Terra Nostra Research Articles

Terra Nostra Garden 2023 dataset of Camellia species, hybrids and their cultivars (Azores, Portugal).

Camellias cultivars collections, comprising an exquisite array of meticulously bred and curated camellia varieties, emerged as indispensable elements within the resplendent 19th century gardens that adorned landscapes across the globe. The heart of Terra Nostra Garden, nestled within the captivating surroundings of the Furnas volcano on S. Miguel Island (Azores, Portugal), started in the year 1782 as an enchanting fishpond garden, strategically positioned in front of the summer house belonging to the esteemed Thomas Hickling, the American vice-consul. Soon this garden was enlarged and embellished with species from several continents. This tradition continued during all the 19th century with the Viscount Duarte Borges da Câmara Medeiros (1848-1872) and his son the Marquis António Borges Medeiros Dias da Câmara e Sousa (1872-1913). In 1933, the 12 hectares property was acquired by the Terra Nostra Society, led by Vasco Bensaude and increased to 12.5 hectares. In 1935, the current Terra Nostra Garden Hotel was inaugurated and, two years later, the Terra Nostra Society reopened the botanical garden attached to the hotel, now called Terra Nostra Garden. Beginning in 1982, the Head Gardener embarked on a transformative journey, dedicating his expertise to the meticulous renovation and expansion of numerous botanical collections nestled within the garden's enchanting landscapes. Amongst the remarkable transformations, the revered camellias collection received special attention, as it underwent a comprehensive rejuvenation process under his skilful guidance. The recent publication of a global digital dataset of Camellia names provides the opportunity to publish the dataset of Camellia species, hybrids and its cultivars currently cultivated at Terra Nostra Garden with their validated names. In June 2023, a total of 669 Camellia phenotypes were identified across the 12.5 hectares of Terra Nostra Garden. These phenotypes include 38 species, 178 hybrids and 637 cultivars. Camelliajaponica represents 81.7% of the 459 species cultivars, while C. x williamsii accounts for 32% of 178 hybrid cultivars. The most prevalent genotypes in Camellia hybrids with known parentage are those of C.japonica, C.saluenensis and C.reticulata present respectively in 64.1%, 45.5% and 37.9% of the hybrids. Regarding cultivar registration, 46.9% were registered in the US, followed by 13% from Japan and 10.8% from Portugal. Although the most ancient cultivar registered growing at the garden is Camelliareticulata Lindl. 'Damanao' from 1621, the majority (69.4%) of cultivars in the garden were registered in the 20th century, followed by the 19th century cultivars (20.7%). One cultivar, Camellia 'Patrícia Bensaude Fernandes', was produced and registered specifically by this garden.

Para a História do Turismo na Ilha de São Miguel [Açores] – Notas Sobre as Origens da Sociedade Terra Nostra

Para a História do Turismo na Ilha de São Miguel [Açores] – Notas Sobre as Origens da Sociedade Terra Nostra

How to involve rural NEET youths in agriculture? Highlights of an untold story

ABSTRACTThis article discusses how to involve rural youths not in employment, education, or training (or NEETs) in agriculture. A Portuguese network-based project called Terra Nostra, carried out from 2013 to 2015 to engage and train NEETs in ecoagriculture activities, was examined to address this issue. The study focused on three aspects: a reanalysis of Terra Nostra’s final report, based on the bioecological model, targeting typical problems with NEETs’ involvement and how the project aimed to overcome them; the lessons learned from the project according to the literature; and the state of the art regarding identical social interventions with NEETs in Portugal and the rest of Europe. A major conclusion stemming from the analysis is that similar projects will need to address the limitations of employment public services in reaching out to rural NEETs and the state’s excessive protectionism of the sector.

America Unbound: Encyclopedic Literature and Hemispheric Studies by Antonio Barrenechea

