A new initiative to better integrate methods and theories from the humanities with those from the fields of environmental design is being launched at the University of California, Berkeley.  The project, known as the Global Urban Humanities Initiative, will bring faculty, graduate students, practitioners and critics together over three years through a series of methods workshops, theory courses, and research studios examining three Pacific Rim cities.  This article examines the history of the interaction of the humanities, social science and design and planning disciplines in teaching and practice and describes the pedagogical and research experiments planned for the project.

In both Argentina and Brazil, the emergence of fiction was linked to a central contradiction. At the heart of fiction in nineteenth-century Argentina and Brazil there was a resistance to fiction. Fiction's defining trait was, precisely, its displaced use: in the impossibility of autonomous existence, its presence was highlighted by its forced absence; fiction became the negative condition of possibility of the written word both in the politically charged climate of national self-assertion following post-independence Argentina and in the early years of the Brazilian First Republic. As a result of this negative or residual formation, fiction --the non-authoritative discourse par excellence-- was both able and forced to engage with other --authoritative-- disocurses, such as those of philosophy, law, science, and political theory. At the same time, owing to its non-committal to pre-established categories of thought and theoretical frameworks, fiction was able to open up a discursive space from within which a crtical examination of both the authority and the legitimizing mechanisms of such discourses became possible.

In this dissertation, I focus on the Brazilian and Argentine contexts to examine two key moments of the intersection of between fiction, aesthetics, and the theoretical triad of philosophy, law, and political theory, , tracing a critical genealogy in which the rise of autonomous fiction and discourses of authority are seen as mutually determinant. I begin, in Chapter 1, by analyzing the ambiguities surrounding two founding figures in the canon of each country: Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, in Argentina, and Euclides da Cunha, in Brazil. Not the least among these ambiguities is that, from the start, the discursive canon of which they occupy the center cannot be clearly defined. It is a canon that is both literary and socio-political, tellingly oscillating between the boundaries of the fictional and the non-fictional. Sarmiento and da Cunha, I contend, are located, each in their respective contexts, at a historical crossroad that offers a privileged glimpse into the mechanisms of formation of discursive authority. Writing at a time when received models and existent criteria proved insufficient and new ones were yet to be formed, they found themselves at a transitional moment in which the urgency of judgment was all the more pressing in light of the absence of criteria by which to judge. Examined from this perspective, new light is cast on the difficulty of generic classification which has marked the reception of Sarmiento's Facundo and da Cunha's Os Sertões to this day. I bring critical theory into dialogue with aesthetic theory and law studies to suggest that the aesthetic dimension in their works lies in the fact that in both texts we see a discourse at work in which the productive moment is emphasized over its doctrinary, legislative moment. In them, form, not yet crystallized into the formulas and formalities of categories and genres, is witnessed at its moment of formation, which is also the moment in which the authority of discourse, not yet having covered the tracks of its own genesis, reveals itself at its most fragile and contingent.

It is the aesthetic dimension understood in this critical and productive relationship to pre-established categories of thought that I take up in the second and final part of the dissertation, encompassing Chapter 2 and 3, where I focus on the works of João Guimarães Rosa and Jorge Luis Borges, in Brazil and Argentina, respectively. In Chapter 2, dedicated to Rosa, I offer a reading of Grande Sertão: Veredas which emphasizes the book's allegorical dimension and the connection between allegory's interplay of identity and difference, presence and absence, with fiction's own modus operandi vis-à-vis the authoritative discourses of political and legal theory. I also offer a reading of a central episode in Grande Sertão: Veredas -- the trial of Zé Bebelo at the Sempre-Verde ranch-- in which fictional representation and political representation --the problematic history of political representation in Brazil-- are played against each other.

