Research and Innovation

Abstract

This essay examines the entangling of the poetic and the ethnographic in the art cinema of the 1960s as an indicator of a broader collision of epistemological/discursive regimes in postwar Soviet cinema—and ultimately, a clash between two fundamentally opposed approaches to the discursive production of history. In the Soviet poetic cinema of the 1960s, the temporal-spatial frameworks of the Stalin era are disrupted, shifting first of all, to what Tarkovsky called a lived experience of time—that is, to the subjective emotions and experiences of individual people; second, to localized histories that may not coincide with the supra-national Soviet developmental narrative; and third, to the positing of an archaic, even pre-historical temporality as a kind of lost ideal. I argue that poetic cinema serves as a site for playing out the contradiction among temporalities and spatialities in post-Stalin culture, and therefore among opposed sense-making projects and representational modes, creating the possibility for subverting the colonial function of Soviet cinema.

Laura Demaría, professor of Spanish, has published her first novel. 

“A diferencia de Utopía, la isla prodigiosa que se desea y es un sueño, St. Louis y todos los lugares de este blues siempre han estado presentes sencilla y abrumadoramente. Aquí no se inventa nada, ni se desea lo inencontrable. "St. Louis Blues" afirma la inmanencia de la vida, describiendo, con palabras discretas y casi dolorosas, esos secretos con que esta va construyendo su evidencia: nuestros encuentros, nuestras pasiones, nuestras soledades, todo aparente, pero inasible; todo resonante pero incomprensible. Esta inmanencia nos rodea y también nos invade; pero ¿qué sentido tiene? Laura Demaría nos ofrece una narración de permanente suspenso: no duda que lo existente tenga sentido; pero ¿dónde está?, ¿qué cara tiene?, ¿es el lugar donde estoy y el ostro que veo en el espejo?, ¿o son también los lugares de los otros y sus pasiones? ¿Hay una respuesta? Con una sabiduría gozosa, esta narración recorre estas supremas preguntas.” - Jorge Aguilar Mora, professor emeritus of Spanish.

"Entre alambradas y exilios. Sangrías de las Españas y terapias de Vichy" [Between Barbed Wire and Exile. Spanish Sangrías and Vichy Therapies] by José María Naharro-Calderón, Professor of Spanish Literature, Iberian Cultures & Exile Studies at the University of Maryland, discusses the complex historical memories that surround the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) exile narratives around concentration camps, identity and political confrontations. They resurface again through planetary violences and diasporas, populisms, post-truths, brexit, elections in the USA, or constitutional challenges in Spain (Catalonia, Basque Country.) This detailed study explores diasporas and concentration camp experiences reflected in essay and literary contributions (Celso Amieva, Manuel Andújar, Max Aub, Otilia Castellví, Eugenio Ímaz, Eulalio Ferrer, 1956 Literature Nobel recipient and UM Professor Juan Ramón Jiménez, Silvia Mistral, Mercè Rodoreda, Jorge Semprún, etc.,) image and film (Mario Camus, María Luisa Elío, Fernando Fernán Gómez, Jomí García Ascot, Agustí Villaronga,) comic books (Manuel Altarriba, Josep Bartolí, Kim, Paco Roca,) and photography (Robert Capa, Agustí Centelles, Manuel Moros, Gerda Taro.) It also studies kitsch best sellers (Javier Cercas, Arturo Pérez Reverte, Andrés Trapiello), and the democratic contradictions that lead to freedoms suppressions and concentration camps, such as in 1939 France, as well as the pending questions of Francoist memories: "The Uncivil Mountain" or the Valley of the Fallen outside Madrid. Last but not least, it evaluates Spain’s Transition to democracy and today’s terrorist and nationalist challenges, paving the debate away from ineffective Vichy type therapies and/or Spanish sangrías.

Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) stands out among recent Latin American writers because of his unique combination of critical acclaim, popularity, and literary significance. Queer Exposures analyzes two central but understudied topics in Bolaño’s fiction and poetry: sexuality and photography. Moving beyond a consideration of how his texts represent these topics, Ryan F. Long demonstrates that, when considered in tandem, they form the basis for a new innovative and critical approach. Emphasizing the processes of exposure associated with photography and sexuality, especially queer sexuality, provides readers and scholars with a versatile method for comprehending Bolaño’s constellation of texts. With close readings of a broad range of texts, from poetry written just after his arrival in Spain in the late 1970s to his posthumously published novels, Queer Exposures concludes that an emphasis on sexuality and photography is essential for understanding how Bolaño’s texts function in dialogue with one another to elucidate and critique the interrelations of writing, visual representation, and power.