Reviewed by: America Unbound: Encyclopedic Literature and Hemispheric Studies by Antonio Barrenechea Charlotte Rogers Antonio Barrenechea. America Unbound: Encyclopedic Literature and Hemispheric Studies. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2016. xiv + 231 pp. In an era of multitasking and short attention spans, Antonio Barrenechea's critical analysis of the encyclopedic novel in the Americas is an outstanding model of the benefits of deeply studying long books. In America Unbound, Barrenechea examines four works of fiction that he calls "summa Americana," or great American novels of continental proportions (xi): Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), Mexican Carlos Fuentes's Terra Nostra (1975), French Canadian Jacques Poulin's Volkswagen Blues (1984), and Native American Leslie Maron Silko's Almanac of the Dead (1991). Several thematic and formal [End Page 379] threads tie these works together: each novel explores the era before the American continent was separated by the imperial languages of Spanish, English, French, and Portuguese and divided into nations; each novel also features contemporary protagonists who critique the results of those divisions. Moreover, the works all have a "masterful performance inscribed within them" that self-consciously takes the entire American continent as its muse (10). The aim of Barrenechea's elegant and jargon-free book is to demonstrate how reading encyclopedic novels from different traditions reveals their shared American roots. Barrenechea takes as his theoretical point of departure the work of Herbert Eugene Bolton, an American historian whose 1932 "The Epic of Greater America" advocated for a continental rather than a national approach to American history. Bolton was undoubtedly a pioneer who wrote against the dominant paradigm of approaching US history without considering its inter-American aspects. Yet Bolton's ideas also had some fatal flaws: the Mexican historian Edmundo O'Gorman criticized him for practicing intellectual hegemony, and Barrenechea points out that Bolton was deeply Eurocentric and rarely considered the Amerindian or African experiences in the Americas. Barrenechea proposes to update Bolton's approach and enters into dialogue with more recent scholars who have spearheaded comparative American literary studies beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, including Vera Kutzinski, Earl Fitz, Lois Parkinson Zamora, and Gustavo Pérez Firmat. What makes Barrenechea's work new is his attention to the encyclopedic American novel, whose roots can be traced to colonial writings about the New World that attempted to enumerate and contain the marvelous abundance of the continent. His selected authors participate in this drive to create a compendium of the interrelated histories of peoples of the Americas, yet they do so in a critical postmodern fashion, demonstrating a "skepticism of totalizing projects" (32). The first work under consideration is Moby-Dick, a staple of the US literary canon that Barrenechea places in a broad continental setting. The rewards of this approach are immediately evident in his contextualization of the doubloon, a unit of Ecuadorian currency that circulated throughout the Americas in the nineteenth century. Melville, who could read Spanish and Portuguese, critiques US imperial ambitions by comparing the gold rush in California and its concomitant philosophy of manifest destiny to the Spanish legend of El Dorado. Ultimately, Barrenechea goes beyond canonical readings of Moby-Dick to show that the tale of the great white whale flourishes [End Page 380] "as an encyclopedic novel that recalls, and disrupts, imperial hemispheric legacies" (24). In Boltonian fashion, this first chapter reveals the deep connections between the United States and the Spanish Empire in the New World. In erudite discussions of the three twentieth-century novels, which make up the bulk of his study, Barrenechea delves deeply into the ways in which the authors depict the violent mestizaje that lies at the root of continental American history. They do so by inserting colonial texts directly into their encyclopedic novels. For example, the author shows how Fuentes mingles the content and form of imperial documents by Columbus and Cortés with contemporary characters in Terra Nostra to "deconstruct the temporal and spatial coordinates of established histories, languages, and nations" (60). While Fuentes is a canonical Spanish American writer, the other two authors discussed in Barrenechea's study occupy the traditionally marginalized intellectual spaces of Québécois and Native American literatures. In the Francophone Poulin's...

