The Power of Tragedy: An Eighteenth-Century Debate on Theater and its Relevance to Literature Pedagogy Today

This article brings to light a debate on tragic fiction in eighteenth-century France, and more specifically, on whether or not tragedy has the power to transform individuals intellectually and emotionally. Through analysis of abbé Dubos’s Reflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles, I contend that Dubos’s overwhelmingly positive conception of fiction—and especially his contention that we learn through the emotions when we engage with tragic fiction—can serve as an admirable pedagogical model for today’s fiction-focused foreign language classrooms.

Cosmologies and Regionalisms from "Above' and "Below' in the Post-Cold War Americas: the Relevance of Karl Polanyi for the 21st Century

Drawing on a Polanyian analysis of the land question, this article aims to analyse both Western and Indigenous cosmologies of Abya Yalathe name that indigenous peoples give to the American continentto understand the relationship between human beings and land and nature. These cosmologies are at the heart of the way in which two distinct societies construct their regional space, one from above', the other from below', and they are therefore key to understanding today's climate change problematique. Following this nexus it is argued that, since the end of the Cold War, a new regional double-movement', unleashed by the quest for land and natural resources has been in the making. This is a superstructural or legal battle between Western transnational regime-making and a law that originated at the centre of the Earth'. The article explains both regionalisms and the dialectical interaction between them and demonstrates that Karl Polanyi's legacy remains relevant for the 21st century.