Ulysses, Europe, Orpheus, and Eurydice are among the mythical characters whose adventures have been illustrated since antiquity in the arts, and for over a century now, in cinema. French filmmakers Agnès Varda, Alain Resnais, Christophe Honoré, and Jean-Jacques Annaud participated in the transmission and rewriting of these Greek myths, each in their own way. In "Ulysses" (1982), Varda combined an autobiographical commentary on a photograph taken in 1954 with a feminist and political perspective on its context, echoing the works of Roland Barthes and Jacques Rancière on photography. Resnais, in "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet" (2012), returned to his passion for theater by revisiting two of Jean Anouilh's plays in light of Jean-Luc Nancy and Mathilde Girard's dialogue on myth and performance. "Métamorphoses" by Honoré (2014) offers a transgender reading of mythological stories, in every sense of the word, under the aegis of Jupiter, Bacchus, and Orpheus in order to articulate a liberated but informed vision of the future for younger generations living in a Mediterranean environment. In "His Majesty Minor" (2007), Annaud presents a parody of "The Odyssey" through a critical reading of Greek mythology by the humanities and social sciences

The book provides a useful and comprehensive overview of all the important issues in L2 education of the last 50-60 years, and second, introduce the pedagogy of multiliteracies as a multifaceted approach that moves past the linguocentric perspective that has historically characterized L2 teaching by (a) leaving behind the divide between language and content courses, and (b) favoring a multimodal and socioculturally situated approach to L2 teaching that places oral, written, visual, and digital texts – understood broadly as the key meaning-making units – at its core.

In 1899, the United Fruit Company (UFCO) was officially incorporated in Boston, Massachusetts, beginning an era of economic, diplomatic, and military interventions in Central America. This event marked the inception of the struggle for economic, political, and cultural autonomy in Central America as well as an era of homegrown inequities, injustices, and impunities to which Central Americans have responded in creative and critical ways. This juncture also set the conditions for the creation of the Transisthmus—a material, cultural, and symbolic site of vast intersections of people, products, and narratives. Taking 1899 as its point of departure, Dividing the Isthmus offers a comprehensive, comparative, and meticulously researched book covering more than one hundred years, between 1899 and 2007, of modern cultural and literary production and modern empire-building in Central America. The book examines the grand narratives of (anti)imperialism, revolution, subalternity, globalization, impunity, transnational migration, and diaspora, as well as other discursive, historical, and material configurations of the region beyond its geophysical and political confines. Focusing in particular on how the material productions and symbolic tropes of cacao, coffee, indigo, bananas, canals, waste, and transmigrant labor have shaped the transisthmian cultural and literary imaginaries, the book develops new methodological approaches for studying cultural production in Central America and its diasporas. Monumental in scope and relentlessly impassioned, this work offers new critical readings of Central American narratives and contributes to the growing field of Central American studies.