Nietzsche in Mexico

Nietzsche in Mexico Lance Olsen (bio) Nietzsche on His Balcony Carlos Fuentes E. Shaskan Bumas and Alejandro Branjer, trans. Dalkey Archive www.dalkeyarchive.com 332 Pages; Print, $18.00 By the time Carlos Fuentes died at 83 from a massive hemorrhage in Mexico City on 15 May, 2012, he had attained an extraordinary position in global literature. A key figure in the Latin American Boom, his name was regularly mentioned in conjunction with those of Alejo Carpentier, Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel Gárcia Márquez. His major works—arguably The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), Terra Nostra (1975), and The Old Gringo (1985)—blend a formally innovative strain of European and American modernism (think Joyce and Faulkner) with a politically charged experimentation associated with Boom writing. Employing temporal disruptions, shifting points of view, rethinkings of syntax and punctuation, and frequent injections of magical realism designed to perplex communal notions of reality, those works complicate and nuance the political novel, often critiquing social evils even as they announce the ultimate uselessness of such critiques. Fuentes’ oeuvre was an expression of his own intellectual journey, which began in his teens with an interest in socialism sparked by the poetry of Pablo Neruda. That led him to Havana in 1959, where he penned pro-Castro articles—as well as to his increasingly critical position toward the regime. (In 1965 he was branded a traitor by Cuba for attending an international writers conference in New York.) His work became increasingly provocative—in the key, one might propose, of Nietzsche—embracing the idea of skepticism, difficulty, inconclusiveness, and ambivalence to a greater and greater extent, remaining both disparaging of the pragmatics of the revolutionary imagination and of capitalism’s profoundly flawed alternative. “Religion is dogmatic,” he once wrote. “Politic is ideological. Reason must be logical, but literature has a privilege of being equivocal.” “The thing to avoid,” as Beckett’s Unnamable has it, “is the spirit of system.” The opposite of equivocation, as Barthes had it, is a mode of propaganda. I find it remarkable, then, given his stature, his literary amazements, that Fuentes’ last novel, the mischievous and rich Nietzsche on His Balcony, published posthumously in Mexico, appeared in the States only last year. And I find myself turning to Dalkey Archive once again with gratitude and fondness for making an otherwise invisible innovative text visible here for the first time. The novel’s plot constitutes a bitter political parable in which some force (god? the universe? the brunt of his own will?) grants the heterodox philosopher a 24-hour return to earth every year following his death. On one of these, the novel’s narrator steps onto his balcony at the Hotel Metropol overlooking an unidentified city to get some air one hot humid night during that temporal in-betweenness after midnight and before dawn to discover a shadowy, hirsute Nietzsche doing the same on the next balcony. That uncanny moment in many ways is emblematic of the novel as a whole. The reader learns virtually nothing about the narrator, location, or time coordinates, and only a few quick familiar brushstrokes about the philosopher himself. It remains unclear whether the narrator is in fact meeting Nietzsche, imagining him, dreaming him, or whether his companion is the narrator’s doppelgänger. What ensues, in any case, is a series of ontological, epistemological, and political ambiguities, paradoxes, and willful contradictions. The pair begins exchanging a plethora of stories (I’m reminded of Fuentes’ observation that, like Scheherezade, we invent narratives in part to stall our own deaths), alternating over the course of more than a hundred short chapters and centering on murderers, rapists, the nature of pleasure and punishment, madness and power—all in a universe clearly beyond good and evil. Those fictive thought experiments slowly develop into a larger allegory about a hypothetical revolution. One day soldiers appear on the streets of the unnamed city, urging local shop owners to resist those in power by closing their businesses and mobilizing. Saul Mendes, a saintly leader (he evinces stigmata that won’t stop bleeding), rises to prominence and takes reluctant control as the former president’s head is...

POGLED NA EVROPSKU ISTORIJU I KULTURUU ROMANU TERRA NOSTRA KARLOSA FUENTESA

Celoviti roman (novela total) Terra Nostra meksičkog književnika Karlosa Fuentesa (1928x2012) četiri decenije nakon objavljivanja prvog izdanja (1975) i dalje predstavlja neiscrpnu građu za hispaniste, istoričare književnosti i naučnike, koji pretežno izučavaju latinoameričke teme, motive i simbole prisutne u tom delu. Budući da roman obiluje intertekstualnim elementima iz evropske istorije, kulture i umetnosti, pokušali smo u ovom radu da sagledamo istorijske činjenice na koje se pisac oslanja – preuzima ih, modifikuje i domaštava, potom likove iz tradicionalne španske književnosti, vešto upletene u radnju romana, i naposletku dela španskih i flamanskih slikara koja Fuentes koristi kao scenografiju i kao simbol. Naše istraživanje je zasnovano pre svega na izvorima iz samog romana, a potom na tumačenjima samog autora u knjigama i intervjuima objavljenim u periodu od 1976. do 2012. godine i stavovima brojnih stranih i domaćih stručnjaka za hispanoameričku književnosti koji su se, naročito u skorašnje vreme, bavili ovim delom. Izučili smo prvo elektronsko izdanje romana Terra Nostra na španskom jeziku (2013) i ukazali na uticaj tog dela na jedan od ključnih romana novije srpske književnosti: Opsada Crkve Svetog Spasa Gorana Petrovića.

