Download or read book The Dystopian Imagination in Contemporary Spanish Literature and Film written by Diana Q. Palardy and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-07-27 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study examines contemporary Spanish dystopian literature and films (in)directly related to the 2008 financial crisis from an urban cultural studies perspective. It explores culturally-charged landscapes that effectively convey the zeitgeist and reveal deep-rooted anxieties about issues such as globalization, consumerism, immigration, speculation, precarity, and political resistance (particularly by Indignados [Indignant Ones] from the 15-M Movement). The book loosely traces the trajectory of the crisis, with the first part looking at texts that underscore some of the behaviors that indirectly contributed to the crisis, and the remaining chapters focusing on works that directly examine the crisis and its aftermath. This close reading of texts and films by Ray Loriga, Elia Barceló, Ion de Sosa, José Ardillo, David Llorente, Eduardo Vaquerizo, and Ricardo Menéndez Salmón offers insights into the creative ways that these authors and directors use spatial constructions to capture the dystopian imagination.
Download or read book The Political Imagination in Spanish Graphic Narrative written by Xavier Dapena and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-11-24 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a spirit of community and collective action, this volume offers insights into the complexity of the political imagination and its cultural scope within Spanish graphic narrative through the lens of global political and social movements. Developed during the critical years of the COVID-19 pandemic and global lockdown, the volume and its chapters reflect the interdisciplinary nature of the comic. They employ a cultural studies approach with different theoretical frameworks ranging from debates within comics studies, film and media theory, postcolonialism, feminism, economics, multimodality, aging, aesthetics, memory studies, food studies, and sound studies, among others. Scholars and students working in these areas will find the book to be an insightful and impactful resource.
Download or read book Modern Literatures in Spain written by Jo Labanyi and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2022-11-08 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jo Labanyi and Luisa Elena Delgado provide the first cultural history of modern literatures in Spain. With contributors Helena Buffery, Kirsty Hooper, and Mari Jose Olaziregi, they showcase the country’s cultural richness and complexity by working across its four major literary cultures – Castilian, Catalan, Galician, and Basque – from the eighteenth century to the present. Engaging critically with the concept of the “national”, Modern Literatures in Spain traces the uneven institutionalization of Spain’s diverse literatures in a context of Castilian literary hegemony, as well as examining diasporic and exile writing . The thematically organized chapters explore literary constructions of subjectivity, gender, and sexuality; urban and rural imaginaries; intersections between high and popular culture; and the formation of a public sphere. Throughout, readings are attentive to the multiple ways in which literature serves as a barometer of cultural responses to historical change. An introduction to major cultural debates as well as an original analysis of key texts, this book is essential reading for students and scholars with an interest in the literatures and cultures of Spain.
Download or read book Obsession Aesthetics and the Iberian City written by Benjamin Fraser and published by Vanderbilt University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-17 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although many depictions of the city in prose, poetry, and visual art can be found dating from earlier periods in human history, Obsession, Aesthetics, and the Iberian City emphasizes a particular phase in urban development. This is the quintessentially modern city that comes into being in the nineteenth century. In social terms, this nineteenth-century city is the product of a specialist class of planners engaged in what urban theorist Henri Lefebvre has called the bourgeois science of modern urbanism. One thinks first of the large scale and the wide boulevards of Baron Georges von Haussmann’s Paris or the geometrical planning vision of Ildefons Cerdà’s Barcelona. The modern science of urban design famously inaugurates a new way of thinking the city; urban modernity is now defined by the triumph of exchange value over use value, and the lived city is eclipsed by the planned city as it is envisioned by capitalists, builders, and speculators. Thus urban plans, architecture, literary prose and poetry, documentary cinema and fiction film, and comics art serve as windows into our modern obsession with urban aesthetics. This book investigates the social relationships implied in our urban modernity by concentrating on four cities that are in broad strokes representative of the cultural and linguistic heterogeneity of the Iberian peninsula. Each chapter introduces but moves well beyond an identifiable urban area in a given city, noting the cultural obsession implicit in its reconstruction as well as the role of obsession in its artistic representation of the urban environment. These areas are Barcelona’s Eixample district, Madrid’s Linear City, Lisbon’s central Baixa area, and Bilbao’s Seven Streets, or Zazpikaleak. The theme of obsession—which as explored is synonymous with the concept of partial madness—provides a point of departure for understanding the interconnection of both urbanistic and artistic discourses.
