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The attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 was a tragic
illustration of the existential threat that the viral spread of
disinformation poses in the age of social media and
twenty-four-hour news. From climate change denialism to the
frenzied conspiracy theories and racist mythologies that fuel
antidemocratic white nationalist movements in the United States and
abroad, What Would Cervantes Do? is a lucid meditation on the key
role the humanities must play in dissecting and combatting all
forms of disinformation. David Castillo and William Egginton travel
back to the early modern period, the first age of inflationary
media, in search of historically tested strategies to overcome
disinformation and shed light on our post-truth market. Through a
series of critical conversations between cultural icons of the
twenty-first century and those of the Spanish Golden Age, What
Would Cervantes Do? provides a tour-de-force commentary on current
politics and popular culture. Offering a diverse range of
Cervantist comparative readings of contemporary cultural texts
–movies, television shows, and infotainment – alongside ideas
and issues from literary and cultural texts of early modern Spain,
Castillo and Egginton present a new way of unpacking the logic of
contemporary media. What Would Cervantes Do? is an urgent and
timely self-help manual for literary scholars and humanists of all
stripes, and a powerful toolkit for reality literacy.
Zombie Talk offers a concise, interdisciplinary introduction and
deep analytical set of theoretical approaches to help readers
understand the phenomenon of zombies in contemporary and modern
culture. With essays that combine Humanities and Social Science
methodologies, the authors examine the zombie through an array of
cultural products from different periods and geographical
locations: films ranging from White Zombie (1932) to the pioneering
films of George Romero, television shows like AMC's The Walking
Dead, to literary offerings such as Richard Matheson's I am Legend
(1954) and Seth Grahame-Smith's Pride, Prejudice and Zombies
(2009), among others.
The essays in The Humanities in the Age of Information and
Post-Truth represent a defense of the social function of the
humanities in today's society. Edited by Ignacio Lopez-Calvo and
Christina Lux, the volume explains different ways in which the
humanities and the arts, beyond their intrinsic and nonfunctional
value, may be a valuable tool in our search for social justice,
human empathy, freedom, and peace, all the while helping us answer
many of the twenty-first century's big questions. Some essays
explore the ways in which the humanities may help us imagine a
different, more just world, and articulate politically effective
mechanisms to achieve such goals. Others address the place of the
humanities and the arts amid the ontological and epistemological
uncertainties constantly produced in a fast-changing world. While
the reader may suspect that these types of lucubration are a
desperate reaction to decreased public funding for the humanities
worldwide, a decreased enrollment of students, or anxiety over the
future of our profession, there is in this volume a coherent
argument for the continued need, perhaps more now than ever, to
invest in humanities education if we are to have informed and
socially conscious citizens rather than just willing consumers and
obedient workers. Furthermore, the essays prove that the humanities
and the arts are, after all, not a luxury but an integral part of a
complete scholarly education.
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