Consortium of Humanities Institutes and Centers (ECHIC), a university based initiative to organize the European Research Institutes and Centers for the Humanities.
