Research and Innovation

With its increasing presence in a continuously evolving media environment, the essay film as a visual form raises new questions about the construction of the subject, its relationship to the world, and the aesthetic possibilities of cinema. In this volume, authors specializing in various national cinemas (Cuban, French, German, Israeli, Italian, Lebanese, Polish, Russian, American) and critical approaches (historical, aesthetic, postcolonial, feminist, philosophical) explore the essay film and its consequences for the theory of cinema while building on and challenging existing theories. Taking as a guiding principle the essay form's dialogic, fluid nature, the volume examines the potential of the essayistic to question, investigate, and reflect on all forms of cinema—fiction film, popular cinema, and documentary, video installation, and digital essay. A wide range of filmmakers are covered, from Dziga Vertov (Man with a Movie Camera, 1928), Chris Marker (Description of a Struggle, 1960), Nicolás Guillén Landrián (Coffea Arábiga, 1968), Pier Paolo Pasolini (Notes for an African Oresteia, 1969), Chantal Akerman (News from Home, 1976) and Jean-Luc Godard (Notre musique, 2004) to Nanni Moretti (Palombella Rossa, 1989), Mohammed Soueid (Civil War, 2002), Claire Denis (L'Intrus, 2004) and Terrence Malick (The Tree of Life, 2011), among others. The volume argues that the essayistic in film—as process, as experience, as experiment—opens the road to key issues faced by the individual in relation to the collective, but can also lead to its own subversion, as a form of dialectical thought that gravitates towards crisis.

1968 and Global Cinema addresses a notable gap in film studies. Although scholarship exists on the late 1950s and 1960s New Wave films, research that puts cinemas on 1968 into dialogue with one another across national boundaries is surprisingly lacking. Only in recent years have histories of 1968 begun to consider the interplay among social movements globally. The essays in this volume, edited by Christina Gerhardt and Sara Saljoughi, cover a breadth of cinematic movements that were part of the era's radical politics and independence movements. Focusing on history, aesthetics, and politics, each contribution illuminates conventional understandings of the relationship of cinema to the events of 1968, or "the long Sixties."

We all have images that we find unwatchable, whether for ethical, political, or sensory and affective reasons. From news coverage of terror attacks to viral videos of police brutality, and from graphic horror films to transgressive artworks, many of the images in our media culture might strike us as unsuitable for viewing. Yet what does it mean to proclaim something “unwatchable”: disturbing, revolting, poor, tedious, or literally inaccessible? With over 50 original essays by leading scholars, artists, critics, and curators, this is the first book to trace the “unwatchable” across our contemporary media environment, in which viewers encounter difficult content on various screens and platforms. Appealing to a broad academic and general readership, the volume offers multidisciplinary approaches to the vast array of troubling images that circulate in global visual culture.

The notion of a socially engaged dandyism – let alone a political one – seems to be antithetical to the definition proposed by Charles Baudelaire, that “A Dandy does nothing. Can you imagine a Dandy speaking to the people, except to scoff?” Yet it is from within the inherently political framework of a cultural revolution, undertaken in the first half of the nineteenth century by young adepts of the Romantic movement, that many of the poses and clichés surrounding the figure of the fin-de-siècle dandy originate. Examining the texts that Gautier, Borel, and their peers publish during this period, as well as satirical articles written about them in the press, this essay theorizes the young Romantics’ transgressive self-fashioning in the aftermath of Hernani as a kind of militant dandyism.

L’article se penche sur la problématique de la secondarité dans une œuvre considérée comme secondaire dans le corpus nervalien – son premier récit en prose, paru en 1832 sous le titre de « La Main de Gloire, histoire macaronique ». Trace de l’éphémère camaraderie du bousingo, ce conte, où dominent l’autoparodie et la dénégation, laisse deviner un jeune Nerval aux prises avec les préoccupations de sa génération et représentant génial de « l’école du désenchantement ».

This study investigates the function of smiling intensity as a non-discrete marker of humor in conversation. The smiling intensity of participants in 8 conversational dyads was measured relative to the occurrence of humorous and non-humorous events in the conversation. A relationship was found between higher smiling intensity and the occurrence of humorous events across conversations, thus confirming the value of smiling as a marker of humor. The results show that the occurrence of humor correlates positively with an increase of smiling intensity relative to the baseline of the conversation and it is foreshadowed by a localized increase of smiling both generally and when humor is predictable. Moreover, during humorous events, participants displayed framing smiling patterns, often preceded or followed by smiling accommodation or inverted smiling gestures, which are representative of the conversational dynamics of the dyad and the ongoing negotiation of meaning.

"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.

Thoroughly based on a close reading of the primary sources (including the often neglected early versions of the treatise), this book challenges the traditional notion of Il Cortegiano as an abstract work of art. Through a careful analysis of the structural changes and thematic developments that occur in the treatise, this book shows that the primary object of Il Libro del Cortegiano is to describe the ways in which despotism exerts its power and influence within the court under the veil of figurative language.

In this article I demonstrate that De Campos’s translation theory of “Trancreation” subverted the hierarchical categories and values that have structured the field of world literature. Positioning himself as an intellectual from an ‘ex-centric’ literaryculture, situated outside of the centers of global circulation, De Campos critiqued the unequal weight usually assigned to translated and original texts, author and translator, established and ascending traditions. I argue that De Campos’s response to the standing inequality that characterizes translational exchanges involved a literary solution. As a creative act in its own right, the theory of transcreation offered an aesthetic answer to the problems of authenticity, influence and literary dependence.

Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, no. 26, 2017, pp. 461-481

Through a comparative study of Bartolomeo Sacchi's De principe (1471), De optimo cive (1474), and an in-depth analysis of lesser-known treatises on the virtue of magnificentia, this article shows that in Florence, as in other Italian cities where humanists played a vital role in the production of propaganda for the regime, humanism served as an effective instrument for the Medici to consolidate their power.