Abstract: ❦I. On Easter Sunday 1341, in a ceremony that took place on Rome’s Capitoline Hill, Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374) was crowned with the laurel wreath. Petrarch owed this realization of a longstanding dream to a large network of friends, but also to the favor of King Robert of Naples. Robert submitted the poet to a three-day examen privatum in his residence, then formally declared him worthy to be crowned poet laureate. The powerful Roman Colonna dynasty also provided active support. As capellanus continuus, Petrarch (who had been ordained in the lower ranks of the Catholic priesthood) had been a familiar figure at the court of Cardinal Giovanni Colonna in Avignon since 1330. The examination by King Robert as well as the legal document containing the privilegium laureationis show that the Roman ceremony was clearly modeled on medieval academic protocol. Its intentions, however, point in an entirely different direction. The poet’s coronation speech, traditionally known as the Collatio laureationis, as well as the other pertinent documents clearly indicate that Petrarch intended to fashion the Capitoline honors into the grandiose inauguration of the new age he was hoping for—regardless of the medieval traditions to which these honors were indebted. Petrarch claimed that the ceremony was reviving a classical tradition that had been forgotten and neglected for more than twelve hundred years. At the same time, it was to signal the impending reformation of an exhausted culture by means of a return to the spirit of the ancients. This spirit, according to Petrarch,

Abstract: Each tenth canto of the three parts of the Divine Comedy marks the passage over a threshold into a new realm, or into the more essential part of each realm. In Inferno it is the first canto inside the retrenched ramparts of the City of Dis; in Purgatono it is where, also just inside a gate, penitential punishments actually begin; in Paradiso it is where we pass out of the shadow of the earth and its imperfections (inconstancy, ambition, and sensual love) displayed by categories of saints appearing lower down. The three cantos X are also linked by the themes of pride in art and pride in family, twin offenses punished on the first purgatorial terrace that are cognate, in InfernoX, with Farinata's fierce preoccupation with ancestors and progeny and Cavalcante 's fearful boasting of his son's high genius. So too Paradiso X celebrates simultaneously the Creator's love for his Son and for his own art. Guido Cavalcanti, Dante's first friend, is named explicitly in Inferno X by his frantic father and possibly on the terrace of pride, in Purgatono XI, when Oderisi da Gubbio remarks that one Guido has wrested from

Abstract: Literature, History and Art, ed. and trans. S. U. Baldassarri and A. Saiber (New Haven: Yale UP, 2000) 327–29; A. M. Cabrini, Un’idea di Firenze. Da Villani a Guicciardini (Rome: Bulzoni, 2001) 3–108; and my article “A Tale of Two Cities: Accounts of the Origins of Fiesole and Florence from the Anonymous Chronica to Leonardo Bruni,” Studi Rinascimentali 5 (2007): 29–56. 2 In addition to the bibliography reported above, see C. T. Davis, “Topographical and Historical Propaganda in Early Florentine Chronicles and Villani,” Medioevo e Rinascimento 2 (1988): 33–51.

Abstract: In 1523, the veedor del oro Gonzalo Fern?ndez de Oviedo returned to Spain to report to the Crown regarding the situation in Panama in the wake of the infamous Pedradas D?vila. Oviedo, who had failed twice in the previous years to obtain an interview with Charles V, received this time a surprising yet gratifying command: the Emperor wanted him to write a report on the peoples and nature of the Indies. Oviedo was certain that this was a task befitting him. After more than twelve years investigating the nature of the New World, he had already begun to write a complete natural and general history of America. But the Emperor's request took him by surprise: he had traveled to Spain leaving behind all his notes in Santo Domingo. Despite this setback, Oviedo tried to fulfill the Emperor's wishes, and hastily arranged for publication whatever he could remember on these matters, a fact he admitted in the resulting Sumario de la natural historia (1526): \"aqu? no traje ni hay de esta escritura m?s de lo que en la memoria est? y puedo de ella aqu? recoger\" (56). Modern commentators have taken this claim at face value, relegating it to a mere biographical curiosity with little bearing on their readings of the text (Francisco Esteve Barba 79; Alberto Salas 59; Antonello Gerbi 214-15; Stephanie Merrim 170). In part, this situation is derived from the fact that the Sumario has attracted very little critical interest,

