During his literary apprenticeship in the 1920s and 1930s, Carpentier established contact with an impressively wide circle of composers with whom he shared both friendship and artistic kinship. Consequently, he engaged in a series of musical collaborations both in Havana and Paris actively promoting a new musical modernism that sought to revitalize creative expression with reinterpretations of the primitive that owed much to Carpentier’s admiration of the Russian works of Stravinsky; a powerful model for the assertion of his own Cubanidad. Investigating the breadth of Carpentier’s musical interactions, including his programming for the Conciertos de Música neuva, this essay considers the mutual cross-fertilization of ideas that resulted in some of the most innovative works of the period, from his ballets with Amadeo Roldán and projected puppet opera with Alejandro García Caturla to his projects with Marius-François Gaillard, Darius Milhaud and Edgard Varèse, the possible unnamed protagonist in Los pasos perdidos.

This essay reassesses Alejo Carpentier’s concept of lo real maravilloso americano [the American marvelous real] by comparing it to analogous notions developed earlier in the works of his Cuban fellow José Lezama Lima, showing how both authors respond to the widespread circulation of French surrealism in the Caribbean between the 1930s and 1940s. In doing so, I deconstruct Carpentier’s claims that his concept of the marvelous real was developed in response to the sense of awe he experienced during his visit to Haiti in 1943, instead viewing it as part of a broader endeavor simultaneously undertaken by several Caribbean writers and intellectuals, particularly in the Francophone islands, who reappropriated surrealist ideas in the context of their own critique of Western thought and an effort to reclaim the islands’ African heritage as part of their struggle for political and cultural autonomy.

Nussbaum begins by analysing the limitations of the two prevalent ethical theories, those of Kant and Bentham. My analysis of “My Week with Marilyn” and “Downton Abbey” serves to clarify this argument. The alternative Nussbaum recommends involves: 1) an interpretation, with the emphasis on ‘an’ rather than ‘the’, as exemplified in the discussion of “The Artist” and “Boardwalk Empire”: 2) feelings and correct judgment in relation to “The Help” and “Weeds.”

A substantial portion of Alejo Carpentier’s writings, nonfictional and fictional, can be classified as Neobaroque, making their author one of the key representatives of this transhistorical, transnational, cross-cultural and interartistic contemporary movement. This chapter focuses on images and expressions of deformed chronology that abound in Carpentier’s fiction, and which are associated with the Baroque, an aesthetics of excess and transgression that sets established forms into variation. It argues that what can be classified as baroque futurisms – eccentric because it deforms linear chronology – is the gist of Carpentier’s concept of the New World Baroque. The chapter briefly outlines Carpentier’s Baroque theory before exploring instances of baroque futurism in representative works of Carpentier’s fiction.

This chapter deals with the narrative treatment of time in Alejo Carpentier’s “Historia de lunas,” “Oficio de tinieblas,” “Viaje a la semilla,” “Semejante a la noche” and El acoso. These fictions were marked by an epochal climate in which a sense of civilizational crisis prevailed, as can be seen in the proposals of Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee or Mircea Eliade, thinkers who left their mark on Carpentier’s historical thinking. The analyses of these narratives focus on the way in which their author deploys competing temporalities, a feature that shows how the historical dimension of his narrative was not limited to the recreation of past scenarios. Furthermore, in these works it is possible to trace a theory of historical becoming, a reflection on the teleology of its processes and the meaning of its occurrence.

This chapter investigates the growth of medieval literary traditions descended from Aesop’s fables, which differed from their Late Antique predecessors in that they increased the proportion of non-human characters featured in their collections and amplified the prominence of non-human speech in the texts themselves. It argues that these developments contributed to a shift in the relationship between truth and fable, which had traditionally been antithetical: A “fable” was a synonym for a lie, since fables imagined scenes of beastly speech that could not happen in reality; to arrive at useful knowledge, readers were enjoined to ignore all the non-human chattering and focus on the morals. In these new literary works, the source of knowledge shifted to a point within the very field of non-human speech, with the speaking beast becoming a detour by which the most convoluted paradoxes of species identity could be explored in words.