Download or read book History Violence and the Hyperreal written by Kathryn Everly and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does literature reveal about a country's changing cultural identity? In History, Violence, and the Hyperreal by Kathryn Everly, this question is applied to the contemporary novel in Spain. In the process, similarities emerge among novels that embrace apparent differences in style, structure, and language. Contemporary Spanish authors are rethinking the way the novel with its narrative powers can define a specific cultural identity. Recent Spanish novels by Carme Riera, Dulce Chacon, Javier Cercas, Ray Loriga, Lucia Etxebarria, and Jose Angel Manas (published from 1995 to 2008) particularly highlight the tension that exists between historical memory and urban youth culture. The novels discussed in this study reconfigure the individual's relationship to narrative, history, and reality through their varied interpretations of Spanish history with its common threads of national and personal violence. In these books, culture acts as mediator between the individual and the rapidly changing dynamic of contemporary society. The authors experiment with the novel form to challenge fundamental concepts of identity when the narrative acknowledges more than one way of reading and understanding history, violence, and reality. In Spain today, questions of historical accuracy in all foundational fictions--such as the Inquisition, the Spanish Civil War, or globalization--collide with the urgency to modernize. The result is a clash between regional and global identities. Seemingly disparate works of historical fiction and Generation X narrative prove similar in the way they deal with history, reality, and the delicate relationship between writer and reader.
Download or read book Travels in Hyperreality written by Umberto Eco and published by HMH. This book was released on 2014-06-24 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “scintillating collection” of essays on Disneyland, medieval times, and much more, from the author of Foucault’s Pendulum (Los Angeles Times). Collected here are some of Umberto Eco’s finest popular essays, recording the incisive and surprisingly entertaining observations of his restless intellectual mind. As the author puts it in the preface to the second edition: “In these pages, I try to interpret and to help others interpret some ‘signs.’ These signs are not only words, or images; they can also be forms of social behavior, political acts, artificial landscapes.” From Disneyland to holography and wax museums, Eco explores America’s obsession with artificial reality, suggesting that the craft of forgery has in certain cases exceeded reality itself. He examines Western culture’s enduring fascination with the middle ages, proposing that our most pressing modern concerns began in that time. He delves into an array of topics, from sports to media to what he calls the crisis of reason. Throughout these travels—both physical and mental—Eco displays the same wit, learning, and lively intelligence that delighted readers of The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum. Translated by William Weaver
Download or read book Simulacra and Simulation written by Jean Baudrillard and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Develops a theory of contemporary culture that relies on displacing economic notions of cultural production with notions of cultural expenditure. This book represents an effort to rethink cultural theory from the perspective of a concept of cultural materialism, one that radically redefines postmodern formulations of the body.
Download or read book The Gulf War Did Not Take Place written by Jean Baudrillard and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a provocative analysis written during the unfolding drama of 1992, Baudrillard draws on his concepts of simulation and the hyperreal to argue that the Gulf War did not take place but was a carefully scripted media event--a "virtual" war. Patton's introduction argues that Baudrillard, more than any other critic of the Gulf War, correctly identified the stakes involved in the gestation of the New World Order.
Download or read book Liminal Fiction at the Edge of the Millennium written by Jessica A. Folkart and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-08 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Liminal Fiction at the Edge of the Millennium: The Ends of Spanish Identity investigates the predominant perception of liminality—identity situated at a threshold, neither one thing nor another, but simultaneously both and neither—caused by encounters with otherness while negotiating identity in contemporary Spain. Examining how identity and alterity are parleyed through the cultural concerns of historical memory, gender roles, sex, religion, nationalism, and immigration, this study demonstrates how fictional representations of reality converge in a common structure wherein the end is not the end, but rather an edge, a liminal ground. On the border between two identities, the end materializes as an ephemeral limit that delineates and differentiates, yet also adjoins and approximates. In exploring the ends of Spanish fiction—both their structure and their intentionality—Liminal Fiction maps the edge as a constitutive component of narrative and identity in texts by Najat El Hachmi, Cristina Fernández Cubas, Javier Marías, Rosa Montero, and Manuel Rivas. In their representation of identity on the edge, these fictions enact and embody the liminal not as simply a transitional and transient mode but as the structuring principle of identification in contemporary Spain.
Download or read book Jean Baudrillard From Hyperreality to Disappearance written by Richard G. Smith and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2015-07-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new collection gathers 23 highly insightful yet previously difficult-to-find interviews with Baudrillard, ranging over topics as diverse as art, war, technology, globalisation, terrorism and the fate of humanity.
