Obsession, Aesthetics, and the Iberian City

Obsession, Aesthetics, and the Iberian City PDF Author: Benjamin Fraser
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
ISBN: 0826502393
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Although many depictions of the city in prose, poetry, and visual art can be found dating from earlier periods in human history, Obsession, Aesthetics, and the Iberian City emphasizes a particular phase in urban development. This is the quintessentially modern city that comes into being in the nineteenth century. In social terms, this nineteenth-century city is the product of a specialist class of planners engaged in what urban theorist Henri Lefebvre has called the bourgeois science of modern urbanism. One thinks first of the large scale and the wide boulevards of Baron Georges von Haussmann’s Paris or the geometrical planning vision of Ildefons Cerdà’s Barcelona. The modern science of urban design famously inaugurates a new way of thinking the city; urban modernity is now defined by the triumph of exchange value over use value, and the lived city is eclipsed by the planned city as it is envisioned by capitalists, builders, and speculators. Thus urban plans, architecture, literary prose and poetry, documentary cinema and fiction film, and comics art serve as windows into our modern obsession with urban aesthetics. This book investigates the social relationships implied in our urban modernity by concentrating on four cities that are in broad strokes representative of the cultural and linguistic heterogeneity of the Iberian peninsula. Each chapter introduces but moves well beyond an identifiable urban area in a given city, noting the cultural obsession implicit in its reconstruction as well as the role of obsession in its artistic representation of the urban environment. These areas are Barcelona’s Eixample district, Madrid’s Linear City, Lisbon’s central Baixa area, and Bilbao’s Seven Streets, or Zazpikaleak. The theme of obsession—which as explored is synonymous with the concept of partial madness—provides a point of departure for understanding the interconnection of both urbanistic and artistic discourses.

Obsession, Aesthetics, and the Iberian City

Obsession, Aesthetics, and the Iberian City PDF Author: Benjamin Fraser
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
ISBN: 0826502393
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Get Book Here

Book Description
Although many depictions of the city in prose, poetry, and visual art can be found dating from earlier periods in human history, Obsession, Aesthetics, and the Iberian City emphasizes a particular phase in urban development. This is the quintessentially modern city that comes into being in the nineteenth century. In social terms, this nineteenth-century city is the product of a specialist class of planners engaged in what urban theorist Henri Lefebvre has called the bourgeois science of modern urbanism. One thinks first of the large scale and the wide boulevards of Baron Georges von Haussmann’s Paris or the geometrical planning vision of Ildefons Cerdà’s Barcelona. The modern science of urban design famously inaugurates a new way of thinking the city; urban modernity is now defined by the triumph of exchange value over use value, and the lived city is eclipsed by the planned city as it is envisioned by capitalists, builders, and speculators. Thus urban plans, architecture, literary prose and poetry, documentary cinema and fiction film, and comics art serve as windows into our modern obsession with urban aesthetics. This book investigates the social relationships implied in our urban modernity by concentrating on four cities that are in broad strokes representative of the cultural and linguistic heterogeneity of the Iberian peninsula. Each chapter introduces but moves well beyond an identifiable urban area in a given city, noting the cultural obsession implicit in its reconstruction as well as the role of obsession in its artistic representation of the urban environment. These areas are Barcelona’s Eixample district, Madrid’s Linear City, Lisbon’s central Baixa area, and Bilbao’s Seven Streets, or Zazpikaleak. The theme of obsession—which as explored is synonymous with the concept of partial madness—provides a point of departure for understanding the interconnection of both urbanistic and artistic discourses.

Down Syndrome Culture

Down Syndrome Culture PDF Author: Benjamin Fraser
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472904558
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
People with Down syndrome possess a culture. They are producers of culture. And in the 21st century, this culture is increasingly visible as a global phenomenon. Down Syndrome Culture examines Down syndrome alongside its social, cultural, and artistic representation. Author Benjamin Fraser draws upon neomaterialist and posthumanist approaches to disability as well as the work of disability theorists such as David Mitchell, Sharon Snyder, Susan Antebi, Tobin Siebers, and Stuart Murray. By particularly focusing on Down syndrome, he showcases the unique place that it holds as an intellectual and developmental disability—one that fits between the social and medical models of disability—within the disability studies field. Down Syndrome Culture also pushes the traditionally Anglophone borders of disability studies by examining examples in Spanish, Catalan, and Portuguese-language texts, and incorporating the work of thinkers in Iberian and Latin American studies. Through a close analysis of life writing, documentaries, and fiction films, the book emphasizes the central role of people with Down syndrome in contemporary cultural production. Chapters discuss the autobiography of Andy Trias Trueta, the social actors of the documentary Los niños [The Grown-Ups] (2016), dancers from Danza Mobile, and a variety of fiction films, challenging ableist understandings of disability in nuanced ways. Ultimately, this book reveals the lives, cultural work, and representations of people with trisomy 21 in an international context.

Comfort and Domestic Space in Modern Spain

Comfort and Domestic Space in Modern Spain PDF Author: Professor Susan Larson
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487529120
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Comfort and domestic space are complex narratives that can help draw our attention to everything from urban planning, everyday objects, and new technologies to class conflict, racial and ethnic segregation, and the gendering of domestic labour. Comfort and Domestic Space in Modern Spain delves into the history of ideas surrounding the modern home. It explores how the collective experience of domestic space has been shaped by government ideologues, technocrats, and artists as well as working- and middle-class Spaniards since the late nineteenth century. The book focuses on the social and cultural meanings of domestic space in ways that invite us to cross boundaries between private and public, the particular and the general, the local and the global, and to pay attention to the role of the cultural imagination in making a house into a home. Considering a wide variety of voices and perspectives that have resulted in new ideas about how to inhabit domestic space, Comfort and Domestic Space in Modern Spain brings together an international, interdisciplinary group of scholars to illuminate the cultural history of everyday life.

