Speaker: Xavier Rubert de Ventós
Venue: Instituto Cervantes
Date: June 6, 2006, Tuesday
Time: 7pm
From the beginning of the Spanish colonization of the New World, it can be noted that one recurring conflict within the colonies was the struggle between religious and civil power. This struggle involved the use of language as one of its main battlegrounds. In his conference, Prof. Rubert of Ventós will discuss the Jesuits´ role in the process of the consolidation of Spanish as the region's lingua franca, as well as their effort to conserve the native tongues of Latin-America.
About the speaker: Xavier Rubert de Ventós (1939) is a professor of Aesthetics at the Barcelona School of Architecture, Santayana Fellow at Harvard University, and founding member of the New York Institute for the Humanities. He has been a member of parliament in the Spanish and European parliaments.
He has written extensively on philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics. His intellectual activity first achieved popularity with the publication of the essays El arte ensimismado (1963) and TeorÃÂa de la sensibilidad (1968), which were warmly received. He also penned La estética y sus herejÃÂas, published in English as Heresies in Modern Art by Columbia Univ. Press in 1979. A prolific writer, he has published texts of various kinds, showing his nonconformity with the orthodox philosophical tradition, and which range from essay to aphorism, personal diaries, or historical or political analysis (Moral, ManÃÂas, amores y otros oficios, El laberinto de la Hispanidad -translated as The Hispanic Labyrinth).
Rubert de Ventós has won several awards, among them the Lletra d'Or Award for Catalan literature and the Anagrama Essay, Espejo de España, and the Josep Pla Awards.
Lecture will be in English.