The goal is to record most books written or edited by the Department of Spanish faculty, instructors, and students. We will start by entering the most recent publications first and work our way back to older books. There is a WMU Authors section in Waldo Library, where most of these books can be found.
With a few exceptions, we do not have the rights to put the full text of the book online, so there will be a link to a place where you can purchase the book.
If you are a faculty member and have a book you would like to include in the WMU book list, please contact wmu-scholarworks@wmich.edu/
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Los cautivos de Argel
Natalio Ohanna
Esta edición de Los cautivos de Argel cumple el deber de reivindicar una valiosa obra del Siglo de Oro y ponerla al alcance de la comunidad académica y el público general en forma fiable. Su publicación en Clásicos Castalia viene a suplir un vacío en la historia editorial de esta pieza que bien merece ingresar en el canon de nuestras letras. Se trata de una fuente esencial para entender la literatura de cautiverio en su modalidad de espectáculo, así como la representación de las relaciones entre cristianos y musulmanes en un período de la vida de España marcado por la coyuntura de la lucha contra el islam, la guerra del corso en el Mediterráneo, la persecución de las minorías religiosas y la construcción de una embrionaria identidad nacional sobre la base de unos mitos de origen que la obra pone de relieve y explota. También suscita interés por el aliciente añadido de cuanto le debe a la primera comedia de Miguel de Cervantes, escrita a finales de 1580, al regreso del cautiverio en Argel. Numerosas notas de esta edición procuran dilucidar ese asunto al que no se le resta importancia, porque se trata, en definitiva, del más prolongado diálogo intertextual entre las dos figuras más universales de las letras áureas.
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Under Brushstrokes
Hedy Habra
In the poem "Brushstrokes," Hedy Habra writes "the painter raises inexorably the level of the waters, and the woman knows... she will only be fulfilled by drowning in the torrent." The poems, in verse and prose, in Habra's new collection, Under Brushstrokes, pay homage to the transformative power of art in the most authentic way possible—by demonstrating it. —Stuart Dybek, author of Ecstatic Cahoots and Paper Lantern
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Tea in Heliopolis : Poems
Hedy Habra
"The poems of Tea in Heliopolis form the story of a family, sometimes tragic, sometimes searingly beautiful, and always exotic, seen through the eyes of a painter. The trope of life, as moments flowing from the paintbrush wielded skillfully by a poet, allows Hedy Habra to capture details redolent of old masters, exquisite and visceral, and creates her remembered world with the wild imagination and color of a Van Gogh. Moving through life in Egypt, to Beirut, then to America, with a kind of post-Newtonian sense of everything happening simultaneously, the chronicle captures the bravery it takes to remember and yet experience a beauty transcendent to pain. This is a remarkable book of poetry." -Diane Wakowski, author of Emerald Ice
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Latinos and American Popular Culture
Patricia M. Montilla
According to the 2010 Census, Latinos represent more than 16 percent of the total population and are the largest and fastest-growing minority group in the United States. Their vast contributions to popular culture are visible in nearly every aspect of American life and are as diverse as the countries and cultures of origin with which Latinos identify themselves. This book provides a historical overview of the developments in U.S. Latino culture and highlights the most recent expressions of Latino life in American popular culture.
With coverage of topics like Latino representations in television, radio, film, and theater; U.S. Latino literature and art; Latino sports stars in baseball, basketball, boxing, football, and soccer; and contemporary pop music; this book will appeal to general readers and be a useful and engaging resource for high school and college students. The work examines the cultural ties that U.S. Latinos maintain with their country of origin or that of their ancestors, explains why language is a critical cultural marker for Latinos, and identifies how Latinos are changing American popular culture. Insightful information on U.S. Latino identity issues and prevalent cultural stereotypes is also included.
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Flying Carpets
Hedy Habra
Surveying what appears as familiar ground, Hedy Habra's Flying Carpets plunge deep into the bygone and the irrecoverable. Steeped in childhood memories of Egypt and Lebanon, and intensified in the act of fictional recollection, Habra's stories are at once joyous and tragic, witty and profound. In Habra we have a Shehrazad of our times, not one trying to save her life, but one intent to bring enchantment, gravitas, and sensitivity to ours. This is a book full of marvels, beautifully written. --Khaled Mattawa, author of Amorisco and Tocqueville
Hedy Habra's Flying Carpets is a collection of enchantments and wonders charmingly recounted, deeply imagined, and composed with lyrical exactitude. It belongs to that rare tradition of books whose spells grow increasingly seductive with each new story. --Stuart Dybek, author of Coast of Chicago and Sailing with Magellan
Hedy Habra's moving, lovely stories emerge from her history as a Middle Eastern exposed to the varied cultures of Egypt, Lebanon, Belgium, Greece, and the United States, fluent in French, Arabic, Spanish, and English. She draws together in this volume vivid images, events, and voices in a compelling, particolored vision that evokes time and place like the haunting recollections from a dream. --Arnold Johnston, author of The Witching Voice: A Novel from the Life of Robert Burns, What the Earth Taught Us (poems), Duets: Love Is Strange (plays, with Deborah Ann Percy)
From Amazon
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Mundos Alternos y Artísticos en Vargas Llosa
Hedy Habra
This book explores the role of the image in relation to the concept of alternative worlds that emanate from the characters' interiority as well as their ability to cretate possible worlds in Vargas Llosa's narrative.
