Instead of Modernity: The Western Canon and the Incorporation of the Hispanic (c. 185075)

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Instead of modernity goes to the very heart of comparative cultural study: the question of what happens when intimate, dynamic connections are made over place and time, what it is to feel at home amid the lavish diversity of culture. This ambitious interdisciplinary book reconsiders foundational figures of the modern western canon, from Darwin to Cameron, Baudelaire to Whistler. It weaves together brain images from France, preserved insects from the Americas, glass in London, poetry from Argentina, paintings from Spain. Flaubert, Whitman, and Nietzsche find themselves with Hostos from Puerto Rico and Gorriti from Argentina. The book ranges over theoretical fields: trauma and sexuality studies, theories of visuality, the philosophy of sacrifice and intimacy, the thought of Wittgenstein. Instead of modernity is an adventure in the practice of comparative writing: resonances join suggestively over place and time, the textures of words, phrases and images combine to form moods.

Reviews

'It is is a lavishly illustrated and ambitiously interdisciplinary volume. Gingers range of references is impressive, flitting between preserved insects from the Americas and brain images from France. Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert sit with Gustavo Adolfo Bcquer and Augusto Ferrn; Friedrich Nietzsche finds himself in the company of Rosala de Castro and Juana Manuela Gorriti. Londons Crystal Palace stands alongside Jos Augustn Arrietas mirror paintings... it succeeds admirably in substantiating its conviction that the inclusion of the Hispanic world in narratives of modernism and modernity enables the identification of resonant patterns of cultural production. Distinctiveness thus transforms the appreciation of similarity, rather than being simply eclipsed by it.'
Modern Language Review

'Instead of Modernity certainly performs an important service by reincorporating the Hispanosphere into modern culture, and by upending simplistic understandings
of modernity in turn. The world it portrays is certainly Quixotic, but in the manner
stressed by Borgess Pierre Menard: as something more fragmentary, more
subtle, more incongruous than previously imagined and infinitely richer for it.'
Romance, Revolution & Reform

'From this new vantage point, both temporality and the concept of modernity are blown out of the water ... [the] broad outlook transcends the limits of what we understand by Hispanism ... and in this quest for the shared and the disruptive, [Ginger] works with pieces of art, turns of language, figures of speech, images from the past and the present, on a surface that as soon opens out to an infinite horizon as it shrinks to a specific time and place.'
Jesusa Vega, Anales de Historia del Arte

Author Bio

Andrew Ginger is the Dean of Faculties at the New College of Humanities at Northeastern