EVENT DETAILS

A Taxonomy of Crisis for Late 19th Century Spanish and Portuguese Essay-writing and Criticism

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE
The Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Presents, A Lecture By Professor Robert Newcomb,
University of California, Davis

A Taxonomy of Crisis for Late 19th Century Spanish and Portuguese Essay-writing
and Criticism

Robert Newcomb is Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and
Portuguese at UC Davis. He is a specialist in Iberian Studies. He teaches Luso-
Brazilian and Hispanic/Latin American literature and he co-directs the
undergraduate program in Portuguese language at Davis. He has published a
book, Nossa and Nuestra América: Inter-American Dialogues (Purdue UP, 2011)
and he is at present working on another book project,  Iberianism and Crisis in Late
19th and Early 20th Century Spain and Portugal. Prof. Newcomb has published
numerous articles, and he currently has a co-edited volume, Beyond Tordesillas,
and a translation of Alfredo Bosi's Dialética da Colonização, under contract with
university presses.

Professor Newcomb's lecture investigates the principal connotations of the idea of
"crisis" in late 19th century Spanish and Portuguese essayistic and critical
discourse. Should the "crisis" of the Iberian Peninsula be understood as a case of
moral failure, as the necessary withering of the Iberian body after a period of
organic expansion, as an opportunity for decisive, radical action, or as a
predetermined, unavoidable - even biblical - catastrophe? Professor Newcomb
draws on primary texts by Antero de Quental, Oliveira Martins, Miguel de
Unamuno, and Joan Maragall, as well as critical analyses of crisis by Reinhart
Koselleck, José Ortega y Gasset, and Jacob Burckhardt.