Download or read book Constructing Identities written by Antonio Medina-Rivera and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2013-07-26 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The basic concern of border studies is to examine and analyze interactions that occur when two groups come into contact with one another. Acculturation and globalization are at the heart of border studies, and cultural studies scholars try to describe the possible interactions in terms of conflicts and resolutions that become the result of those possible encounters. The present book is a peer-reviewed selection of papers presented during the IV Crossing Over Symposium at Cleveland State University held in October, 2011, and it is a follow-up to our discussion on border studies. The main focus of this volume is historical, [inter]national, gender and racial borders, and the implications that all of them have in the construction of an identity.
Download or read book Spanish Horror Film and Television in the 21st Century written by Vicente Rodríguez Ortega and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-07-20 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an up-to-date, in-depth survey of 21st-century Spanish horror film and media, exploring both aesthetics and industrial dynamics. It offers detailed analysis of contemporary films and TV series as well as novel approaches to key works within the history of Spanish cinema. While addressing the specificities of the Spanish landscape, this volume also situates the national cinematic output within the international arena, understanding film production and reception as continuously changing processes in which a variety of economic, social and cultural factors intervene. The book first analyzes the main horror trends emerging in the early 2000s, then approaches genre hybridization and the rise of new filmmakers since the 2010s with a special focus on gender issues and the reconfiguration of the past, before addressing the impact of streaming services within the Spanish film panorama, from a production and distribution standpoint. This book will be of keen interest to scholars and students in the areas of film studies, media studies, TV studies, horror, Spanish cultural studies and production studies.
Download or read book Visions of Dystopia in China s New Historical Novels written by Jeffrey C. Kinkley and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-04 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The depiction of personal and collective suffering in modern Chinese novels differs significantly from standard Communist accounts and most Eastern and Western historical narratives. Writers such as Yu Hua, Su Tong, Wang Anyi, Mo Yan, Han Shaogong, Ge Fei, Li Rui, and Zhang Wei scramble common conceptions of ChinaÕs modern development, deploying avant-garde narrative techniques from Latin American and Euro-American modernism to project a surprisingly Òun-ChineseÓ dystopian vision and critical view of human culture and ethics. The epic narratives of modern Chinese fiction make rich use of magical realism, surrealism, and unusual treatments of historical time. Also featuring graphic depictions of sex and violence and dark, raunchy comedy, these novels deeply reflect ChinaÕs turbulent recent history, re-presenting the overthrow of the monarchy in the early twentieth century and the resulting chaos of revolution and war; the recurring miseries perpetrated by class warfare during the dictatorship of Mao Zedong; and the social dislocations caused by ChinaÕs industrialization and rise as a global power. This book casts ChinaÕs highbrow historical novels from the 1990s to the mid-2000s as a distinctively Chinese contribution to the form of the global dystopian novel and, consequently, to global thinking about the interrelations of utopia and dystopia.
Download or read book Tokyo Doesn t Love Us Anymore written by Ray Loriga and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dreamlike dystopian novel “shines a dark spotlight on the modern allure of pharmaceuticals’ seeming power to assuage all ills” (Booklist). Set in the very near future, this is the story of a traveling salesman floating from arid Arizona parking lots to steamy Bangkok bars and beyond to peddle the hottest new commodity for a group known only as The Company. What he has is a drug that erases memory. You can choose your oblivion, be it one mistake or a lifetime of pain. But things become hazy when our hero begins sampling the goods and reaches the point where he can’t even remember what it is he cannot remember. A pitch-perfect piece for our times filled with hypnotic prose, Tokyo Doesn’t Love Us Anymore is both a riveting story and a thoughtful exploration of the drug culture that surrounds us, the nature of forgetfulness, and the implacable tyranny of emotions—questioning what it means to be human when everything, including human identity, can be bought. “Part crime novel, part political allegory, part love story . . . Compelling.” —The New York Times Book Review
Download or read book Swastika Night written by Katharine Burdekin and published by Feminist Press at CUNY. This book was released on 1985 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a "feudal Europe seven centuries into post-Hitlerian society, Burdekin's novel explores the connection between gender and political power and anticipates modern feminist science fiction."--Cover.
