Lessons to Lose: Reading Against the Logic of Success
Abstract
In an era defined by relentless image consumption, digital information overload, and the flattening of public discourse, mass media advances a single social survival story: success. This triumphalist interpretive frame reshapes our aesthetic, moral, and political imaginaries and, by symmetry, produces a new, systemic marginality: failure. Literature and the arts have long attended to those labeled losers, not merely as subjects of pity but as repositories of alternative interpretive practices—discursive tactics that expose, contest, and rework the symbolic order. From Don Quixote’s linguistic subversions to Rousseau’s counter-Enlightenment gestures and Mario Levrero’s surrender to purposeless writing, these experiments reveal how meaning is made, circulated, and consumed. Reconstructing such strategies allows us to rethink marginality, recover neglected modes of critique and empathy, and imagine more capacious, durable cultural projects beyond the tyranny of success.
About the speaker
Dr. Juan Manuel Díaz is a Fulbright scholar, literary critic, and writer specializing in critical theory and Latin American culture. He holds a Ph.D. in Spanish Language and Literature from the University of Maryland and a double B.A. in Modern Literature and Instrumental Technician of Copy Editing from the National University of Córdoba, Argentina. He is an advisor and contributor to Revista Bife and the author of the short story collection Evangelio Nocturno (Gospel of the Night), published by De Los Cuatro Vientos Press.
About Studies in Culture, and Translation & Interpreting Research Joint Seminars
Studies in Culture
Through the scholarly analysis of many different kinds of cultural products, texts and phenomena, Studies in Culture brings together researchers who seek to understand how the world is understood differently by people coming from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Researchers in this cluster work on literature, film, music, theatre, the visual arts, intangible heritage, testimonies and historical narratives.
Research in Studies in Culture within the School centres around four broad sub-themes of Heritage, memory and trauma studies; Intellectual and cultural history; Literature; and Film and visual cultures.
To view more on the research and interests of the Studies in Culture cluster, please click here.
Translation & Interpreting
Translation and Interpreting (T&I) is a rapidly developing multidisciplinary area of research. The school’s translation and interpreting research activities cover two main streams: applied research relating to translation and interpreting practice, pedagogy and the T&I industry, and theoretical approaches to translation in the areas of literature, cultural studies and philosophy.
To view more on the research and interests of the Translation & Interpreting Cluster, please click here.