Geochemical and palaeontological evidence for the definition of the Silurian/Devonian boundary in the Changwantang Section, Guangxi Province, China

Southern Guangxi Province is one of the important areas for the study of the Silurian/Devonian boundary (SDB) in South China. Despite attempts to define the exact level of the SDB in the Yulin (Guangxi Province) area using biostratigraphy, no consensus has been reached as the indicator fossils (e.g. graptolite Monograptus uniformis uniformis, conodont Icriodus woschmidti woschmidti and trilobite Warburgella rugulosa rugosa) are not coexistent in South China. Since Mann et al. (2001: Dynamics of the Silurian/Devonian boundary sequence: sedimentary cycles vs. organic matter variation. Terra Nostra, 2001, 44-48) reported the first isotope curve based on organic carbon for the SDB at Klonk in the Czech Republic (GSSP), some comparable variation curves of δ 13 Corg across the SDB have been obtained at several locations including sections in Turkey and China. This distinct variation curve of the isotopic composition of organic carbon across the SDB provides a chemostratigraphic reference for a worldwide correlation of the SDB. In this study, organic geochemistry together with graptolite biostratigraphy is applied as a tool for identifying the SDB at the Changwantang Section in Yulin (Guangxi Province). The results suggest that the variations in some indexes of organic geochemistry can be correlated to the representative curve of the SDB in the Klonk and Esenyali sections. The exact level of the SDB in the Changwantang Section is positioned within the upper part of the Fangcheng Formation, which is consistent with the available palaeontological data from graptolites (e.g. Colonograptus colonus, Plectograptus sp., Monograptus uniformis, M. cf. M. praehercynicus and M. aequabilis).

Research and development of cosmetic and medicinal peloids using geomaterials and biomaterials

Over the past five years a group of researchers from the Center for Research in Pharmaceutical Technology, Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Porto and GeoBioTec Research Unit, FCT, University of Aveiro made an inventory of the traditional application of in autonomous regions of Madeira and Azores and developed formulations of peloids. In the SPA of Crown, Caldeiras da Ribeira Grande, Sao Miguel Island, Azores, we highlight the application of hot sludge and biofilms in the treatment of various dermatological and osteoarticular diseases, since the founding of the Spa in 1811. In the Beija pudles and in the outdoor swimming pool of Terra Nostra Garden Hotel & Spa, structures located in Furnas Valley on the island of Sao Miguel, Azores, reddish brown biofilms are removed from the walls of the tanks / pools and applied directly to the skin with a view to the treatment of diseases such as dermatitis and fungal infections. On the island of Porto Santo, Madeira Archipelago (Atlantic Ocean), there is a long tradition in the manufacture and application of peloids in ambulatory, which consits of mixtures of illitic- smectite clay, or with mineral water of the ancient house of the waters of Porto Santo, Fontinha, or with water matured for several weeks or months into sinks of natural stone (sandstone and trachyte). In previous research several mixtures have been developed, comprising illiticsmectite clays, mineral water, sea water, components of traditional medicinal plants and infusions. Is currently underway the preparation of a research project aimed at studying, from the therapeutic point of view, the action of traditional and designed peloids in the autonomous regions of Madeira and Azores, in a group of patients affected by various kinds of diseases.

Decolonizing time: The Mexican temporalities of D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley and Carlos Fuentes

A recent exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, Mexico: A Revolution in Art 1910–1940, highlighted a juxtaposition of past and present that fascinated intellectuals, novelists and artists from around the world. Against this background, this article explores how tensions between what Adam Marrows describes as “the cosmic time of empire” and the more fluid senses of local, historical Mexican time in the modernist novels of D.H. Lawrence (The Plumed Serpent, 1926) and Aldous Huxley (Island, 1962) challenged the prevailing western concept of modernity. Their work deeply affected the next generation of Mexican writers including Carlos Fuentes, whose extensive experimentation with temporal dislocations in novels such as Terra Nostra (1975) incorporates features of utopianism and magical realism – foreshadowed by Huxley and Lawrence – that question the horizons of local and global histories and gesture towards “decolonial options” identified by Walter D. Mignolo as “roads towards the future”.

The Age of Time according to Carlos Fuentes

Born on 11 November 1928, Carlos Fuentes on 15 May 2012 met on Parnassus the princes of word and vision that one of his deceased characters dreamed of in El naranjo (1993; The Orange Tree). If, as he wrote in Constancia y otras novelas para vírgenes (1990; “Constancia” and Other Stories for Virgins), readers are the ghosts of writers (296), the author of Terra nostra (1975) was, for his part, a ghost of Cervantes and disciple of Erasmus who rewrote La Celestina, Don Quixote, the successive Don Juans of Tirso de Molina, Zorrilla, and Mozart, the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and Luca Signorelli, the gnostic gospels, and the texts of the Jewish mystical tradition.

