A Study Guide for Juan Ramon Jimenez's "Platero and I," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

In 1913, Rabindranath Tagore received the Nobel Prize in Literature. World famous overnight, he was translated into numerous languages. Meanwhile, in Slovenia, a young, still anonymous poet felt strongly drawn to the newly available works of the Indian bard. This young man was Srečko Kosovel, who is today hailed as Slovenia’s leading avant-garde poet of the interwar period. But what could Kosovel, then barely out of his teens, have in common with a figure of Tagore’s stature? Deeply affected by Italy’s conquest of parts of Slovene-populated territory, Kosovel was able to identify with Tagore and relate to the historical predicament of colonial subjugation. Despite coming from different backgrounds, they were kindred spirits a dynamic, creative ideal of universalism lay at the core of their concerns. As a ‘true’ universalist, in the sense of feeling empathy with the less fortunate, it was more in the spirit of equality that Kosovel approached Tagore. This volume is the first comparative study of the writings of these two poets who lived worlds apart but spoke in strikingly similar voices. It explores the links between India and East-Central Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century and gives expression to responses from within Europe that have largely been overlooked in postcolonial and cultural studies.

The question of humanness requires a philosophical anthropology and we need a revision of what philosophical anthropology means in light of contemporary efforts in speculative realism and object-oriented ontology. This is the main claim of the book which expands into the smaller supporting claims that 1) contemporary work in speculative realism indicates that Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein needs to be rethought in consideration of certain Kantian values 2) recent philosophical anthropology offers an incomplete look at the central concern of philosophical anthropology, namely, the question of humanness 3) current ontological models do not account adequately for humanness, because they do not begin with humanness. From these considerations, a new ontological model better suited to account for humanness is proposed, spectral ontology. Under spectral ontology, Being is treated as a spectrum consisting of beings, nonbeings, and hyperbeings. Nonbeings, or nonrelational entities, and hyper-beings, are spectral insofar as they are like a specter which haunts the being that manifests in the world. Thus, spectral in this sense refers to both the nonrelational status of nonbeings and to an ontology which reflects such a spectrum of Being.