Shipwreck and Deliverance contrasts common European and American understandings of the philosophical, cultural and political problems of modernity with fresh perspectives written into the novels and essays of three major Latin American authors (Octavio Paz, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vegas Llosa). The book argues that European and American analyses of modernity tend to be disproportionately analytical, highlighting the economic and socio-political consequences of modernity over the personal, emotional, and spiritual concerns that are of central importance to Latin American authors.

Minds are rhetorical. From the moment we are born others are shaping our capacity for mental agency. As a meditation on the nature of human thought and action, this book starts with the proposition that human thinking is inherently and irreducibly social, and that the long rhetorical tradition in the West has been a neglected source for thinking about cognition. Each chapter reflects on a different dimension of human thought based on the fundamental proposition that our rhetoric thinks and acts with and through others.