Baroque, Neobaroque, New World Baroque

The era known as modernity supposes a radical break from preceding historical periods. One of its characteristics is disenchantment or the significant diminution of that which symbolically and qualitatively anchors a community and its individuals. This is discerned in the twilight of the mythical hero, as evidenced by Don Quixote de la Mancha. This work, where quixotic adventures embody the hero’s journey, manifests the deterioration of this fundamental archetype. In Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, the effect of the symbolic and qualitative chasm generated by modernity is evident: the hero is helpless in the face of not only modern pharisaic society but also brute reality. Confrontation with material reality as such only deepens with the consolidation of modern capitalism. However, the impulse to carry out the mythical journey persists. This is evident in the Bildungsroman. This article will unearth the archetypal components of the novel of formation. A much-needed corrective to reverse the erasure of the Hispanophone literary tradition and world as it relates to the Bildungsroman is proposed. The other will be to establish a second novel of formation paradigm, namely The Sorrows of Young Werther.

En los últimos años hemos visto en el arte contemporáneo de América Latina un creciente interés por la estética del perífodo colonial, especialmente una tendencia por cuestionar las sensibilidades del Barroco (siglo XVI al XVIII). Diferenciando la cultura y la política barroca del arte y el periodo Barroco, es más adecuado referirse a estas prácticas transhistóricas en el arte contemporáneo como expresiones de un “contra-Barroco”. Siendo que los intereses por la estética del Barroca varían entre artistas el presente artículo examinarán exclusivamente las piezas Con nombre y apellidos (2017) y Notabile y Nobicile (2017) de la artista ecuatoriana María José Argenzio (n. 1977). Estas obras, más allá de constituir dos trabajos diferentes, se analizan en conjunto bajo un marco expositivo. Es decir, en una puesta en escena, las obras hacen evidente la tensión entre lo real y el artificio, al mismo tiempo que retratan la construcción de la identidad en América Latina. A través de este análisis, propongo que la estética de un contra-Barroco surge como una propuesta contestataria a la visualidad moderna y la representación colonial.

Special Issue "Baroque Aesthetics and 21st Century Literary and Visual Production in Latin-America"


Special Issue Information

A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787). This special issue belongs to the section "Cultural Studies & Critical Theory in the Humanities".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 15 January 2022.

Special Issue Editor: Prof. Pablo Baler
Department of Modern Languages & Literatures, California State University, Los Angeles, CA 90032, USA

Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,

During the early decades of the 20th century, the work of such authors as Eugeni d’Ors, Alfonso Reyes, and Alejo Carpentier initiated a critical trend that reclaimed the logic and aesthetics of the historical baroque as a way to approach a broad range of artistic expressions in Latin America. This theoretical framework, summarized in the general idea of the “Neo-baroque”, explored the logic of instability, ambiguity, and transformation that characterized baroque aesthetics as appropriated in 20th century Latin America. Through this perspective, a broad range of movements have been studied, from Modernism to the experimental avant-garde, from the formal fantasies of Magical Realism to the explosion of the signifier in the so-called poets of the Neo-baroque school.

As we embark on the third decade of the 21st century, we recognize the tectonic stresses and paradigm shifts that are shaping the literary and artistic production coming out of Latin America. This globalized, virtualized, de-territorialized, torn-apart, and reconfigurable century is setting the stage for renewed challenges that require new conceptualizations. It is time to expand our understanding of what and where Latin America is and, therefore, problematize the ways in which we approach the art produced in the midst of this fluid, paradoxical, and always-changing geo-symbolic coordinate.

For this Special Issue of Humanities, we want to offer an opportunity to engage with the critical consciousness gained by these 21st century instabilities and to experiment with innovative methodological and hermeneutic approaches. In brief, we propose to re-energize the impetus of a skewed, anamorphic Neo-baroque perspective in order to explore new ways of thinking from, through, and about current literary and visual production in a “Latin America” we now conceive as a territory in accelerated flux, conditioned by new contradictory historical, cultural, and political forces.

Prof. Pablo Baler
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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Keywords
neo-baroque
baroque aesthetics
literary and artistic production
Latin America
Published Papers
This special issue is now open for submission.

Resumen: La democratización tecnológica abre la puerta a un análisis con perspectiva feminista, dado que las tradicionales trabas al acceso a la creación literaria parecen difuminarse. Esta es una propuesta para contextualizar los nuevos textos surgidos al margen de lo canónico y con soportes virtuales que pretende imbricar las teorías sobre Hipermodernismo y Neobarroco, que estudian el horror vacui de la narrativa actual, pero que no dialogan entre sí. Palabras clave: neobarroco, hipermodernismo, crítica feminista, narrativa transmedia. Abstract: Technological democratization opens the door to an analysis with a feminist perspective, since the traditional obstacles to access literary creation tools seem to be disappearing. This is a proposal to contextualize the new texts that emerged outside the canon and within virtual environments. The present work intends to overlap the theories about Hypermodernism and Neo-Baroque: both of them study the horror vacui of the current narrative), but they do not dialogue with each other.

Giovannoni’s architecture is often labelled as Roman barochetto and
near to linguistic and spatial themes used by Borromini. In reality, the
compositional directions of his projects were more complex and moved
by a desire for simplification and contextualization, although there
are learned references in his architecture, often as stylistic and formal
quotations, which include Bramante, Guarini, Bernini and Borromini,
as in the Roman church of Angeli Custodi. Nevertheless, Giovannoni
used Borromini’s models with great caution, warning young Italian
architects against that imitation as “dangerous”. The essay attempts to
reconstruct the parallel threads of the growing interest in Borromini’s
work in the early twentieth century and the revival of his solutions in
design. This revaluation of the Baroque was facilitated by photographs
published by the Associazione Artistica fra i Cultori di Architettura and
by contemporary publications dedicated to Baroque repertoires, such as
those of Magni, Muñoz and Colasanti, that are real catalogues of details
and decorative elements available to designers. This is visible in works
by Ponti, Capponi and Sabbatini.