In Benjamin’s Library, Jane O. Newman offers, for the first time in any language, a reading of Walter Benjamin’s notoriously opaque work, Origin of the German Tragic Drama that systematically attends ...to its place in discussions of the Baroque in Benjamin’s day. Taking into account the literary and cultural contexts of Benjamin’s work, Newman recovers Benjamin’s relationship to the ideologically loaded readings of the literature and political theory of the seventeenth-century Baroque that abounded in Germany during the political and economic crises of the Weimar years.
To date, the significance of the Baroque for Origin of the German Tragic Drama has been glossed over by students of Benjamin, most of whom have neither read it in this context nor engaged with the often incongruous debates about the period that filled both academic and popular texts in the years leading up to and following World War I. Armed with extraordinary historical, bibliographical, philological, and orthographic research, Newman shows the extent to which Benjamin participated in these debates by reconstructing the literal and figurative history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books that Benjamin analyzes and the literary, art historical and art theoretical, and political theological discussions of the Baroque with which he was familiar. In so doing, she challenges the exceptionalist, even hagiographic, approaches that have become common in Benjamin studies. The result is a deeply learned book that will infuse much-needed life into the study of one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century.
Baroque Horrors turns the current cultural and political conversation from the familiar narrative patterns and self-justifying allegories of abjection to a dialogue on the history of our modern fears ...and their monstrous offspring. When life and death are severed from nature and history, "reality" and "authenticity" may be experienced as spectator sports and staged attractions, as in the "real lives" captured by reality TV and the "authentic cadavers" displayed around the world in the Body Worlds exhibitions. Rather than thinking of virtual reality and staged authenticity as recent developments of the postmodern age, Castillo looks back to the Spanish baroque period in search for the roots of the commodification of nature and the horror vacui that accompanies it. Aimed at specialists, students, and readers of early modern literature and culture in the Spanish and Anglophone traditions as well as anyone interested in horror fantasy, Baroque Horrors offers new ways to rethink broad questions of intellectual and political history and relate them to the modern age.
Sister Maria do Céu, one of the most outstanding Portuguese writers of the Baroque period, left behind a voluminous bilingual œuvre which circulated in Portugal, but throughout the eighteenth century ...three anthologies also got published in Madrid. In this essay I will focus on the underlying translation power relations at various levels: (1) the Iberian networks that have led to the translations of Sister Maria do Céu’s works; (2) the paratexts written by the translators and censors which contain interesting clues on translation, linguistic prestige, and the status quo of women; (3) the literary and linguistic patterns used by the translators.
Sister Maria do Céu, one of the most outstanding Portuguese writers of the Baroque period, left behind a voluminous bilingual œuvre which circulated in Portugal, but throughout the eighteenth century ...three anthologies also got published in Madrid. In this essay I will focus on the underlying translation power relations at various levels: (1) the Iberian networks that have led to the translations of Sister Maria do Céu’s works; (2) the paratexts written by the translators and censors which contain interesting clues on translation, linguistic prestige, and the status quo of women; (3) the literary and linguistic patterns used by the translators.
Fruto de un estudio histórico-cultural sobre el lugar subalterno que ocuparon los vendedores ambulantes entre los siglos XVI y XVII, este artículo analiza las ambiguas significaciones con las que ...fueron retratados en diferentes campos, y muy singularmente en la literatura, que los asoció a embaucadores, charlatanes, vagabundos, placeras apicaradas, emigrantes miserables y minorías étnico-religiosas. Sin embargo, y a pesar del estigma, sus formas de expresión y especialmente sus pregones cristalizaron como género folclórico-literario, conjugando algunos de los elementos de la cultura cómica popular típica del mundo de la plaza, las ferias y la fiesta.
The Theater of Truth argues that seventeenth-century baroque and twentieth-century neobaroque aesthetics have to be understood as part of the same complex. The Neobaroque, rather than being a return ...to the stylistic practices of a particular time and place, should be described as the continuation of a cultural strategy produced as a response to a specific problem of thought that has beset Europe and the colonial world since early modernity. This problem, in its simplest philosophical form, concerns the paradoxical relation between appearances and what they represent. Egginton explores expressions of this problem in the art and literature of the Hispanic Baroques, new and old. He shows how the strategies of these two Baroques emerged in the political and social world of the Spanish Empire, and how they continue to be deployed in the cultural politics of the present. Further, he offers a unified theory for the relation between the two Baroques and a new vocabulary for distinguishing between their ideological values.
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