Roberto González Echevarría: Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative (1990–) [EN, ES]

“This book offers a theory about the origin and evolution of the Latin American narrative, and about the emergence of the modern novel. It argues that the novel developed from the discourse of the law in the Spanish Empire during the sixteenth century, while many of the early historical documents concerning the New World assumed the same forms, furnished by the notarial arts. Thus, both the novel and these first Latin American narratives imitated the language of authority. The book explores how the same process is repeated in two key moments in the history of the Latin American narrative. In the nineteenth century, the model was the discourse of scientific travellers such as von Humboldt and Darwin, while in the twentieth century, the discourse of anthropology – the study of language and myth – has come to shape the narrative. Professor González Echevarría’s theoretical approach is drawn from a reading of Carpentier’s Los pasos perdidos, and the book centres on major figures in the tradition such as Columbus, Garcilaso el Inca, Sarmiento, Gallegos, Borges and Garcia Marquez.”

Publisher Cambridge University Press, 1990
ISBN 0521023998, 9780521023993
245 pages

Review (Terry J. Peavler, Latin American Research Review, c1990, EN)
Review (Margarita Zamora, Hispanic Review, 1992, EN)
Review (Adriana Gordillo, Fronteras de la historia, 2003, ES)

Publisher (EN)
WorldCat (EN)
WorldCat (ES)

Myth and Archive (PDF), PDF (English, 1990)
Mito y archivo: una teoría de la narrativa latinoamericana (Spanish, trans. Virginia Aguirre Muñoz, PDF, 77 MB, via Academia.edu)

Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (1988)

A collection of essays based on a faculty seminar conducted and organised by the University of Vermont in the autumn of 1982. Contains an interview with Foucault made in October 1982, his six seminar presentations, a public lecture entitled “The Political Technology of Individuals”, and five presentations by members of the seminar.

Foucault’s presentations provide a concise overview of the conceptual and methodological shift that guided his “turn to the Greeks” in The History of Sexuality and his later seminars.

Edited by Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, Patrick H. Hutton
Publisher University of Massachusetts Press, 1988
ISBN 0870235931, 9780870235931
166 pages

Review (Montanus C. Milanzi, Systems Research and Behavioral Science, 2001)

PDF

Peter Sloterdijk: You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics (2009/2012)

“In his major investigation into the nature of humans, Peter Sloterdijk presents a critique of myth – the myth of the return of religion. For it is not religion that is returning; rather, there is something else quite profound that is taking on increasing significance in the present: the human as a practising, training being, one that creates itself through exercises and thereby transcends itself. Rainer Maria Rilke formulated the drive towards such self-training in the early twentieth century in the imperative ‘You must change your life’.

In making his case for the expansion of the practice zone for individuals and for society as a whole, Sloterdijk develops a fundamental and fundamentally new anthropology. The core of his science of the human being is an insight into the self-formation of all things human. The activity of both individuals and collectives constantly comes back to affect them: work affects the worker, communication the communicator, feelings the feeler.

It is those humans who engage expressly in practice that embody this mode of existence most clearly: farmers, workers, warriors, writers, yogis, rhetoricians, musicians or models. By examining their training plans and peak performances, this book offers a panorama of exercises that are necessary to be, and remain, a human being.”

First published in German as Du mußt dein Leben ändern, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 2009.

Translated by Wieland Hoban
Publisher Polity Press, 2012
ISBN 0745649211, 9780745649214
500 pages

review (Keith Ansell-Pearson, LA Review of Books)
review (Michael Hübl, Metropolis M)
commentary (Bruce Sterling, Wired)
commentary (Sanne van der Hout)

Publisher

PDF