El peregrinaje simbólico a través de la mitología azteca en Terra Nostra de Carlos Fuentes

En Terra Nostra Carlos Fuentes exociza la historia para ofrecerle una nueva oportunidad, para las múltiples posibilidades de realización que quedaron latentes en su discurrir tengan su lugar, pues considera que sólo la ficción, la palabra escrita puede viabilizar tiempos y espacios múltiples y simultáneos, y que sólo éstos pueden devolvernos la "memoria". Para ello, el mejor camino es el mitológico, lo mágico, lo onírico. La segunda parte de la obra recrea la mitología azteca aplicándola al viaje real y simbólico que realiza un joven sin nombre y sin edad a quien en su camino desde España hasta el centro del Imperio azteca se le irán desvelando los misterios del panteón mesoamericano.

<i>Terra Nostra</i> and the Rewriting of the Modern Subject: Archetypes, Myth, and Selfhood

This article argues that one of the most important contributions of Carlos Fuentes's Terra Nostra is its rewriting of the modern subject. Through its metafi ctional dimension, the novel seeks to change the legacy of the recoding of subjectivities begun in the Spanish Golden Age. More specifi cally, it is through the construction of its characters and the way in which the latter depend on, and grow out of, the structure of the novel that Fuentes revises modern individualist conceptions of the subject. Although critics have tended to privilege the novel's realm of myth (understood as transcendent and timeless), this reading depends on the novel's evocation of a Marxist narrative of culture as strug- gle driven that Carlos Fuentes never loses from sight. The novel's structure arguably promotes a diachronic understanding of history into which both the mythic and material strands feed. Myth, in this reading, is a consciously embraced worldview that grounds, and dialectically informs, this vision of history rather than shying away from it. An overall critical consensus has evolved around Terra Nostra with regard to its mythic dimension: myth, cyclical time, and timeless moments are viewed as dominating the novel's historical framing, expressed through the well-known key dates of 1492 (the discovery of America, the conquest of Granada, the pub- lication of Antonio de Nebrija's Gramatica de la lengua castellana and the edict of expulsion of the Jews), 1521 (the fall of Tenochtitlan and the comuneros rebellion), and 1598 (the death of Felipe II). 1

Trânsito de temas comuns entre o JN e as telenovelas

This ar cle deals with the incidence of the reality- c on syncre smin the Brazilian television. The inves ga on begins with the hypothesisthat the interpenetra on of these sorts of programs occurs inbetween the television news and the soap-opera contents, by meansof a con nuous spectacle. The corpus of the study has included theseries of programs shown in January of 2000, by Rede Globo de Televisão,in which Jornal Nacional was inserted between two soap-operas,Vila Madalena and Terra Nostra. The research disclosed evidencesof a notable recurrence of subjects and approaches in theschedule of the major Brazilian network prime me.

Fuentes, "Terra Nostra", and the Reconfiguration of Latin American Culture

Fuentes, "Terra Nostra", and the Reconfiguration of Latin American Culture

Fuentes, Terra nostra, and the reconfiguration of Latin American culture

Fuentes, Terra nostra, and the reconfiguration of Latin American culture

Assistir, ouvir, ler e narrar: o papel da mídia nas construções identitárias étnicas

Este artigo objetiva analisar algumas relações existentes entre as identidades étnicas e a mídia, em especial a televisão. Partindo-se de pesquisa etnográfica entre descendentes de imigrantes italianos na região central do Rio Grande do Sul, no Brasil, tomou-se como estudo de caso a recepção da novela Terra Nostra, exibida pela Rede Globo de Televisão em 1999-2000. A recepção da telenovela favoreceu a reflexividade acerca da noção de pertencimento "italiano" e promoveu uma série de diálogos entre a tradição imaginada e alimentada em nível local e aquela transmitida pela televisão. Esses diálogos centravam-se, em particular, sobre a questão de gênero, a sexualidade, as narrativas do processo colonizador e os elementos diacríticos presentes na italianidade paulista, que entravam em desacordo com os padrões valorativos locais.

Political Controversies in Brazilian TV Fiction

This article discusses the Brazilian telenovela Terra Nostra, a prime-time production of TV Globo. The telenovela presented a complex picture of nineteenth-century Brazilian politics and of the saga of Italian immigrants, with a plurality of perspectives about these themes. A series of focus group discussions with viewers of different social backgrounds, concentrating on the political messages of the telenovela, reveals the complexity of audience responses. The author finds that the telenovela played an “orientation role,” providing interpretive frames that were often applied by viewers to current political issues. Even though they are frequently looked at with disdain, telenovelas have become key to understanding the dilemmas and perspectives of democratic politics in Brazil.

