LITERAL 13

In this issue:

Current Events

Essays

Poetry

Reviews

Film

Reflection

LITERAL 13
Myths & Madness
/ Mitos y manías

We live in a complicated era. In issue number 10 of Literal magazine, we put the spotlight on the importance of faith and religious belief in the modern world. In the current issue, by contrast, we offer our readers three essays that examine a different contemporary trend: the loss of belief and the collapse of cultural myths. Armando González Torres examines the waning prestige of that mythical figure of modernity: the public intellectual. Maarten van Delden shows how one of Latin America’s most revered cultural icons, the Cuban poet and revolutionary José Martí, has been pulled off his pedestal in recent years by a series of revisionist readings of his life and work. José Antonio Aguilar Rivera, in turn, explores a central irony of our era: we live, to a large extent, in a rational, demystifi ed world, and yet the resistance to rationality, the hankering for myths that give meaning to our lives, remains immensely strong. In sum, these three articles cast light on some of the key cultural and intellectual tensions that characterize the present age.