Download or read book Cinema of Simulation Hyperreal Hollywood in the Long 1990s written by Randy Laist and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-09-22 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hyperreality is an Alice-in-Wonderland dimension where copies have no originals, simulation is more real than reality, and living dreams undermine the barriers between imagination and objective experience. The most prominent philosopher of the hyperreal, Jean Baudrillard, formulated his concept of hyperreality throughout the 1980s, but it was not until the 1990s that the end of the Cold War, along with the proliferation of new reality-bending technologies, made hyperreality seem to come true. In the ?lost decade? between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11, the nature of reality itself became a source of uncertainty, a psychic condition that has been recognizably recorded by that seismograph of American consciousness, Hollywood cinema. The auteur cinema of the 1970s aimed for gritty realism, and the most prominent feature of Reagan-era cinema was its fantastic unrealism. Clinton-era cinema, however, is characterized by a prevailing mood of hyperrealism, communicated in various ways by such benchmark films as JFK, Pulp Fiction, and The Matrix. The hyperreal cinema of the 1990s conceives of the movie screen as neither a window on a preexisting social reality (realism), nor as a wormhole into a fantastic dream-dimension (escapism), but as an arena in which images and reality exchange masks, blend into one another, and challenge the philosophical premises which differentiate them from one another. Cinema of Simulation: Hyperreal Hollywood in the Long 1990s provides a guided tour through the anxieties and fantasies, reciprocally social and cinematic, which characterize the surreal territory of the hyperreal.
Download or read book Memory War and Dictatorship in Recent Spanish Fiction by Women written by Sarah Leggott and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-10 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Memory, War, and Dictatorship in Recent Spanish Fiction by Women analyzes five novels by women writers that present women’s experiences during and after the Spanish Civil War and Franco dictatorship, highlighting the struggles of female protagonists of different ages to confront an unresolved individual and collective past. It discusses the different narrative models and strategies used in these works and the ways in which they engage with their political and historical context, particularly in the light of campaigns for the so-called recovery of historical memory in Spain (the “memory boom”) and in the broader context of memory and trauma studies. The novels that are examined in this book are Dulce Chacón’s La voz dormida (2002), Rosa Regàs’s Luna lunera (1999), Josefina Aldecoa’s La fuerza del destino (1997), Carme Riera’s La mitad del alma (2005), and Almudena Grandes’s El corazón helado (2007). These works all highlight the multiple nature of memories and histories and demonstrate the complex ways in which the past impacts on the present. This book also considers the extent to which the memories represented in these five novels are inflected by gender and informed by the gender politics of twentieth-century and contemporary Spain.
Download or read book Genre Fusion written by Sara J. Brenneis and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-15 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the boom in historical fiction and historiography about Spain's recent past has found an eager readership, these texts are rarely studied as two halves of the same story. With Genre Fusion: A New Approach to History, Fiction, and Memory in Contemporary Spain, Sara J. Brenneis argues that fiction and nonfiction written by a single author and focused on the same historical moment deserve to be read side-by-side. By proposing a literary model that examines these genres together, Genre Fusion gives equal importance to fiction and historiography in Spain. In her book, Brenneis develops a new theory of "genre fusion" to show how authors who write both historiography and fiction produce a more accurate representation of the lived experience of Spanish history than would be possible in a single genre. Genre Fusion opens with a straightforward overview of the relationships among history, fiction, and memory in contemporary culture. While providing an up-to-date context for scholarly debates about Spain's historical memory, Genre Fusion also expands the contours of the discussion beyond the specialized territory of Hispanic studies. To demonstrate the theoretical necessity of genre fusion, Brenneis analyzes pairs of interconnected texts (one a work of literature, the other a work of historiography) written by a single author. She explores how fictional and nonfictional works by Montserrat Roig, Carmen Martín Gaite, Carlos Blanco Aguinaga, and Javier Marías unearth the collective memories of Spain's past. Through these four authors, Genre Fusionn traces the transformation of a country once enveloped in a postwar silence to one currently consumed by its own history and memory. Brenneis demonstrates that, when read through the lens of genre fusion, these Spanish authors shelve the country's stagnant official record of its past and unlock the collective and personal accounts of the people who constitute Spanish history.
Download or read book Spanish Women Writers and Spain s Civil War written by Maryellen Bieder and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-12-01 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) pitted conservative forces including the army, the Church, the Falange (fascist party), landowners, and industrial capitalists against the Republic, installed in 1931 and supported by intellectuals, the petite bourgeoisie, many campesinos (farm laborers), and the urban proletariat. Provoking heated passions on both sides, the Civil War soon became an international phenomenon that inspired a number of literary works reflecting the impact of the war on foreign and national writers. While the literature of the period has been the subject of scholarship, women's literary production has not been studied as a body of work in the same way that literature by men has been, and its unique features have not been examined. Addressing this lacuna in literary studies, this volume provides fresh perspectives on well-known women writers, as well as less studied ones, whose works take the Spanish Civil War as a theme. The authors represented in this collection reflect a wide range of political positions. Writers such as Maria Zambrano, Mercè Rodoreda, and Josefina Aldecoa were clearly aligned with the Republic, whereas others, including Mercedes Salisachs and Liberata Masoliver, sympathized with the Nationalists. Most, however, are situated in a more ambiguous political space, although the ethics and character portraits that emerge in their works might suggest Republican sympathies. Taken together, the essays are an important contribution to scholarship on literature inspired by this pivotal point in Spanish history.