Download or read book The Discourse of Flanerie in Antonio Mu oz Molina s Texts written by Richard Sperber and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-10 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and Walter Benjamin have shown that flanerie is anything but an aimless stroll. Walking through London, Paris, and Berlin entailed engagements with the latest modernity. Thought-provoking, exhilarating, and at times terrifying: flanerie adjusted to and documented the mobility of modernity, its aesthetic possibilities and social risks. Antonio Muñoz Molina is one of several contemporary authors who have closely coupled the development of their literary characters to urban perambulations. Their biographic growth, cultural and social adaptations, as well as epistemological insights are so dependent on flanerie that his late twentieth and early twenty-first-century texts warrant the designation flaneur literature. Muñoz Molina has also contributed to the current decentralization of flaneur literature from Paris to smaller cities, including Spanish cities like Granada, Córdoba, and San Sebastián. Reflecting on Poe, Baudelaire, and Benjamin in these cities, his characters update and revise the canon of flaneur literature, stretching its discursive boundaries. This study examines not only the mobility of his characters but also draws attention to intercultural aspects of his flaneur literature which lie both in a uniquely Spanish perspective on flanerie as well as in engagements with cultural otherness. Walking through a Moroccan city or through Chinatown in New York, Muñoz Molina’s characters broaden the Eurocentric horizon of canonical flaneur literature and the modernist one of his Spanish flaneur precursor, Federico García Lorca, whose portrait of New York is revisited in Muñoz Molina’s longest flaneur text. National and literary boundaries blur as intercultural urban spaces transform his characters into transnational subjects. This study traces the author’s struggle with this globalization: a residual rural nostalgia straddles uneasily with forays into filmic flanerie, a form of spectatorship that renders the flaneur newly mobile in the mass-mediatized environments of postmodernity. If Muñoz Molina is generally regarded as an incisive chronicler of Spain’s transition from Francoism to democracy and an attentive memorialist of the Spanish Civil War, this study bases its portrait of a much more globally engaged Muñoz Molina in his characters’ movements from Spain into the urban centers of Euro-American postmodernity and its northern African periphery.
Download or read book Arrernte Present Arrernte Past written by Diane J. Austin-Broos and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-08-01 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Arrernte people of Central Australia first encountered Europeans in the 1860s as groups of explorers, pastoralists, missionaries, and laborers invaded their land. During that time the Arrernte were the subject of intense curiosity, and the earliest accounts of their lives, beliefs, and traditions were a seminal influence on European notions of the primitive. The first study to address the Arrernte’s contemporary situation, Arrernte Present, Arrernte Past also documents the immense sociocultural changes they have experienced over the past hundred years. Employing ethnographic and archival research, Diane Austin-Broos traces the history of the Arrernte as they have transitioned from a society of hunter-gatherers to members of the Hermannsburg Mission community to their present, marginalized position in the modern Australian economy. While she concludes that these wrenching structural shifts led to the violence that now marks Arrernte communities, she also brings to light the powerful acts of imagination that have sustained a continuing sense of Arrernte identity.
Download or read book Leave the World Behind written by Rumaan Alam and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now a Netflix film starring Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, Ethan Hawke, Myha'la, Farrah Mackenzie, Charlie Evans and Kevin Bacon. Written for the Screen and Directed by Sam Esmail. Executive Producers Barack and Michelle Obama, Tonia Davis, Daniel M. Stillman, Nick Krishnamurthy, Rumaan Alam A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick! Finalist for the 2020 National Book Award in Fiction One of Barack Obama's Summer Reads A Best Book of the Year From: The Washington Post * Time * NPR * Elle * Esquire * Kirkus * Library Journal * The Chicago Public Library * The New York Public Library * BookPage * The Globe and Mail * EW.com * The LA Times * USA Today * InStyle * The New Yorker * AARP * Publisher's Lunch * LitHub * Book Marks * Electric Literature * Brooklyn Based * The Boston Globe A magnetic novel about two families, strangers to each other, who are forced together on a long weekend gone terribly wrong. From the bestselling author of Rich and Pretty comes a suspenseful and provocative novel keenly attuned to the complexities of parenthood, race, and class. Leave the World Behind explores how our closest bonds are reshaped—and unexpected new ones are forged—in moments of crisis. Amanda and Clay head out to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a vacation: a quiet reprieve from life in New York City, quality time with their teenage son and daughter, and a taste of the good life in the luxurious home they’ve rented for the week. But a late-night knock on the door breaks the spell. Ruth and G. H. are an older couple—it’s their house, and they’ve arrived in a panic. They bring the news that a sudden blackout has swept the city. But in this rural area—with the TV and internet now down, and no cell phone service—it’s hard to know what to believe. Should Amanda and Clay trust this couple—and vice versa? What happened back in New York? Is the vacation home, isolated from civilization, a truly safe place for their families? And are they safe from one other?
Download or read book The Reinvention of Mexico in Contemporary Spanish Travel Writing written by Jane Hanley and published by Vanderbilt University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-15 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The long history of transatlantic movement in the Spanish-speaking world has had a significant impact on present-day concepts of Mexico and the implications of representing Mexico and Latin America more generally in Spain, Europe, and throughout the world. In addition to analyzing texts that have received little to no critical attention, this book examines the connections between contemporary travel, including the local dynamics of encounters and the global circulation of information, and the significant influence of the history of exchange between Spain and Mexico in the construction of existing ideas of place. To frame the analysis of contemporary travel writing, author Jane Hanley examines key moments in the history of Mexican-Spanish relations, including the origins of narratives regarding Spaniards' sense of Mexico's similarity to and difference from Spain. This history underpins the discussion of the role of Spanish travelers in their encounters with Mexican peoples and places and their reflection on their own role as communicators of cultural meaning and participants in the tourist economy with its impact—both negative and positive—on places.