In this densely written, subtle, often insightful book, Naharro-Calderón takes on the task of localizing the various nuances of the socio-political condition that defined writers within and without Spain in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. He sets up Juan Ramón Jiménez as a central figure for readings of Antonio Machado, Jorge Guillén, Pedro Salinas, Pedro Garfias, Luis Cernuda, and Damaso Alonso that illuminate the weave of texts and intertexts in this period of Spanish poetry that formed the waning years of a Silver Age. The first quarter of the book is given over to a close discussion of the phenomenon of exile: "la pérdida del espacio de origen" (25). After an avalanche of notes, Naharro reaches an aporia (one of the words of postmodernist and deconstructionist discourse of which he is fond), and states resignedly that it is impossible to arrive at a satisfactory "delimitaci6n semantica" of exile but that it is "un fen6meno antiguo y actual conectado con el origen y futuro de la tierra" (58). He establishes his terminology: instead of posguerra, he prefers "'d6cadas de entresiglo' o 'entresiglo' a secas," and to avoid prolonging the myth of "exilio interior," for which he feels Paul Ilie is responsible, he proposes "literatura perseguida, censurada, resistente, o disidente" (93). The rest of the book is less polemical and makes many contributions to enlarging and refocusing the account of Spain's poetry from 1940 to 1960. Naharro's discussion of the fortunes of Juan Ram6n vis-a-vis Antonio Machado shows sharply how politics, ignorance, and censorship combined to create the leyenda blanca about the reclusive Juan Ram6n and the socially committed Machado. The two Andalusians had much in common: they were both anti-moderns concerned about the algebraic spirit of the new poetry; they were both neoromantics in their conception of the poet as prophet and both congenial to Heidegger's ideas about poetry; they both exalted el pueblo ("lo mejor de España," "la aristocracia congénita," Juan Ramón; "el hombre elemental y fundamental," "la aristocracia española está en el pueblo," Machado [172-77]). Machado broke with Ortega's notion of a governing elite, but Juan Ramón was less perturbed, claiming, however, in a discussion of T. S. Eliot's Notes toward a Definition of Culture, that elitism had nothing to do with class. Finally, both Juan Ramón and Machado believed that poets do not write for the masses. Given these parallels, plus Juan Ramón's early and unconditional allegiance to the Republic and his refusal to negotiate, through Juan Guerrero, with the censors, it is a sad lesson in the genesis of legends that Naharro tells. The vexing story of Juan Ramón's relation with younger poets, heretofore anecdotal in nature, Naharro recasts in the language of Harold Bloom: the anxiety of strong poets to overcome their predecessors, means of adaptation and veering away. Ansiedad is the proper word for all parties concerned. The case of Cernuda is enlightening: he attacked, was attacked, responded, then freed himself and went, especially via his dramatic monologues, his own strong way. In "El poeta," Cernuda presented the figure of Juan Ram6n as a precursor of his own poetic devotion, thereby purging himself of his own anxiety of influence. Naharro is right to point out that Cernuda was not an inadaptado, but rather one of the poets of his generation who got beyond solipsism in a convincing way. In a final chapter, Naharro adds to the cultural panorama of the entresiglo through a discussion of the contents of the Juan Guerrero letters in the Juan Ram6n Jimenez collection in Puerto Rico. As early as March 22, 1940, Guerrero was sharing information with Juan Ramón' on the whereabouts of individuals and Blecua began his pursuit of books by Guillén and Juan Ramón'. A copy of "Poeta en Nueva York" was in Blecua's hands in April 1945 (400). In short, although few readers had access to the works of the absent Spanish poets, many individual writers went to great length to acquire now canonical texts. The Guerrero correspondence is, indeed, an invaluable source for the intrahistoria of Spanish poetry. Naharro's book is rich in detail, overlapping on occasion, but thoughtprovoking and illuminating in its effort to go beyond generalizations and ponder cultural details.HOWARD YOUNG

Barcelona: Anthropos, 1994. 463 p. ISBN 84-7658-438-5

Forgetting Differences: Tragedy, Historiography and the French Wars of Religion (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), is a study of the role of conceptions of tragedy and the tragic in the rhetoric of reconciliation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French historiographical and theatrical works about France’s Wars of Religion. Taking account of the overlaps and disjunctions between juridical and theological conceptions of pardon, amnesty, and reconciliation, and opening up a broader inquiry into conceptions of memory and forgetting as they bore on representations of the Wars of Religion in historiography and theatrical tragedy from 1550–1630, the arguments in the book examine attitudes toward history in early modern Europe, provide an account of the emergence of the ideal of aesthetic distance as one of the foundations of French literary theory of the seventeenth century, and offer an analysis of the shifting conceptions of emotion that informed postwar reconciliation in early modern France.

This book presents a new history of German film from 1980-2010, a period that witnessed rapid transformations, including intensified globalization, a restructured world economy, geopolitical realignment, and technological change, all of which have affected cinema in fundamental ways. Rethinking the conventional periodization of German film history, Baer posits 1980-rather than 1989-as a crucial turning point for German cinema's embrace of a new market orientation and move away from the state-sponsored film culture that characterized both DEFA and the New German Cinema. Reading films from East, West, and post-unification Germany together, Baer argues that contemporary German cinema is characterized most strongly by its origins in and responses to advanced capitalism. Informed by a feminist approach and in dialogue with prominent theories of contemporary film, the book places a special focus on how German films make visible the neoliberal recasting of gender and national identities around the new millennium.