Abstract: Twelve years after the loss of Spain's last American colonies in Cuba and Puerto Rico, Miguel de Unamuno wrote in a letter to Chilean poet Ernesto Guzman that "ahora lo que es cierto es que nuestro yo, el propio nuestro, lo descubrimos al contacto de otros vos" (Epistolario americano 350). This general statement could summarize Unamuno's approach to the intricacies of individual subjectivity and the dilemmas of national identity in post-colonial Spain. The vexing relationship between self and other permeates Unamuno's interest in the mysteries of personality as much as his concern with the national self, especially at a time when Spain was experiencing "una de las m?s graves crisis de su existencia pol?tica y vida espiritual" and needed to open up to Europe and its former colonies to rediscover itself (Epistolario ameri? cano 351). However, the opening quote can also be read as a succinct comment on the form that frames the Spanish writer's words, namely a letter. Indeed, a fundamental function of epistolary writing is to express a reciprocal relationship between self and other?between the letter writer and the addressee?while at the same time overcoming

Abstract: The goal of this essay is to describe an emotional dynamic that is intrinsic to language rather than simply represented by or expressed in it. Beyond the familiar models of linguistic praxis?positing and performance; reference and signification; formation and deforma? tion?I will attempt to articulate a notion of linguistic affectivity, or more specifically, linguistic auto-affection. The initial focus will be on the traditional but vexing figure of anacoluthon, a breakdown of grammar or syntax that is often mistakenly treated as though its manifestation reveals nothing about language. I will then turn to a reading of Gottfried Benn's "Requiem," a text in which the relations between disruptions of syntactic norms and discursive affectivity are explored in detail. From the Greek for "lack of sequence," anacoluthon is typically defined as an abrupt change in the syntax or grammar of a statement, as when a sentence begins in the first person but suddenly switches to the third person or a transitive verb appears but fails to be followed by a direct object. Anacoluthon is often associated with aposiopesis, in which a sentence breaks off, never to continue, and anapodoton, in which a sentence begins with a subordinate clause that is not fol? lowed by a main clause. In these cases, rhetoricians speak of the initial syntax or grammar creating an expectation for the completion of a pattern that is then thwarted when another grammar rears its head. Anacoluthon is regularly linked with feelings, but not in the terms I propose to delineate. Figures of interruption are celebrated for what they convey about the volatile emotional state of their speaker, since

Abstract: Critics from Bourdieu to Bersani have emphasized a redemptive logic governing Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. This essay investigates an alternative, non-appropriative paradigm for reading in Proust—an aesthetics of the unqualifiable, or “quelconque” (“whatever”). I argue that the most striking aesthetic experiences in the novel are those that expose the critic’s incapacitation in the face of the incomparably commonplace object. At stake here is not the compensatory, self-aggrandizing aesthetics of involuntary memory, but a mode of ravished attention to the ordinary that spoils the profits of distinction.

Abstract: The field of emotion studies is growing without an agreement on terminology. This issue of MLN proposes "emotionality" as the appro? priate term of art for several reasons. While "emotion" designates a particular feeling that somebody has, "emotionality" refers to a quality or a potential. This difference has several implications. Emotionality, like rationality, can be a characteristic of non-human processes or entities. We have no great problems speaking of an emotional encounter, an emotional decision, an emotional space, an emotional film, and the like?even if we still feel compelled to project a human subject as the source or recipient of these emotional experiences. Several contributions to this issue will interrogate this compulsion. Emotionality is the (often latent) ability to be emotional, whereas emotions are specific manifestations of emotionality. Scholars of emo? tion characteristically produce lists of emotions and focus on a few items on that list. While we can certainly learn from these descriptions and analyses of individual emotions, such studies often obscure the fact that emotions easily transform from one into the other. Without a change in the fundamental situation, fear might give rise to anger, which might turn into a sadness that gives way to pleasure. This shows, in my view, that individual emotions are different interpretations and evaluations of a given emotional text. The interpretations change easily because with emotionality we are moving in the realm of difference; something is emotional when it registers and dynamically responds