Download or read book On Such a Full Sea written by Chang-rae Lee and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-01-07 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Watching a talented writer take a risk is one of the pleasures of devoted reading, and On Such a Full Sea provides all that and more. . . . With On Such a Full Sea, [Chang-rae Lee] has found a new way to explore his old preoccupation: the oft-told tale of the desperate, betraying, lonely human heart.”—Andrew Sean Greer, The New York Times Book Review “I've never been a fan of grand hyperbolic declarations in book reviews, but faced with On Such a Full Sea, I have no choice but to ask: Who is a greater novelist than Chang-rae Lee today?”—Porochista Khakpour, The Los Angeles Times From the beloved award-winning author of Native Speaker,The Surrendered, and My Year Abroad, a highly provocative, deeply affecting story of one woman’s legendary quest in a shocking, future America. On Such a Full Sea takes Chang-rae Lee’s elegance of prose, his masterly storytelling, and his long-standing interests in identity, culture, work, and love, and lifts them to a new plane. Stepping from the realistic and historical territories of his previous work, Lee brings us into a world created from scratch. Against a vividly imagined future America, Lee tells a stunning, surprising, and riveting story that will change the way readers think about the world they live in. In a future, long-declining America, society is strictly stratified by class. Long-abandoned urban neighborhoods have been repurposed as highwalled, self-contained labor colonies. And the members of the labor class—descendants of those brought over en masse many years earlier from environmentally ruined provincial China—find purpose and identity in their work to provide pristine produce and fish to the small, elite, satellite charter villages that ring the labor settlement. In this world lives Fan, a female fish-tank diver, who leaves her home in the B-Mor settlement (once known as Baltimore), when the man she loves mysteriously disappears. Fan’s journey to find him takes her out of the safety of B-Mor, through the anarchic Open Counties, where crime is rampant with scant governmental oversight, and to a faraway charter village, in a quest that will soon become legend to those she left behind.
Download or read book Terra Nostra written by Carlos Fuentes and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2013-05-14 with total page 1183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Terra Nostra is one of the great masterpieces of modern Latin American fiction. Concerned with nothing less than the history of Spain and of South America, with the Indian Gods and with Christianity, with the birth, the passion, and the death of civilizations, Fuentes's great novel is, indeed, that rare creation--the total work of art. Magnificently translated by Margaret Sayers Peden, Terra Nostra is, as Milan Kundera says in his afterword, "the spreading out of the novel, the exploration of its possibilities, the voyage to the edge of what only a novelist can see and say."
Download or read book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Pulitzer Prize Winner written by Junot Díaz and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008-09-02 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of: The Pulitzer Prize The National Book Critics Circle Award The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award The Jon Sargent, Sr. First Novel Prize A Time Magazine #1 Fiction Book of the Year One of the best books of 2007 according to: The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, People, The Village Voice, Time Out New York, Salon, Baltimore City Paper, The Christian Science Monitor, Booklist, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, New York Public Library, and many more... Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd who—from the New Jersey home he shares with his old world mother and rebellious sister—dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the fukú—a curse that has haunted Oscar’s family for generations, following them on their epic journey from Santo Domingo to the USA. Encapsulating Dominican-American history, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao opens our eyes to an astonishing vision of the contemporary American experience and explores the endless human capacity to persevere—and risk it all—in the name of love.
Download or read book World Film Locations Barcelona written by Lorenzo J. Torres Hortelano and published by Intellect Books. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Barcelona is one of the world’s most beautiful cities. A permanent showcase of the work of acclaimed architect Antoni Gaudí, it also has a long and rich cinematic legacy. Great directors from all over the world – among them Woody Allen, Pedro Almodóvar and Michelangelo Antonioni – have set their films there. World Film Locations: Barcelona is the first book of its kind to explore the rich cinematic history of this seductive Catalonian city. The illuminating essays collected here cover essential themes of the city’s cinematic history, including the origins of cinema in Barcelona; the role of Ciutat Vella (old quarter) as a film set; the influential Barcelona School of the 1960s; the film presence of Gaudí and his work; changing attitudes and urban renewal before and after the 1992 Olympics; and the emergence of a new generation of female filmmakers that have made Barcelona the centre of their cinematic explorations. This book will be a welcome addition to the libraries of anyone enchanted by the beauty of Barcelona, whether in person on the big screen.
