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This article looks into the place of Machado de Assis in literature and his peculiar treatment of intertextual sources through a careful analysis of three short stories from the collection Histórias sem data. “The Devil’s Church,” “An Alexandrian Tale,” and “The Academies of Siam” are clearly set apart from the rest of the stories in that collection, and these stories help us reconsider the thematic and stylistic scope and depth of Machado de Assis’s fiction.

Sofia Coppola’s enigmatic film, Somewhere, has met with conflicting responses from critics who attempt to label it a “European” film. Yet, as I argue, the film may be best understood not in its relationship to European cinema, but, rather, its relation to philosophical debates between modernism and postmodernism, to American film history, and, even more importantly, to one of the oldest and most dominant tropes in US culture —that of the hobo-hero. I begin by explaining the background of the figure of the hobo-hero, and its relationship to modernism, and then return to look at the manner in which Coppola draws upon this image in order to invoke (and comment upon) American identity, the postmodern culture of Los Angeles/Hollywood, and questions that are central to the discourse of philosophical modernism. Towards the end of the article, I draw upon the work of Marshall Berman in order to question whether there is a way in which the hobo-hero can allow modernism to openly defy postmodernism itself, even while expressing and exploring a postmodern landscape, a postmodern world. Perhaps surprisingly, I argue that such a question may be best answered by Sofia Coppola’s fourth feature film.

The documentary Favela Rising (2005) and its companion narrative, Culture is Our Weapon (2010), depict the AfroReggae cultural movement as a break with the past, a means of creating citizenship for Brazilian favelas. A leitmotif of the film is struggling to end the communities' \"paralysis\" caused by the domination of drug lords and corrupt, brutal police. Many residents and viewers feel that the favela lies outside the Brazilian nation. However, this essay shows that AfroReggae is part of a Brazilian artistic tradition that begins with Oswald de Andrade's \"Manifesto antropófago\" (1928). Andrade focuses on sublimation, translating emotions into art. But Andrade's ideas, while sometimes inspired by the favelas, did not reach most of their residents until later movements, such as Freire's pedagogy of the oppressed, Boal's theater of the oppressed, and Quilombhoje's Cadernos Negros. This history explains why AfroReggae stands out among today's literatura marginal, most of which is a continuation of the determinist Naturalist tradition. Andrade's essay and AfroReggae's performances predate and confirm Kelly Oliver's argument that the oppressed need a sublimation space to combat oppression. AfroReggae and the Brazilian tradition they represent have much to teach about how art can transform communities around world.

During the course of research into Catalan Modernisme it became apparent to me that the major works on the subject and other works on the period 1880-1911 in Catalonia neglected a lot of primary sources and consciously or otherwise underplayed certain aspects of the period. I refer mainly to an ideology which in different contexts has been called 'Messianism', 'Hero-worship' and other similar names. This way of thinking inspired a considerable volume of political, journalistic and creative writing during the period embraced by Catalan Modernism and early Noucentisme. The material concerned might, by most modern critics, be considered second-rate and by anyone who has the patience to read it outrageous, irrational and sometimes absurd! These are surely not sufficient reasons for ignoring it altogether. It was certainly not dismissed in its day. Its exponents commanded the front pages of such key journals as L'Avenç and Joventut and books written under its influence were published and lauded in contemporary reviews. By discounting this material, perhaps because of its poor philosophical or critical merit, critics have missed an opportunity to penetrate the Catalan middle-class intellectual mentality of that time as expressed by some of its well-known apologists and to understand more fully the Catalan attitude to Peninsular historical events. In this article I shall simply refer to material that is fairly accessible and offer as an example one writer and his attitudes, a writer who, although extreme, was the epitome of this particular direction of Modernism: Pompeu Gener (1848-1919). The article is by no means exhaustive and the whole subject of the relationship between Modernist ideas and the growth of Nationalism is still to be thoroughly explored.