Iberian Cities

Iberian Cities PDF Author: Joan Ramon Resina
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136534636
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
This multi-disciplinary study explores the explosion of cultural, social, linguistic, and architectural development in urban and rural settlements on and surrounding the Iberian peninsula during the 20th century.

Obsession, Aesthetics, and the Iberian City

Obsession, Aesthetics, and the Iberian City PDF Author: Benjamin Fraser
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780826502377
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
The obsessive tensions between planners and urbanites as expressed in a broad Iberian social imaginary

A Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula

A Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula PDF Author: Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027288399
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 766

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Book Description
A Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula is the second comparative history of a new subseries with a regional focus, published by the Coordinating Committee of the International Comparative Literature Association. As its predecessor for East-Central Europe, this two-volume history distances itself from traditional histories built around periods and movements, and explores, from a comparative viewpoint, a space considered to be a powerful symbol of inter-literary relations. Both the geographical pertinence and its symbolic condition are obviously discussed, when not even contested. Written by an international team of researchers who are specialists in the field, this history is the first attempt at applying a comparative approach to the plurilingual and multicultural literatures in the Iberian Peninsula. The aim of comprehensiveness is abandoned in favor of a diverse and extensive array of key issues for a comparative agenda. A Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula undermines the primacy claimed for national and linguistic boundaries, and provides a geo-cultural account of literary inter-systems which cannot otherwise be explained.

The Cambridge History of Modernism

The Cambridge History of Modernism PDF Author: Vincent Sherry
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316720535
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1579

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Book Description
This Cambridge History of Modernism is the first comprehensive history of modernism in the distinguished Cambridge Histories series. It identifies a distinctive temperament of 'modernism' within the 'modern' period, establishing the circumstances of modernized life as the ground and warrant for an art that becomes 'modernist' by virtue of its demonstrably self-conscious involvement in this modern condition. Following this sensibility from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, tracking its manifestations across pan-European and transatlantic locations, the forty-three chapters offer a remarkable combination of breadth and focus. Prominent scholars of modernism provide analytical narratives of its literature, music, visual arts, architecture, philosophy, and science, offering circumstantial accounts of its diverse personnel in their many settings. These historically informed readings offer definitive accounts of the major work of twentieth-century cultural history and provide a new cornerstone for the study of modernism in the current century.

The Production of Space

The Production of Space PDF Author: Henri Lefebvre
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN: 9780631181774
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
Henri Lefebvre has considerable claims to be the greatest living philosopher. His work spans some sixty years and includes original work on a diverse range of subjects, from dialectical materialism to architecture, urbanism and the experience of everyday life. The Production of Space is his major philosophical work and its translation has been long awaited by scholars in many different fields. The book is a search for a reconciliation between mental space (the space of the philosophers) and real space (the physical and social spheres in which we all live). In the course of his exploration, Henri Lefebvre moves from metaphysical and ideological considerations of the meaning of space to its experience in the everyday life of home and city. He seeks, in other words, to bridge the gap between the realms of theory and practice, between the mental and the social, and between philosophy and reality. In doing so, he ranges through art, literature, architecture and economics, and further provides a powerful antidote to the sterile and obfuscatory methods and theories characteristic of much recent continental philosophy. This is a work of great vision and incisiveness. It is also characterized by its author's wit and by anecdote, as well as by a deftness of style which Donald Nicholson-Smith's sensitive translation precisely captures.

Ireland, Literature, and the Coast

Ireland, Literature, and the Coast PDF Author: Nicholas Allen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192599712
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
The island of Ireland is home to one of the world's great literary and artistic traditions. This book reads Irish literature and art in context of the island's coastal and maritime cultures, beginning with the late imperial experiences of Jack and William Butler Yeats and ending with the contemporary work of Anne Enright and Sinead Morrissey. It includes chapters on key historical texts such as Erskine Childers's The Riddle of the Sands, and on contemporary writers including Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Kevin Barry. It sets a diverse range of writing and visual art in a fluid panorama of liquid associations that connect Irish literature to an archipelago of other times and places. Situated within contemporary conversations about the blue and the environmental humanities, this book builds on the upsurge of interest in seas and coasts in literary studies, presenting James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, John Banville, and many others in new coastal and maritime contexts. In doing so, it creates a literary and visual narrative of Irish coastal cultures across a seaboard that extends to a planetary configuration of imagined islands.

The Seduction of the Mediterranean

The Seduction of the Mediterranean PDF Author: Robert Aldrich
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134871392
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Through an explanation of forty figures in European culture, ^The Seduction of the Mediterranean argues that the Mediterranean, classical and contemporary, was the central theme in homoerotic writing and art from the 1750s to the 1950s. Episodes of exile, murder, drug-taking, wild homosexual orgies and court cases are woven into an original study of a significant theme in European culture. The myth of a homoerotic Mediterranean made a major contribution to general attitudes towards Antiquity, the Renaissance and modern Italy and Greece.