Pablo Picasso's continued search for the essential features of perceived objects and his natural abidance to the general principles regulating artistic creation determined his intuitive analysis of the various stages of vision. His exploration of pictorial language is reflected in the well-established periods in the development of Cubism. Progressively, objects were analyzed first by their image (or retinal) and surface (or external) features as viewed from particular observer-oriented viewpoints during the Pre-Cubist and Cézannian Cubist stages; then by viewer-independent, structural features during Analytic Cubism; and finally by categorial features during Synthetic Cubism. This final re-evaluation allowed the artist to treat pictorial language as truly arbitrary, leading to metaphorical correlations between objects that went beyond what was actually depicted on the surface of the canvas.

Interface-Driven Phenomena in Spanish: Essays in Honor of Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach brings together a collection of articles from leading experts in the fields of formal syntax and semantics. With a specific focus on interface-related phenomena, the articles address a broad array of issues in Spanish grammar. In so doing, the book offers an updated view on current research topics while providing a rich variety of methods and theoretical perspectives. The volume will be of interest to advanced students, researchers and scholars working on Spanish syntax, semantics and their interfaces.

With the words ?A new manifestation of art was ... expected, necessary, inevitable,? Jean Mor? announced the advent of the Symbolist movement in 1886. When Symbolist artists began experimenting in order to invent new visual languages appropriate for representing modern life in all its complexity, they set the stage for innovation in twentieth-century art. Rejecting what they perceived as the superficial descriptive quality of Impressionism, Naturalism, and Realism, Symbolist artists delved beneath the surface to express feelings, ideas, scientific processes, and universal truths. By privileging intangible concepts over perceived realities and by asserting their creative autonomy, Symbolist artists broke with the past and paved the way for the heterogeneity and penchant for risk-taking that characterizes modern art. The essays collected here, which consider artists from France to Russia and Finland to Greece, argue persuasively that Symbolist approaches to content, form, and subject helped to shape twentieth-century Modernism. Well-known figures such as Kandinsky, Khnopff, Matisse, and Munch are considered alongside lesser-known artists such as Fini, Gyzis, Koen, and Vrubel in order to demonstrate that Symbolist art did not constitute an isolated moment of wild experimentation, but rather an inspirational point of departure for twentieth-century developments.

Crossroads! Intersections physical and/or metaphorical demand processes of consideration, determination, decision and commitment. Stasis is no longer an option where convergence is poised before the unknown. Where categories such as gender, culture, ethnicity, socio-economic status, philosophy and religion clash, the multivariate process can reach such complexity that literary, sociological and psychological tools can have differing interpretations. Real-life intersections range from the mundane (choosing among food items on a menu according to taste preferences) to survival-determinants (evaluating the efficacy of various medical procedures). But such intersections are at the two ends of a very long continuum that takes in issues of form/function, and traditional vs.modern. For example, Home may be defined both as a physical place and/or a mental construct. In more esoteric contexts, artists chiefly known for visual production, representing their ideas with color and form, not infrequently cross media to paint with words. Philosophy, religion, art and literature cross paths via symbols and other visual and linguistic constructs. Writers deal with how and where their own or their characters multiple identities intersect. The Hispanic world is an extraordinarily vivid place to explore these crossroads. This collection of essays addresses a multitude of crossroads in numerous Hispanic contexts across the intersections of time & space/tradition & modernity. The contexts are wide-ranging; e.g., the visual, architectural: how Spains age-old oenological tradition meets modern technology, how the vestiges of long-term dictatorship lurk in the spaces of Spains democracy; and how space/architecture, and art/poetry cross in Latin America. Painters Pablo Picasso and Frida Kahlos productions cross the visual to the written; and magical realism products of the twentieth century Latin American artistic movement defy nature, science, time and space.

Hominids have always been obsessed with representing their own bodies. The first "selfies" were prehistoric negative hand images and human stick figures, followed by stone and ceramic representations of the human figure. Thousands of years later, moving via historic art and literature to contemporary social media, the contemporary term "selfie" was self-generated. The book illuminates some "selfies". This collection of critical essays about the fixation on the human self addresses a multi-faceted geographic set of cultures -- the Iberian Peninsula to pre-Columbian America and Hispanic America -- analysing such representations from medical, literal and metaphorical perspectives over centuries. Chapter contributions address the representation of the body itself as subject, in both visual and textual manners, and illuminate attempts at control of the environment, of perception, of behaviour and of actions, by artists and authors. Other chapters address the body as subjected to circumstance, representing the body as affected by factors such as illness, injury, treatment and death. These myriad effects on the body are interpreted through the brushes of painters and the pens of authors for social and/or personal control purposes. The essays reveal critics' insights when "selfies" are examined through a focused "lens" over a breadth of cultures. The result, complex and unique, is that what is viewed -- the visual art and literature under discussion -- becomes a mirror image, indistinguishable from the component viewing apparatus, the "lens".

