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This book presents, from the point of view of the early modern historian, the legacy of Baroque thought in modern and contemporary literature, a highly under-researched subject that spans two disciplines and several centuries. Its purpose is not to discover the direct links and references of one culture in the other, but, rather, to present the patterns of thought that our time owes to the age of Baroque, namely both temporal and spatial plurality. The books explored here (Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino, Rings of Saturn, by W.G. Sebald, and The Investigator, by Dragan Velikić) are not novels that are consciously or purposefully Baroque in their structure, or use the age of the Baroque as the setting of their narratives. However, the Baroque is still present in them all, primarily as the aesthetic principle, as that invisible heritage that shapes the worldviews of their characters. They are Baroque in the sense of space they inhabit, and in the way reality and imagination are interwoven.
Throughout history, the research of space has always been an issue of great interest. Since classical Antiquity, the physical space itself and its imperfect double, the illusionary space used in the visual arts, have been one of the perpetual obsessions of man. However, there are very few studies that question the reality of represented space, and deal with those liminal phenomena that exist on the blurred boundary between reality and imagination. Such spaces were never defined by carefully drawn borders; they were usually outlined by the ephemeral and ever changing barriers. For that very reason, liminal spaces describe those curious worlds confined in gardens and collections, they underpin all those dreams of ideal societies, and construct visions of unobtainable and distant shores. Liminal spaces are the territories not usually found on maps and in atlases, they are not subjected to laws of perspective and elude the usual representations. They are always beyond and behind the established depiction of space. Often, they possess yet another layer of signification, that transforms a mere image of nature into a political manifesto, the lines on precious stones into the shapes of vanished cities, and private art collections into a dream of absolute power. This book explores different representations and forms of liminal spaces, that on the one hand, deeply influenced the history of the early modern imagination, and, on the other, established the models for our own understanding of liminal spatial phenomena.
Relics, dreams, voyages is a closely focused sequence of studies of worldwide connections in all the arts in the baroque period. Drawing on original research in libraries, collections, and archives in five countries, and in as many languages, this book draws many astonishing, unfamiliar and beautiful texts, things and events, into a cartography of the secret and strange patterns of baroque cultures worldwide. The visual arts are examined across a wide temporal and geographical span, and many subversive iconographies are decoded: at the French and English courts, in remote Scotland, in Nagasaki, in Valladolid. This books offers a new, extraordinary cultural geography of the baroque world, opening doors to many rich and strange cultural artefacts, from 'China to Peru.'
The Baroque world was a flowing one, a realm of slippery presences in constant flux. Everything seemed to be in endless motion –space, time, emotions and the individual itself. It was a deeply shifting world, and this absence of solidity and certainty would come to define both the macro and the microcosms of these inconstant times. Like other Baroque phenomena, fluidity encompassed a rather complex and wide-ranging set of manifestations – from the swirls of angels on the ceilings of Pietro da Cortona and the polyvalence of space in the complex interiors by Guarini, to the fluidity of being that marked equally the statues of Messerschmidt and Bernini’s Borghese mythologies. This book charts different aspects of this fluidity, discussing fluid geographies, fluidity of presence, fluidity of spaces and materials, fluid souls and water in Baroque culture.
The series is designed to advance the publication of research pertaining to themes and motifs in literature. The studies cover cross-cultural patterns as well as the entire range of national literatures. They trace the development and use of themes and motifs over extended periods, elucidate the significance of specific themes or motifs for the formation of period styles, and analyze the unique structural function of themes and motifs.
This handbook provides an extensive overview of traditional and emerging research areas within the field of intermediality studies, understood broadly as the study of interrelations among all forms of communicative media types, including transmedial phenomena. Section I offers accounts of the development of the field of intermediality - its histories, theories and methods. Section II and III then explore intermedial facets of communication from ancient times until the 21st century, with discussion on a wide range of cultural and geographical settings, media types, and topics, by contributors from a diverse set of disciplines. It concludes in Section IV with an emphasis on urgent societal issues that an intermedial perspective might help understand.