In the final chapter, I examine the work of Jorge Luis Borges to show how fiction, understood as a discourse that does not conceal its moment of artifice, plays a mediating function between the production of authority and its legislating role, and in so doing opens up the possibility of a critical examination of its own validating assumptions and epistemic frameworks. I first examine how Borges problematizes the question of tradition and national identity through a discussion of his essay "El Escritor Argentino y la Tradición". In that essay, Borges offers as an alternative to a substantive national identity an identity that is relational and adjectival. This notion of an "adjectival identity"-- an identity that defines itself contextually, by means of the interplay of similarity and difference with all other identities, will guide Borges's own aesthetic project and his own insertion within the literary tradition with which he is, from the start, always already in dialogue. I then offer a close-reading of an essay and two fictional short stories of Borges's in which the genesis of authority is thematized - namely, Una vindicación del Falso Basílides, Los Teólogos, and Tres Versiones de Judas, in which the violent consolidation of the religious canon is set against the greater plausibility of heretic alternatives. I go on to examine how Borges's fictions find their counterpart in his essayistic work so as to constitute a coherent critique of philosophical authority. It is a critique in which the non-apodictic logic of fiction, by means of a semblance that mirrors the structural plausibility of philosophical discourse yet replaces philosophy's quest for the unity of truth with the forking paths of discursive possibility, denounces the contingency that underlies the categorical postulates of philosophy. To the extent that acknowledging the contingency of its own postulates poses a threat to the authority of a philosophical system, Borges's aesthetic critique of philosophical authority seems to suggest that philosophical logic ultimately resides on a fundamental denial, one in which what is at stake is precisely its categorical distinction from fictional discourse: the denial of its own moment of artifice.

This dissertation explores the use of amazement as a transformative experience capable of reframing traumatic memory in the romances of Cervantes and Shakespeare. Romance offers a structure to moblilize emotion and fantasy to deal with traumatic events. Focusing on the experience of amazement and its effect on literary content and form allows the critic to see the connections between romance and tragedy, and specifically between Renaissance romance and ancient tragedy, comedy, and romance. The three parts of this project provide a reading of amazement that is historically grounded in the period between 1550 and 1640. Although modern psychoanalytic theory and trauma studies are engaged in a limited way, the methodology of the thesis is to use the explicit, detailed, and ancient traditions available to Cervantes and Shakespeare as interpretive tools. Renaissance literary theory, popular romance models, and early modern psychology all focus on the dynamic between the fantasy and emotions to demonstrate how amazement responds to trauma.

Part I begins by analyzing ancient tragedy and romance to show how genre limits or makes possible the management of painful events, and how amazement is the central experience marking these limits and possibilities. Then it synthesizes Renaissance literary theory of the Aristotelian and the Neoplatonic schools, and the other strains of thinking those schools subsume. This synthesis focuses on the various treatments of the role of amazement in the process of transformation. Neo-Platonism offers the possibility for transformation from a debased state in an imperfect world to an exalted position in a world remade. Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, a bestseller in England and Spain during the Renaissance with clear influences on both Shakespeare and Cervantes, builds on Neo-Platonist, but also tragic, ideas about amazement. These structure his interpolated tale, “Cupid and Psyche, and build a model for romance. Part I concludes by showing how early modern psychoanalysis, which also draws on literary tragedy and romance for its conclusions, presents a model of amazement as breaking down the psyche and causing depression and anxiety through its effects on the fantasy. Conversely, amazement can work on the fantasy to restore it to wholeness. Ancient tragedy and romance, Renaissance literary theory and its classical models, and early modern psychology all help to elaborate a model of amazement as both the cause of trauma and the means to solving the ruptures it creates cognitively and emotionally.

Part II examines Cervantes’ use of different kinds of amazement to turn around the tragic experience of slavery into a story of hope in El trato de Argel, Los baños de Argel, and “The Captive’s Tale” in Don Quixote Part I. Cervantes portrays the impossibility of completely erasing trauma and the limited, but still significant, success of romance in containing it. This section hinges on the idea of the trato, a form of torture in Algeria a punishment in which the hands were tied behind the back, the body lifted up into the air, and then allowed to fall to the ground, so that the bones were dislocated from the shoulders. The word also meant double-dealing and referred to any kind of commercial bargaining. Thus, the first play, El trato, depicts a typical Renaissance chaos of love in which lovers long for those who spurn them, but the plot of deliverance literally cashes in on the love of a Moorish couple for their Spanish slaves. There are two strands to this play: stories of martyrdom, torture, and butchery balanced by a comical love plot. The perversity of the Moorish masters is trumped by the greed of an Ottoman king who returns the beautiful Christian slaves to their homeland on the condition that they will send back their ransom money. The experience of amazement as terror is kept apart from the transcendent experience of amazement by the dual structure of the play. One part of the play ends on a tragic note, the other on a comic note, and suspended between these are moments of amazed transcendence. From the experience that will not fit in either genre comes an amazement that Cervantes will later capture in a romance version of this story.