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Causatives in Minimalism
Mercedes Tubino Blanco
This monograph studies issues of current minimalist concern, such as whether differences in the expression of argument and syntactic structure can all be attributed to the parameterization of specific functional heads. In particular, this book studies in-depth the extent to which variation in the expression of causation, available both intra- and cross linguistically, can be accounted for by appealing only to the microparameterization of the causative head, Cause, as previously argued for by linguists such as Pylkkänen. It concludes that the microparameterization of Cause may explain some major characteristics associated with causatives, but it cannot be regarded as the only explanation behind variation in these structures. The book includes relevant discussion on argument structure and looks in detail at languages, such as the Uto-Aztecan Hiaki, that have not received much attention before. It is mostly intended for an audience interested in theoretical approaches to argument structure and variation.
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Confluencias y demarcaciones: generaciones literarias y expresiones estéticas en la novela mexicana, 1998-2008
Irma López
La autora estudia la trayectoria de las dos generaciones de escritoras mexicanas que definieron algunas tendencias de la literatura mexicana de finales del siglo XX y principios del XXI, recorriendo sus obras más representativas. Del mismo modo, revisa las propuestas estilísticas que sustentan dichas obras, así como el manejo de los temas y el interés por construir una poética que dé cuenta de la estética actual.
From Amazon.com
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Cautiverio y convivencia en la edad de Cervantes
Natalio Ohanna
Cautiverio y convivencia en la edad de Cervantes [Captivity and Coexistence in the Age of Cervantes] explores Spanish narratives of coexistence in Muslim and Native American lands, through the lens of captivity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Far from engaging with the violence or trauma of confinement, the author studies the cognitive experience that results from abrupt immersion in a foreign culture, which leads to a revision of homogeneous and stereotypical perceptions of cultural, religious and ethnic differences, and ultimately undermines the perception of one’s own society as a stable world. In the Early Modern use of captivity narratives as critical instruments, Natalio Ohanna identifies a pluralistic conception that aims to transform the complex web of images, attitudes, beliefs, and practices with which the Spain of Cervantes dealt with the problem of difference between human groups.
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Por escrito: De la palabra a la composición
Jorge M. Febles and Carolyn J. Harris
Por escrito employs a step-by-step, task-oriented approach directed to intermediate and third-year students of Spanish. Students develop fundamental writing skills through a review of very specific grammatical topics and original reading selections. The material evolves from the simple to the complex, focusing first on description, then on narrative prose, and finally on expository writing of an argumentative and analytical nature. By following the prescribed method, students learn to write clearly and to communicate efficiently, avoiding the perils of direct translation. As a result, students increase their understanding of Spanish syntax and begin to develop a sense of style in the target language.
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Materials for the Sociolinguistic Description and Corpus-Based Study of Spanish in Barcelona: Toward a Documentation of Colloquial Spanish in Naturally Occurring Groups
Robert Vann
This book reflects on the Spanish of Catalonia and furnishes documentary resources for studying colloquial Spanish spoken in naturally occurring social groups in Barcelona. Part I addresses many complex issues necessary to appropriately contextualize Spanish language usage in Barcelona and linguistic analysis of such usage, with discussions of language contact, ethnolinguistic identities, language ideologies, ways of speaking, corpus-based research, fieldwork methodology, and speaker profiles. Part II presents the first known publication of orthographically transcribed spoken language corpus data from colloquial Spanish conversations in naturally occurring social groups in Catalonia. The volume thus contributes to scholarship in Spanish sociolinguistics and dialectology, documentary linguistics, anthropological linguistics, and the sociology of language. This work will appeal to academics worldwide in these and related fields (e.g., contact linguistics, discourse analysis, Hispanic studies, and Catalan studies), to Spanish teachers, and to the community studied.
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Figuraciones del hinterland: notas sobre Maracaibo o un breve estudio del monte y culebra en Venezuela
Antonio M. Isea
Professor Isea specializes in Literary Theory, Spanish American cultural studies, twenty-first century Spanish American literature, and postcolonial novelistic discourse in the Spanish-Caribbean. His first book, Historiografía y ficción en la narrativa de Denzil Romero, is the first major study of the work of that important Venezuelan author, and it covers topics such as race and nation-building in Venezuela. His second book, Figuraciones del hinterland: notas sobre Maracaibo o un breve estudio del Monte y Culebra en Venezuela (2008), consists of eight essays that interpret the cultural, social and economic map of the city of Maracaibo, Venezuela's oil Mecca. The book explores notions of modernity and cultural liminality in Venezuela, one of the largest oil producing countries in the world.
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Parody, the Avant-Garde, and the Poetics of Subversion in Oliverio Girondo
Patricia Montilla
Oliverio Girondo is a leading figure of the Spanish American avant-garde. Parody, the Avant-Garde, and the Poetics of Subversion in Oliverio Girondo examines the presence and function of parody in Girondo’s early poetry and drawings. It illustrates how, through the subversion of both conventional and vanguard poetics, these texts discredit the values imposed upon artistic production by institutionalized models and social codes. This book assesses the extent to which Girondo followed the theories outlined in his critical writings and considers how his works fit into the general trajectory of the historical avant-garde and contemporary Spanish American literature.
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Spaces of Representation: The Struggle for Social Justice in Postwar Guatemala
Michael T. Millar
Spaces of Representation: The Struggle for Social Justice in Postwar Guatemala juxtaposes a variety of contemporary Guatemalan discourses – literary fiction, testimonio, historical and political documents, and popular drama – calling into question such notions as truth, clarification, memory, and storytelling in the representation of human experience. It analyzes these texts in an effort to further a broader understanding of the dynamic social tensions that continue to exist in Guatemala despite the signing of the 1996 Peace Accords. This book illuminates the contemporary cultural production of Guatemala by highlighting peace and social justice – not as accomplished political and economic goals, but as perpetual motives for social transformation in Central America.