Abstract: Although my subject is the Christian doctrine of free will and its importance in the revision of the picaresque at the hands of Miguel de Cervantes and others of his generation, rather than the theme of freedom more generally, I would begin by noting that freedom was a multifaceted and often polemical concern in early modern Europe. In this, it differed from today, when, under the enduring influence of lib? eralism and its validation of individual rights, individual achievements, and individual liberties, we are wont to cast freedom in a uniquely positive light, akin to that in which Don Quixote portrays the world stretching out before him when, "libre y desembarazado," he departs the castle of the Duke and Duchess in part two of Cervantes's novel. "La libertad," he informs Sancho, "es uno de los m?s preciosos dones que a los hombres dieron los cielos; con ella no pueden igualarse los tesoros que encierra la tierra ni el mar encubre. . . . ?Venturoso aquel a quien el cielo dio un pedazo de pan sin que le quede obligaci?n de agradecerlo a otro que al mismo cielo!" (2.58, 1195).1 For Don Quixote, freedom is a compound ideal consisting, on one hand, of the license to make one's own way in the world and, on the other, of the absence of social (worldly) duties and conven

Abstract: ❦Mention Ozymandias and many English speakers will remember some exposure to Percy Shelley’s sonnet during high school. The poem continues to influence popular culture: a search for “Ozymandias” on the Internet reveals three rock-and-roll songs, an album by a German “electro-medieval” musical ensemble, a pianist’s musical project, three different comic-book characters, and elements of video games and science-fiction. 1 Nor has elite culture forgotten the poem: a recent review of Gunther Grass’s autobiography compared the celebrated German novelist to Ozymandias. By belatedly confessing his service in the Nazi army as a teenager, claims the reviewer, the novelist has ceased being “a moral authority on frank and timely facing up to the Nazi past,” relinquishing his previously unquestioned right to criticize his compatriots’ evasion of responsibility. Grass’s monumental cultural stature is compared to a statue that he has “demolished,” its “ruins lying, like Shelley’s Ozymandias, as a warning beside the roadside” (Garton Ash 23). Shelley’s poem has made Ozymandias an emblem of self-deluding hubris, the ambition to be remembered favorably by posterity, and the refusal to acknowledge time’s destruction of human achievement. Yet This essay celebrates the wonder that John Freccero’s Dante course inspired in a particularly naive Yale undergraduate in 1970. It is part of a chapter included in a monograph I am preparing, Writing and Wonder: Mythical Books and Lost Libraries in the Premodern Imagination. All translations are my own except as noted. 1

Abstract: As far as we know, there is no record of the love story of Francesca da Rimini before Dante's account in Canto V of the Inferno. His portrait of her emerges in astonishingly few verses and, in its passion and pathos, emulates and rivals Virgil's portrayal of Dido. Francesca tells us nothing of her life in the first part of her monologue, apart from her place of birth, which she identifies with elegant periphrasis. Instead, she sums up in retrospect the genesis, consummation and fatal consequences of the love she shared with her inseparable companion in Hell, whom she does not name. Her celebrated apostrophe to love, the unforgettable anaphora on "Amore," is at once succinct and profound, a rhetorical representation in miniature of consciousness and interiority without precedent in the Middle Ages. We shall see that part of it is ultimately derived from Plato's Phaedrus, yet it anticipates the "subjectivity" we associate with the modern novel. In three anaphoric terzine, Francesca describes love and its effects, not abstractly, as had other poets and especially Guido Cavalcanti in

Abstract: Gottfried von Stra?burg's famous narration of the story of Tristan and Isolde is regarded as exemplary for its subtlety in representing emo? tions. The author is admired for his descriptions of inner conflicts and processes, which seem to reveal a remarkably modern psychological insight and an acknowledgement of the general ambivalence of feel? ings. It is also assumed that his interpretation refrains from an older literary tradition of describing affects, a tradition which involves a rep? ertoire of body movements and gestures as well as tears and laments.1 Some scholars associate these conventions of expressing emotions in medieval literature with a 'theatrical' quality. 'Theatrical' in this context takes on negative meanings like 'exaggerated,' 'artificial' and 'simulated.' In some medieval genres, expressions of emotions seem to be as formulaic as dramatic role play.2 These literary traditions in which emotions are communicated in expressive ways are regarded as less authentic than a more recent, modern tradition according to which emotions are located in the individual's interior and show

