This multidisciplinary study focuses on the creative state as the nucleus of the work of numerous poets, artists, and philosophers from twentieth-century Spain. Beginning with cognitive science, Gala explores the mental processes and structures that underline creative thinking, for poets like José María Hinojosa, Clara Janés, and Jorge Guillén.

Poets and artists create works that astound and move us, but what is the nature of their creative process? How do thought and reality, the physical and the psychological, interact in their work? How do they use body and mind, emotions and cognition, the objective and the subjective, to reconcile the self and the world, art and reality? Creative Cognition and the Cultural Panorama of Twentieth Century-Spain is a multidisciplinary study of poets, plastic artists, and philosophers mainly from twentieth-century Spain. It focuses on the creative state as the nucleus of the artist's work as it brings forth cognitive experiences that are out of the ordinary realm of knowledge about the self, art, and the world. Not a strictly neurobiological approach, it takes cognitive science as a point of departure to explore the mental processes and structures that underline creative thinking.

The Place of Silence explores the poetics and politics of silence in architecture. Bringing together contributions by internationally recognized scholars in architecture and the humanities, it explores the diverse practices, affects, politics and cultural meanings of silence, silent places and silent buildings in historical and contemporary contexts. What counts as silence in specific situations is highly relative, and the term itself carries complex and varied significations which make it a revealing field of study. Chapters explore a range of themes, from the apparent 'loss of silence' in the contemporary urban world; through designed silent spaces; to the forced silences of oppression, catastrophe, or technological breakdown. The book unfolds a rich and complementary array of perspectives which address – through the lens of architecture and place – questions of sound, atmosphere, and attunement, together building a volume which will form the key scholarly resource on architecture and silence.

After nearly forty years of dictatorship and an abrupt transition to democracy in the twentieth century, Spain is now in a moment of great rediscovery. The Peninsular country’s precarious past, paired with its current situation of economic crisis (currently Spain has one of the highest unemployment rates in the Eurozone) and movements to recover languages, literatures and cultures other than Spanish, creates a country where artists, authors and directors are exploring existential and social issues in new and revitalized ways. The chapters included in Collapse, Catastrophe, and Rediscovery: Spain’s Cultural Panorama in the Twenty First Century explore filmic, literary and cultural representations of modern-day Spain, and the contributing authors offer insight into how the past has affected the country’s artistic and literary production of today and how film and literature dialogue with the social and economic situation of Spain in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Anchored to current cultural and social trends, this collection presents a variety of perspectives and a wide range of analyses of some of the most pertinent contemporary Spanish texts and films with the goal of expanding conceptualizations of the cultural panorama of Spain today.

'The differing contributions have been woven together to produce a harmonious, informative and eminently enjoyable volume... it should prove an invaluable tool to teachers in schools who will find themselves well rewarded when looking for an update on any of the various topics covered.' -Vida HispanicaThis interdisciplinary volume focuses on the ways in which cultural practices serve the purposes of identity formation. It introduces readers to a range of theoretical debates as well as informing them about specific areas of twentieth-century Spanish culture: ethnography, music, TV, advertising, popular literature, medical discourse, film, posters, museums, and urban development.

Bringing together readings of Spanish intellectuals and New Education theorists, Anna Kathryn Kendrick argues that Spanish pedagogues drew upon, and in part secularized, 'catholic' notions of wholeness and totality.