The connections between origami, mathematics, science, technology, and education have been a topic of considerable interest now for several decades. While many individuals have happened upon discrete connections among these fields during the twentieth century, the field really took off when previously isolated individuals began to make stronger con

This book crosses multiple world cultures as the chapters highlight both women as creators (by) and women as subjects (about). Chapter topics address widely varying socio-cultural facets of multi-cultures from various historical, sociological, artistic and literary perspectives. The title, Women as Creators and Subjects, in that order, summarizes the content of the book, which begins with commentary on women as creators and moves to elucidating about women to establish a framework. Themes range from power and politics in regards to Aztec women’s bodies, roles of historical indigenous, Spanish, Latin America, and Latinx women, and female participation in development efforts in the Global South of studio art, i.e., visual representations of women by women, as well as of female muses for male artists—and critical articles about all manner of works and genres literally by a litany of women artists and writers, both in literature and film, as well as women as represented in works by males, all from across the Middle East, Global South, Europe and the Americas.

Jigsaw puzzles' notorious complexity and mega-multiple, amorphously-shaped pieces provide an appropriate metaphor for the navigating and maneuvering necessary throughout all aspects of human dynamics. Involvement comprises not only efforts by an individual personally trying to fit together a life of relationships with Family, Friends & Foes within complex categories and different levels, but the efforts by groups of individuals within those categories, progressively, by those groups within a larger society and/or societies, and then, across so many so-called boundaries: geographic, ethnic, linguistic, artistic and more. Such is the starting point for this particular collection of essays, which focuses on the human dynamics in cultures characterized, mostly linguistically, as Hispanic worlds, and those cultures both in real life and in terms of cultural productions such as movies, visual art and literature. Unlike jigsaw puzzles with their convenient guiding box-cover representation of the finished "product" once the pieces are correctly assembled, human dynamics' "pieces" are more like amoebas, ever changing size and shape, multiplying and dividing, sometimes fitting in with other pieces, sometimes not, sometimes overlappingin short, frequently unpredictable and always challenging for the would-be "assembler(s)." Thus, the title of this book could easily morph ad infinitum with the three elements of Family, Friends, Foes reflecting an enormous and unwieldy range of relationship, emotion and viewpoint. Mixed messages abound. And as can be seen from the individual chapter titles and content so-called successful relationships may be fleeting or unattainableor may match the imagined, hoped-for "picture" of a working relationship dynamic.

Philosophers have contemplated the meaning of life, the who & the why, since nascent self-consciousness of the evolving hominid species. Yet practical efforts, i.e., control of life, have always transcended the philosophical: how to dominate what happens to the physical body itself, how to control the environment, and the interaction therefrom. Thus are born rites, rituals & religions. A rite can be a prescribed religious or other solemn ceremony or act it can be a social custom or practice, or even a mundane conventional act. A ritual can be the established form for a ceremony, the order of words used for example; a ritual observance can be either a system of ceremonial acts or actions, or an act or series of acts regularly repeated in a set precise manner. Religion generally encompasses a socio-cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that relates humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements. Religion is a set of beliefs, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances (rites and rituals). Control efforts highlighted in this volume range from prehistoric cave paintings, Amerindian ceremonies, Christian denominational (especially Roman Catholic), traditions & Afro-Caribbean syncretic rites, to crossovers, which deal with the more socio-cultural rites of passage like the quinceanera, and/or dance rites & rituals like the Southern Cone tango, African candombe, Cuban habanera and European waltzes and polkas and the corrida, from the public ritual known as tauromaquia. The premise behind this comparative volume is to discover how rites, rituals & religions are addressed in real life in these divergent societies by exploring the visual and literary representations of control. Rites, Rituals and Religions is eighth and final volume in the Hispanic Worlds series

Many women in cultures throughout the world exhibit resilience and power in the face of obstacles and vicissitudes. From colonial New Spain to postcolonial Africa and India, Women and Contemporary World Literature examines ways in which women in literature function within their specific culture and circumstances to confront the challenges they encounter. In spite of fragmentation in their lives - much like quiltmakers - they piece together the scraps of their existence to form an integrated and complete whole. With its focus on power, fragmentation, and metaphor, and a strong interdisciplinary approach, this book offers a unique perspective to scholars, teachers, and students of comparative literature, contemporary world literature, colonial and postcolonial literature, women's studies, interdisciplinary studies, and literature and cultural studies.