Abstract: ❦As the first avowedly feminist novel in the Italian tradition, Sibilla Aleramo’s 1906 Una donna occupies the space that Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own occupies for the Anglo-American tradition, and has been the object of similar veneration. After all, Aleramo’s autobiographical protagonist commits the cultural crime of leaving her child in order to live a life of her own, and break the “monstrous chain” that links mothers to daughters, forming a continuum of maternal sacrifice. 1 Our sympathy is with her predicament. But contemporary readers may be less sympathetic with aspects of her prose that I, for one, have always found almost unbearable: the trailing off of sentences as they sink into sentimentality, the overuse of points of suspension. Take the following episode, for example. Towards the end of the autobiographical novel, the protagonist has announced to her brutish husband her intention to separate from him, remain in Rome, and make a living on her own. The husband covers her with vile insult, beats her, and threatens, in the child’s presence, to take the child away with him. The thought is unbearable to her:

Abstract: Lope's defense of poetry, Cuesti?n del honor debido a la poes?a, has attracted little attention from scholars, due in no small part to the difficulty of reading a text that appears overburdened with excessive catalogs and recondite allusions, but also to its deceptive patina of counter-reformation moralism resolutely displayed in the form of a rhetorical exercise. It is my reading that Lope, rather than merely adopting panegyric convention aligned with moral conservatism, entertained more pragmatic motives stemming from a need to jus? tify Spanish amorous poetry under insistent moral attack, and more significantly to claim validity for his own love poetry ("donde habla amor puro" Epistolario III: 330). Lope's Platonism both in defending and writing poetry was compromised, however, when it came into conflict with his literary embraces of eros and the imposition of a Scholastic-Aristotelian psychology. In effect Lope's "discurso" can be considered a conventional yet ambivalent early reflection on poetics, rhetoric and literary theory.1

Abstract: violence, if you will. But is not all language, that is, "impure" language, all language after the Fall, as Benjamin would say, violent? And does he himself not battle and ultimately fail in the face of language: fail either by instrumentalizing it as a tool for communication, or fail in failing to communicate, fail as a communicator, so to speak? Given this aporetic situation that guarantees failure no matter what, we shall?violently?assure ourselves of some fundamental assumptions recurring in what is to come. In his 1921 essay "Toward a Critique of Violence" Benjamin is concerned with law, law's denial of its inher? ent violence (Gewalt). He is concerned, more concretely, with the nature of juridical force (Gewalt) and what he calls its law-positing and preserving character. All law is characteristic in that it violently establishes boundaries, divides, discriminates between 'legal' and 'ille? gal' so as to then coercively?if not violently?maintain these divisive

Abstract: This essay focuses on how Helene Cixous’s mourning for Algeria, in “Mon Algeriance” and Les Reveries de la femme sauvage , is linked to the death of her father, buried in Algiers. Cixous’ suffering (“malgerien:” a neologism to express both the evil and the illness -“le mal”- of Algeria) stems from her metonymic constellation of Algeria retrospectively viewed as “evil” during the Vichy regime, and also as the carrier of illness that contaminates the father. Cixous’ “malgerien” is also the experience of mourning the defunct father whose fatal illness becomes in her imaginary Algeria an allegory of the situation of the Jew during the Vichy regime in occupied Algeria. The father’s illness also allegorizes other fatal conflicts for Cixous, such as the relationship between Jews and Arabs, French and Jews, as well as colonizer and colonized in Algeria before 1954. The essay explores Cixous's fracturing of memory occasioned by her departure from Algeria in 1954 and draws out the meaning and implications of the metaphors of suffering and illness in relation to the father’s tuberculosis.

Abstract: Generation X Rocks compila excelentes y variados ejemplos de cultural studies en relación a un breve segmento histórico que rebasa escasamente una década. El volumen consigue reunir aportaciones tan ineludibles como originales, no sólo ya para quien tenga interés en el rock o en la producción española de los noventa—llámese ésta Generación X, Generación XYZ, por citar la afortunada ironía de Montalbán, o se refiera al Momento X—, sino también para quien le interese su vínculo con la cultura popular. En definitiva, Generation X Rocks es una herramienta bibliográfica muy útil para cualquier acercamiento crítico al cine y a la narrativa peninsulares de los últimos años.

