Research and Innovation

This film describes the complicated relationship in an improbable “family,” alternating between moments of strong connections in the midst of struggles, and moments when fits of rage, anger, and passion re-actualize a sense of loss and “never quite making it.” The chapter also discusses the idea of “normalcy,” based on Michael Warner’s work The Trouble with normal, by examining how it relates to the coming-of-age narrative, and demonstrates how failure, and ambivalence on a personal, relational level as depicted in Mommy can also translate a collective sentiment about contemporary Québec, and the world we live in. Full reference: “Joy, Melancholy, and The Promise of Happiness in Xavier Dolan’s Mommy (2014),” ReFocus: The Films of Xavier Dolan, ed. Andrée Lafontaine, Edinburgh University Press, 2019, pp. 177-190.

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.

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.

This article on Neapolitan humanism in fifteenth century Italy examines the notion of majesty as it is described in rhetorical terms by Giovanni Pontano in his De principe liber. It shows the important role that humanist education played in the Kingdom of Naples in the construction and articulation of the public image of the prince, illustrating the close link between rhetoric and morality, and between ideal models of human conduct and the realistic world of politics.

This article examines the relationship between the magazines Cadernos Brasileiros (1959 - 1970) and Mundo Nuevo (1967 - 1971) in the 1960s and 70s. It problematizes the processes of South-South exchange by examining the triangulation of Brazilian and Hispanic American cultural relations, which in the case studied, relied on material and logistical support of the United States. If on the one hand the support of the United states undermined the credibility of Latin American cultural magazines, on the other hand, it also opened opportunities for editors, cultural producers, and writers to advance their own agenda of literary internationalization and the cultural integration of Latin America.

Thinking World Literature from Lusophone Perspectives, special issue of Journal of Lusophone Studies, 2021. (accepted)

The article addresses circulation and exchange in the Global South by examining the case of Biblioteca Ayacucho (1973), a transnational collection of over 500 books from several Latin American countries. It discusses Ayacucho’ strategies of transnationalization which, in addition to book publishing, also relied on networks of intellectual collaboration and exchange. By engaging Latin American specialists and relying on local scholarship, Ayacucho offered an inclusive model of world literature that allies both distant and close reading in the construction of a transnational literature. As such, it defied established assumptions about literary circulation and center-based conceptions of world literature.

DOI: 10.1163/24056480-20210001