This book presents an original and engaging look at contemporary popular culture, opening with the provocative idea that this is a day and age of complete exhaustion of ideas, images, stories, and myths. Questioning the effects of content recycling in cinema and other media, the author further elaborates on the repurposing of cultural junk, the reassembling of narratives and myths. The thought-provoking hypothesis proposed in this research is that we have entered an age of cultural promiscuity. By analyzing the mutations of myth-making practices and connecting them with larger cultural manifestations, the author explains these transformations as integral to the development of a myth-illogical imagination. Cinematic and mythological representations in mainstream Hollywood films have reached a point of amalgamation with no return, which marks the beginning of a "fourth age of representations," where signs and meanings are manifested in illogical permutations. This is more explicit in films that commingle aliens, cowboys, undead American presidents, and zombie nazis, joining together in the same narrative ghosts, werewolves, and vampires, aggregating disjoined storylines and historical fake facts, all coalesced in an orgy of empty burlesque and infantile masquerades. This interdisciplinary research combines cultural studies, film criticism, art and myth interpretations, bringing into the debate multiple concepts from related fields such as critical theory and media criticism. The book also opens up to innovative approaches from a wide array of academic disciplines, offering researchers, students and those fascinated by the transformations happening in contemporary cinema an interpretative tool based on a revised dialectic approach. The conclusion is that we are now victims of a zombie semiotics. Meaning-making in contemporary culture, politics, and aesthetics is dominated by a process of incessant desecration of significations, specific to the total mishmash of representations analyzed here.
The Baroque Spanish stage is populated with virile queens and feminized kings. This study examines the diverse ways in which seventeenth-century comedias engage with the discourse of power and rulership and how it relates to gender. A privileged place for ideological negotiation, the comedia provided negative and positive reflections of kingship at a time when there was a perceived crisis of monarchical authority in the Habsburg court. Author María Cristina Quintero explores how playwrights such as Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Tirso de Molina, Antonio Coello, and Francisco Bances Candamo--taking inspiration from legend, myth, and history--repeatedly staged fantasies of feminine rule, at a time when there was a concerted effort to contain women's visibility and agency in the public sphere. The comedia's preoccupation with kingship together with its obsession with the representation of women (and women's bodies) renders the question of royal subjectivity inseparable from issues surrounding masculinity and femininity. Taking into account theories of performance and performativity within a historical context, this study investigates how the themes, imagery, and language in plays by Calderón and his contemporaries reveal a richly paradoxical presentation of gendered monarchical power.
The history of aesthetics, like the histories of other sciences, may be treated in a two-fold manner: as the history of the men who created the field of study, or as the history of the questions that have been raised and resolved in the course of its pursuit. The earlier History of Aesthetics (3 volumes, 1960-68, English-language edition 1970-74) by the author of the present book was a history of men, of writers and artists who in centuries past have spoken up concerning beauty and art, form and crea tivity. The present book returns to the same subject, but treats it in a different way: as the history of aesthetic questions, concepts, theories. The matter of the two books, the previous and the present, is in part the same; but only in part: for the earlier book ended with the 17th century, while the present one brings the subject up to our own times. And from the 18th century to the 20th much happened in aesthetics; it was only in that period that aesthetics achieved recognition as a separate science, received a name of its own, and produced theories that early scholars and artists had never dreamed of.
This study argues that Paul Bowles is more perceptive than many American travelers in Morocco. The book provides us with what are perhaps the most sustained meditations to date on Bowles’s translation work and his autobiography, as well as perceptive analyses of key stories such as “A Distant Episode” and “Here to Learn” and his second novel, Let It Come Down, set primarily in Tangier. The chapter on translation dwells on the complex interactions between Moroccan storytellers and Bowles. The work considers translation as a site where the oral and written, colonial and post-colonial scene, and English and Maghrebi come face to face; it is a place where things are worked out in dynamic interaction. The chapter on Bowles’s autobiography Without Stopping, urges us to take this piece of self-writing (famously dubbed Without Telling by William Burroughs) more seriously, drawing our attention to baroque architectural features of mind and external landscape, worlds distorted by mirrors, dreams, and fluid transit where forms morph. The work also highlights difference between experience and representation of experience through language, transformed through the prism of memory. In the chapter on Without Stopping as well as in my discussions of Bowles’s fiction, I provide useful elaborations of connections between Bowles’s work and that of Edgar Allan Poe.My reading of one of Bowles’s best-known stories, “A Distant Episode,” brings to the surface a recognition that the tragic fate of the Professor, the story’s protagonist, is an outcome of his inability to admit that cultures are not static. The academically trained linguist demonstrates an unwillingness or inability to adapt to change, or to read cultural signs accurately. The message is that Morocco is not stuck in time, and cannot be held in place by Orientalist fantasies or preconceived, externally derived intellectual constructs and assumptions. The book concludes that against the grain of Samuel Huntington’s notion of Clash of Civilizations, Bowles’s poetic and geographical journey forcefully projects cosmopolitanism and transnational attention confirming that civilizations and ‘identities’ open up rather than shut down, war or clash.