Cervantes reworks much of the same material in the story of Zoraida and Ruy Pérez from Don Quixote Part I, but instead of the trato as an explicit torture of Christians, the story focuses on trato in its other meanings as double-dealing, betrayal, and commercial transactions. On an economic level, this makes sense since the first story fashioned from this material is resolved by a Muslim king’s trust in the integrity of two Spanish slaves to pay him back for their freedom. In “The Captive’s Tale” Cervantes places the inner world of emotions into a context of commerce, as if bargaining, purchasing, and stealing were all perfect metaphors for an emotional and psychological process. The story portrays the purchase of happiness, which exchanges terror for wonder. The love story bears the burden of the explicit torture it cuts out by displacing martyr stories and torture onto the love triangle of father-daughter-lover. The figure of the idealized woman, Zoraida, represents the possibility of escape from slavery by redeeming, or literally buying, the freedom of the captive Spaniards. Symbolically, she serves as a psychological escape from trauma into fantasy. After they escape from Algiers, terror restages itself, showing the limitations of the fantasy of the feminine ideal to eradicate terror through the wonder, or admiración, which she inspires. In Los baños, which was Cervantes’ last attempt to refashion the same material, the author once again unyokes the love plot from violence and betrayal. The structural change to the tale renders the relationship to the feminine less complicated and instead focuses the experience of wonder on a transcendent ideal.

Part III demonstrates how the feminine becomes the focal point for the emotional oscillation between amazement as terror and amazement as wonder. Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale manipulate three feminine archetypes: the evil queen, the sacrificed maiden, and the redeemer to forge a pathway for redemption. The sacrificed maiden Polyxena from Seneca’s The Trojan Women, which the chapter proves was a direct influence on Shakespeare, is the central character in this pattern of redemption. This chapter also demonstrates the classical influences of Apuleius and Heliodorus on Shakespeare’s treatment of the various kinds of amazement, his employment of legal themes, and his use of feminine archetypes to dramatize how the male protagonists’ amazement as terror can be transformed into amazement as wonder.

In Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale, the principle male protagonists succumb to their fears of the feminine other. In order to justify the fantasy, to make it credible to the reason, even though it is not rational or equitable, the male interpreters subject the sacrificed women to a trial in which they come out guilty. When the sacrificed daughter returns as a redeemer at the end of The Æthiopica, Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, and Cymbeline, a form of trial is resurrected as well. Now, the fantasy of the woman as redeemer overcomes the laws that almost sacrifice her again. As an object of “admiration,” the redeemer allows the male spectator to approach the terror and desire that the feminine inspire in him by providing him with an escape into fantasy. The triumph of the redeemer becomes legible in the power of this new idealized archetype to allow the male judge to break his own laws. In the dream-like resurrection that Paulina orchestrates at the end of The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare shatters the Polyxena Pattern altogether. Instead of a polarized archetype of femininity, Hermione appears on the stage as an imperfect woman who belongs to an imperfect world. When the cycle of demonization and idealization is broken, we move out of a closed circuit of emotions that begins with terror as astonishment, changing into aggression and then the fear and erotic fantasy embodied in “admiration.” The wonder that characterizes the end of The Winter’s Tale is of a paradigm of binaries torn up and remade through a fantasy of femininity born from a woman.

This dissertation contributes to the body of work on early modern amazement by including the full range of emotions from terror to wonder that constitute amazement. The range of literary texts allows for a concrete connection between romance and tragedy, centered on affect. Because amazement is cognitive and emotional, aesthetic and psychological, so the study of it must necessarily be interdisciplinary. The intent of the project is to study romance as a mode, rather than as a grab bag of motifs and dramatic devices on which we can impose a theological or philosophical pattern. Rather, the affective aim of these stories is directly related to the limitations and possibilities of literary form. What comes across as episodic or meandering is actually the attempt to provide a structure for the rapprochement of the subject and the dreams and nightmares caused by trauma. The argument demonstrates the interplay between literary form and psychological healing.

The Matter of Beauty proposes that Victorian aesthetic theory is not a branch of philosophy focusing on art; rather, it is best understood as an interdisciplinary investigation of how humans relate affectively to physical things. The central claim of the dissertation is that aesthetic theory in the late-Victorian period enabled a significant reconsideration of what a "human" was, and of how distinctions could be drawn between self and other. I pursue this claim across four authors -- Walter Pater, William Morris, Grant Allen, and Vernon Lee -- who represent different modes in which a materialist strain of aesthetics led to a recognition that individuals constitutively lack autonomy from one another and from their surroundings.