Download or read book Jean Baudrillard written by Richard G Smith and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2015-07-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new collection gathers 23 highly insightful yet previously difficult-to-find interviews with Baudrillard, ranging over topics as diverse as art, war, technology, globalisation, terrorism and the fate of humanity.
Download or read book Mother and Myth in Spanish Novels written by Sandra J. Schumm and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2011 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Remembering the forgotten mother is a major theme in Myth and Mother in Spanish Novels and reflects the current interest in the recuperation of historic memory in Spain. The novels in this study feature mature protagonists who recall their mothers as a way to define their own identities and to nullify the fictional matricide prevalent in post-war Spanish novels; this twenty-first-century fiction highlights the haunting presence of the mother and begs comparison with myth.
Download or read book Re collecting the Past written by Melissa A. Stewart and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2016-02-22 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection explores the role of memoria histórica in its broadest sense, bringing together studies of narrative, theatre, visual expressions, film, television, and radio that provide a comprehensive overview of contemporary cultural production in Spain in this regard. Employing a wide range of critical approaches to works that examine, comment on, and recreate events and epochs from the civil war to the present, the essays gathered here bring together research and intercultural memory to investigate half a century of cultural production, ranging from “high culture” to more popular productions, such as television series and graphic novels. A testament to the conflation of multiple silencings – be they of the defeated, victims of trauma or women – this project is about hearing the voices of the unheard and recovering their muted past.
Download or read book Spatiality at the Periphery in European Literatures and Visual Arts written by Kathryn Everly and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-06-12 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spatiality at the Periphery in European Literatures and Visual Arts analyzes the impact migrations, both internal and external, have on Europe’s literary and visual representations in the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. The volume aims to subvert a centripetal reading of European cultural production by including peripheral thinkers, writers, and visual artists operating in transcultural contexts. The essays highlight and investigate the fertile artistic discourses generated in the spatial peripheries outside of Europe or its inner peripheries. The volume addresses the need for geocritical readings that overcome the engrained dichotomy of centers-peripheries. By doing so, the book brings a more nuanced approach to national literatures and proposes the idea of “contact zones of imaginative interaction”.
Download or read book Introducing Lyotard written by Bill Readings and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-06-19 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first truly introductory text on Lyotard, this book situates Lyotard's interventions in the postmodern debate in the wider context of his rethinking of the politics of representation. Bill Readings examines Lyotard's relationship to structuralism, Marxism and semiotics, and contrasts his work with the literary deconstruction of Paul de Man; he positions Lyotard's work so as to draw out the implications of poststructurlaism's attention to difference in reading. Lyotard's willingness to question the political and examine the relationship between art and politics is shown to undermine the charge that deconstruction abdicates political and social articulation.
Download or read book Home Away from Home written by N. Michelle Murray and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2018-12-28 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Home Away from Home: Immigrant Narratives, Domesticity, and Coloniality in Contemporary Spanish Culture examines ideological, emotional, economic, and cultural phenomena brought about by migration through readings of works of literature and film featuring domestic workers. In the past thirty years, Spain has experienced a massive increase in immigration. Since the 1990s, immigrants have been increasingly female, as bilateral trade agreements, migration quotas, and immigration policies between Spain and its former colonies (including the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Equatorial Guinea, and the Philippines) have created jobs for foreign women in the domestic service sector. These migrations reveal that colonial histories continue to be structuring elements of Spanish national culture, even in a democratic era in which its former colonies are now independent. Migration has also transformed the demographic composition of Spain and has created complex new social relations around the axes of gender, race, and nationality. Representations of migrant domestic workers provide critical responses to immigration and its feminization, alongside profound engagements with how the Spanish nation has changed since the end of the Franco era in 1975. Throughout Home Away from Home, readings of works of literature and film show that texts concerning the transnational nature of domestic work uniquely provide a nuanced account of the cultural shifts occurring in late twentieth- through twenty-first-century Spain.
Download or read book Spanish Fiction in the Digital Age written by C. Henseler and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-10-24 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book applies theoretical models that reflect the mediated, hybrid, and nomadic global scenes within which GenX artists and writers live, think, and work. Henseler touches upon critical insights in comparative media studies, cultural studies, and social theory, and uses sidebars to travel along multiple voices, facts, figures, and faces.