Abstract: Finale.?The only philosophy that can be practiced responsibly in the face of despair would be the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption. . . . Perspectives would have to be created in which the world displaces itself, estranges itself, reveals its fissures and crevices similar to how indigent and garbled it will lie open one day in the Messianic light. To gain such perspectives without velleity or violence, entirely from felt contact with the objects?this alone is what thinking is about. ?Theodor W. Adorno1

Abstract: Henri de Regnier recalls Mallarme saying, in April 1894: “Il n’y a qu’un homme qui ait le droit d’etre anarchiste: moi, le Poete, puisque, seul, je fabrique un produit dont la Societe ne veut pas, en echange duquel elle ne me donne pas de quoi vivre.” This article presents a close reading of one of Mallarme’s Divagations texts, « Laurent Tailhade, » in the context of Symbolist responses to the anarchist bombing campaigns of the « ere des attentats, » in order to sketch out Mallarme’s own notion of the poetics of explosion – at once more modest and more audacious than those of his more ‘radical’ contemporaries.

Abstract: In his posthumously published essays and lectures on aesthetic ideology, Paul de Man suggests that Schiller's aesthetics and specifically his account of the sublime represent a "naive," "childish" and regressive reworking of Kant (AI 134, 141). De Man holds Schiller responsible for distorting the entire subsequent reception of Kant and for producing an aesthetic ideology that falsely ascribes unity and stability to the concept of the aesthetic, invariably papering over tensions within both that concept and the texts in which aesthetics is treated. In this regard the name "Schiller" becomes for de Man a signifier of aesthetic ideology. In his indictment of Schiller as a progenitor of aesthetic ideology, and in his invocation of a Kantian materialism, de Man appears thereby to lay claim to the legacy of critical theory and in particular Benjaminian "historical materialism." Indeed he goes on to imply, with reference to Joseph Goebbels, that Schiller's celebration by National Socialist Germany may indicate a connection between 18th-century aesthetics and 20th-century genocide (AI 154-55). In what follows I would like to connect the bookends of de Man's

Abstract: If we regard the Commedia as confessional literature in the Augustinian tradition, further resemblances to Augustine soon present themselves1 Chief among these is the belief that human language is grounded in desire; that each life, in its reaching out to God or its rejection of him, may be said to constitute a form of syntax; and that it is partly thanks to this resemblance that one can be led to the divinity by literary means at all In confining the analysis to the manifest narrative structure, one may however neglect the first principle in which the analogy is grounded: that of the paradigm, whose elements are realized in time and syntax One goal of this essay is to complement the chiefly syntactic emphasis of the contemporary narratologists by including more explicit consideration of the paradigmatic dimension2 Once this view has been stated, we shall briefly characterize the linguistic analogy in Saint Augustine, showing its progressive unfolding in the Confessions (aD 397-401) and its confirmation in the De Tnnitate

Abstract: In recent years, the novels of Melania Mazzucco and Laura Pariani1 have skillfully filled thematic gaps in contemporary Italian narrative. Indeed, their works lean toward the investigation and description of peripheral spaces that, for their importance, of both a historical and social nature in regards to Italy and Italian migrations, deserve discussion and perspectives within the literary realm. Migration rep? resents a topic that Italian writers at large have considered marginal; this despite the fact that many Italians dealt with the loss of contact with those relatives who migrated in search of economic ameliora? tion. The present study investigates in particular the techniques by which Mazzucco's prize-winning 2003 novel Vita2 constructs a story that brilliantly incorporates narratives of, and about, a traumatic migration of two children from southern Lazio to the United States of America. Without shying away from predictable displays of Italian ethnicity?namely problems of adaptation and assimilation, difficul? ties arising from the lack of knowledge of the language, confronting

Abstract: 2 Due to the vast bibliography that exists on letter-writing, I will note here only a selec? tion of critical works that are particularly relevant to my study: Janet Gurkin Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1986); Thomas O. Beebee, Epistolary Fiction in Europe, William Merrill Decker, Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America before Telecommunications (Chapel Hill: The U of North Carolina P, 1998); Mar gherita di Fazio, La lettera e il romanzo: esempi di comunicazione epistolare nella narrativa (Roma: Nuova Arnica Editrice, 1996); Mary A. Favret, Romantic Correspondence: Women, politics and the fiction of letters (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993); Amanda Gilroy and Wil W. Verhoeven, eds., Epistolary Histories: Letters, Fiction, Culture (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2000); Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, ed., Writing the Female Voice: Essay on Epistolary Literature (Boston: Northeastern UP, 1989); Linda Kauffman, Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fictions (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986) and Special Delivery: Epistolary Modes in Modern Fiction (Chicago and London: The U of Chicago P, 1992); Elizabeth J. MacArthur, Extravagant Narratives: Closure and Dynamics in the Epistolary Form (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1990); Ruth Perry, Women, Letters, and the Novel (New York: AMS P, 1980); Barbara Zaczek, Censored Sentiments: Letters and Censorship in Epistolary Novels and Conduct Material (Newark: U of Delaware P, 1997). 3 Real letters rather than fictional ones have been the focus of recent Italian criti?