My analysis of a wide range of late-Victorian writing demonstrates that aesthetic theory responded to a question that was powerfully raised by nineteenth-century science, and that remains with us today: If our most elevated emotions can be localized as electrical activity in the brain, is there a "self" that transcends our material being? The intellectual tradition that I reconstruct reveals that considering aesthetic experience is a productive step toward answering this question. In their discussions of art and literature, Pater, Morris, Allen, and Lee develop a discourse of bodily sensations rather than of moral feelings; for them, aesthetic pleasure is important not because it is uplifting, but because it makes enjoyable the interconnectedness of bodies, minds, and matter. Furthermore, recovering this discourse allows us to revisit critical commonplaces about the political significance of Victorian aesthetics. Over the past two decades, the tendency has been to frame questions about the politics of aesthetics in oppositional terms: e.g., is aestheticism queer or misogynist, progressive or reactionary? I look elsewhere in order to evaluate the politics of aestheticism: representations of the individual as a material thing lacking autonomy reconfigured the relation between self and society. Materialist aesthetics showed individuals to be inherently dependent upon their contingent environments, thereby calling into question context-free ideals of personal freedom and individualism.

Malcolm Bull offers a detailed analysis of nihilism in Nietzsche's works. Along with accompanying commentaries by Cascardi and Clark, he explores the significance of Nietzscheís views given the fact that a wide range of readers have come to embrace his ideas as new orthodoxy. There seem to be no anti-Nietzscheans today, but Bull demonstrates that this wide embrace of Nietzsche runs counter to the very meaning of nihilism as Nietzsche understood it.

We have reached the end of the history of art, says Arthur Danto. Contemporary arts exist laterally in such a myriad of forms and theories that one can no longer give art's progression a narrative format. Danto's essay, and the discussions that follow it, explores the ramifications of this position. While modernism sought after what art itself is, what it is in its essence, and thus opened up diverse forms of exploration, this alone cannot explain how we got to the state of art as it is now, that of "anything goes." Danto informs us that this "end" of art should not leave us depressed or alarmed, but rather exhilarated, as a "liberation of art beyond history" opens up new possibilities of creation already being implemented in the diverse applications of contemporary artists.

Readings in Common: Assimilation and Interpretive Authority in Early Modern Spain examines how sixteenth and early seventeenth<–>century Iberian scholars negotiated the meanings of shared narratives and parallel rituals across ecumenical and linguistic lines. By rendering Iberian scholastic modes of demarcating Christianity more humanistic, and by comparing these theological arguments with the reading practices of Northern European reformers, I question the conventional genealogy of modern, secular interpretive strategies. My project thus proposes a revised history of religious tolerance and textual historicism on the one hand, and of medieval and early modern Iberian convivencia, scholasticism, and evangelism on the other hand.

The first half of the dissertation, which examines patristic texts, scholastic commentaries, and humanist essays in Latin and Spanish, argues that sixteenth<–>century Iberian reformers defended a moderate politics of peaceful conversion and New Christian assimilation by reformulating established scholastic categories of difference. Emphasizing a model of religion defined by obligatory practice, scholars such as Francisco de Vitoria, Bartolom<é> de Las Casas, Ignacio de Las Casas, and Pedro de Valencia acknowledged the epistemological limitations of knowing and regulating the faith of indigenous Americans, Iberian Moriscos, and other potential or recent converts to Christianity. The second half of the dissertation, which investigates the Sacromonte <“>lead books,< ”> a series of forged holy texts composed in Arabic, as well as several Spanish, French, and Latin philological treatises, moves from an examination of ritual to an analysis of early modern dispute over the nature of language. I demonstrate that a radically formal approach to philology, exemplified by orthodox modes of translation and an evangelical pedagogy of linguistic usage, broadly transformed understandings of cultural and religious similitude and difference. By underscoring the parallel epistemological conditions of early modern Iberian theology and philology, I both present a nuanced account of conversion and reform in the early modern Hispanic world and show how this account can be helpful for rethinking the changing relationship among religion, scholarship, and politics in the present.

Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (1970) offers one of the most powerful and comprehensive critiques of art and of the discipline of aesthetics ever written. The work offers a deeply critical engagement with the history and philosophy of aesthetics and with the traditions of European art through the middle of the 20th century. It is coupled with ambitious claims about what aesthetic theory ought to be. But the cultural horizon of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory was the world of high modernism, and much has happened since then both in theory and in practice. Adorno’s powerful vision of aesthetics calls for reconsideration in this light. Must his work be defended, updated, resisted, or simply left behind? This volume gathers new essays by leading philosophers, critics, and theorists writing in the wake of Adorno in order to address these questions. They hold in common a deep respect for the power of Adorno’s aesthetic critique and a concern for the future of aesthetic theory in response to recent developments in aesthetics and its contexts.