A Reappraisal of the “Total” Novel: Totality and Communicative Systems in Carlos Fuentes's Terra Nostra

A Reappraisal of the “Total” Novel: Totality and Communicative Systems in Carlos Fuentes's Terra Nostra

History Made, History Imagined: Contemporary Literature, Poiesis, and Past

History Made, History Imagined: Contemporary Literature, Poiesis, and Past. By David W. Price. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. 338 pages. Archival Reflections: Postmodern Fiction of the Americas (SelfReflexivity, Historical Revisionism, Utopia). By Santiago JuanNavarro. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2000. 367 pages. David Price's History Made, History Imagined and Santiago JuanNavarro's Archival Reflections pose similar questions and arrive at similar conclusions, but in so doing, they occupy very different ideological territories and employ different analytic strategies. The differences will tell us as much as the similarities. Thus, a comparison will allow me to consider their respective arguments without, I hope, doing a disservice to either. The questions asked by Professors Price and Juan-Navarro have been asked by a number of critics and theorists over the past two decades. The questions are, essentially, these: how do works of literature reflect historical realities and at the same time (re)create histories and values? How do writers position their texts so as to critique the abuses of the past and at the same time suggest alternatives futures? These questions form the substratum of much postcolonial fiction, of course. Indeed, without them, a text can hardly be said to belong to this amorphous yet recognizable category, for if a shared history can be taken for granted in dominant cultures, it cannot be in postcolonial contexts that are still in the process of defining themselves against the dominant culture. Both of the works under review treat writers who take this premise as a given, and who ask questions about the nature and relations of historical memory and literary narrative. Juan-Navarro focusses on the self-reflexive narrative strategies of the authors he discusses, whereas Price is concerned to uncover a recurring set of ideas that he identifies with Vico and Nietzsche. Let me begin with Juan-Navarro, who engages postmodernist theory and historiography, rather than postcolonial theory as such, placing particular emphasis on the concept of historiographic metafiction. Adopting Linda Hutcheon's well-known term, he provides descriptive restatements of theorists who have developed this sub-genre, among them Ihab Hassan, Brian McHale, Fredric Jameson, Julio Ortega, Garcia Canclini, Jose Oviedo, and Lucien Dallenbach. Hayden White and Michel Foucault are also duly summarized. Juan-Navarro does not attempt to compare or mediate the critical positions of these theorists, or to integrate them into a theory of his own. This is disappointing, since the author foregoes the rare opportunity to weigh U.S. and Latin American writers and theorists in terms of their cultural positioning. For example, he might have wondered how Canclini or Foucault would apply differently to, say, Fuentes or Doctorow, but he does not. Rather, he describes the theories and then applies one or another of them to a given work. Some cultural distinctions are made in the process, but there is a strong undertow pulling all of the texts into a single interpretive current. In this, Archival Reflections reflects one of the practical weakness of postmodernist theory: its globalizing tendencies. Cultural and social comparisons are not foregrounded, despite the author's broad selection of American writers and theories. Juan-Navarro does, however, describe the historical context of each of the novels in question. Chapters are devoted to Carlos Fuentes' Terra Nostra, Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, Julio Cortazar's Libro de Manuel, and E.L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel. In contrast to what would be a predictable postmodern-List position, the author assumes that the past can be known, and he goes about describing it to his reader. This is useful, for each of the novels is, on its most basic level, a narrative about a particular time and place, and each of these works has important things to say about that historical context. …

Laptev sea system discussed at Russian‐German Workshop

The Laptev Sea covers the central part of the vast Arctic shelf seas off northern Eurasia. It receives large volumes of fresh water from the Lena River and other big rivers that drain the central part of Siberia; peak runoff occurs in the early summer. Being tucked away between two groups of islands—Severnaya Zemlya in the west and the New Siberian Islands in the east—and connected to the Kara Sea in the west and the East Siberian Sea in the east only through relatively narrow straits, the Laptev Sea is an important area for sea‐ice formation in the Arctic Ocean [Rigor and Colony, 1997; Kassens et al., 1999].Through sea ice formation, the Laptev Sea influences the ice cover of the central Arctic Ocean and its Transpolar Drift, which exports sea ice into the western Norwegian‐Greenland Sea. The Laptev Sea is also the central segment of the Northern Sea Route. For this reason, commercial interests wish to gain valuable knowledge about the extremes of its modern environment, past variability and predictability on time scales of months and years. Both in the Laptev Sea and on the adjacent land regions, large tracts of subterraneous and submarine permafrost have been observed as a consequence of the extreme paleoclimate of the latest geological past.