Abstract: So reads the introductory matter to selections from the Decameron in the Norton Anthology to World Literature,2 which, after offering prelimi? nary evidence of the relation between these two works (the Decameron's division into one-hundred tales; the pedigree of "prencipe Galeotto" from InfernoV), summarily dismisses any sustained similarities between the two works in favor of a rhetorical opposition. As incorrect as this classification may seem, the critical tradition of Italian studies forged this rhetoric before any misgivings within the marketplace of World Literature. At the end of the nineteenth century, Francesco de Sanctis called the Decameron the "nuova Commedia, non la 'divina,' ma la 'ter? restre' Commedia."2, Much later, Erich Auerbach made claims about

Abstract: Drawing on the anthropological theory of Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner, the article will explore the recurrent references in the work of Darrieussecq, NDiaye and Redonnet to liminal locations, times, characters and conditions and will show that analysis of this allusional pattern not only sheds light on the role played by the fantastic in their texts, but also permits more precise identification both of shared thematic preoccupations and of personal priorities and inflections.

Abstract: last lecture and the last chapter of Derrida's Memoires, for Paul de Man, if it had not been for the necessity of adding "Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man's War" in a revised edition of 1988 Derrida quotes passages from two letters de Man wrote to him in 1970 and 1971 before and after the publication in Poetique of de Man's "The Rhetoric of Blindness: Derrida as Reader of Rousseau."2

Abstract: structural) forms. In several of his essays from Written on a Body, Sarduy takes advantage of this ambiguity in the word to signify a plane of existence (he calls it a “zone”) characterized by the flexibility necessary to maintain a certain tension, by the ability of this zone to sustain inversions, changes, and transformations. The motility of this zone is in contrast to the apparent rigidity of a fixed world of so-called reality, which appears to be a totality invested by terms such as “the economic,” “the political,” or “class struggle,” when it is in fact nothing more than an unstable surface for Sarduy. Indeed, for him, topology is another word for the zone of signification, for the plane of language whose lines of force between its parts, whose tension between its signifiers, whose amatory violence, he describes as “erotic” (Sarduy, Escrito 46). Sanchez turns this zone metaphorically described by Sarduy, first into the canvases of her “Erotic Topologies,” and then into the pages and general design of Zona. Sanchez’s Merversions Sanchez works from the seventies and early eighties materialize this erotic zone: the lines of force and the horizontal and vertical planes that intersect it and give it form, according to Sarduy. Sanchez’s “Topologies” series is defined by a minimal use of materials belonging to the visual arts and sculpture (canvas, acrylic paint, and wood). She stretches the materials out, up, down, and forward beyond the plane of an always frame-less modular form. Many of her works reach heroic dimensions, some of them standing vertically seventy-two inches tall, and stretching out to what is often a fine point from a flat surface (Cf., “Erotic Topology” from the “The Amazons Series” 1978, Fig. 1). The surface is stretched and extended to simulate folding, caressing, and touching feminine sexual body parts (highly abstract and stylized details that suggest nipples, labia, navels, vulvas, urinary tracts, anuses, clitoris, and the end of the urethra), which in turn project into, and enter, another space, both laterally and frontally, sending out imaginary lines or rays or even tendrils that seem to go in all directions, reaching and “touching” the contiguous canvas and the viewer. The colors of the works are muted, subtle shades of white, gray, and silver, but also radiant, as if meant to reflect blindingly the bright light of the Caribbean sun.10 When joined together, the modular pieces create 10 As if to underscore this reflective quality of her work, several photographs of her canvases from her catalogues are set on the beach and under the bright sun. Not