Carnero, Guillermo: Estudios sobre teatro español del siglo XVIII

Review of: Carnero, Guillermo. Estudios sobre teatro español del siglo XVIII. Zaragoza, Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza, 1997, 310 pp

Gothic Larra

Mariano José de Larra’s scathing review of Dumas’s Antony often is cited as evidence of his disapproval of the aesthetic excesses characteristic of Romantic productions.1 Comparatively few critics have remarked on Larra’s special disregard for the conventions of Romantic works we tend to classify as “Gothic”—texts and performances that expressly seek responses such as fear or horror.2 For example, he disdained Ducange’s El verdugo de Amsterdam particularly because (as he wrote in a review) that play makes audiences “llorar como haría llorar a cualquiera una paliza” (395), without appeal to an audience’s deeper moral and intellectual capacities. Though he was a friend of the theatrical impresario Juan de Grimaldi, Larra saw much popular literature and entertainment as betraying the (enlightened, progressive, patriotic) writer’s obligation to develop readers’ and viewers’ critical faculties.3 Yet (as he so often pointed out in his articles), Larra himself labored under a weekly obligation to attract readers’ attention, and it was not easy to appeal to a people who saw things “de tan distinta manera” (“El castellano viejo” 119) and whose preoccupations—with appearance, display, social standing—were illusory at best

Majos, the “españolísimo gremio” of eighteenth-century popular theatre: casticismo, unsettledness and abjection

Los majos del teatro dieciochesco popular de Madrid se enorgullecían de su casticismo, o de su genuina “españolidad” (en oposición a “extranjeridad”). Sin embargo, desde el inicio de su formulación literaria, los majos refieren al público de teatro a las luchas subyacentes al cosmopolitismo urbano, tales como la inmigración, la pobreza, el desplazamiento, y lo que Fumerton califica como unsettledness, una condición de inestabilidad que caracterizaba la vida de un sinnúmero de personas en el ámbito urbano capitalino. Paradójicamente, dos características esenciales de su “españolidad” son la marginalización y la inestabilidad de los majos de Madrid. Los majos son a la vez familiares y extranjeros, centrales y periféricos; y a este respecto, haré valer la noción de “lo abyecto” propuesta por Kristeva. Así, los majos configuran una abyección inherente a la construcción cultural de la comunidad “castiza” madrileña en el pasado.The majos of Madrid’s eighteenth-century popular theatre were proud of their casticismo, or genuine ‘Spanishness’ (as opposed to ‘foreignness’). However, from their inception in literature, majos refer audiences to the struggles underlying urban cosmopolitanism, such as immigration, poverty, displacement, and what Fumerton terms ‘unsettledness’, a condition of instability characterizing the lives of countless persons in the capital’s urban environment. Paradoxically, two essential characteristics of the ‘Spanishness’ of Madrid’s majos are their marginalization and unsettledness. I draw on Kristeva’s notion of ‘abjection’ to approach some of the ways in which majos are at the same time familiar and foreign/ different, central and marginal, and argue that majos configure an abjection inherent in the cultural construction of ‘castizo’ community belonging during the past

Majos, the “españolísimo gremio” of eighteenth-century popular theatre: casticismo, unsettledness and abjection

The majos of Madrid’s eighteenth-century popular theatre were proud of their casticismo, or genuine ‘Spanishness’ (as opposed to ‘foreignness’). However, from their inception in literature, majos refer audiences to the struggles underlying urban cosmopolitanism, such as immigration, poverty, displacement, and what Fumerton terms ‘unsettledness’, a condition of instability characterizing the lives of countless persons in the capital’s urban environment. Paradoxically, two essential characteristics of the ‘Spanishness’ of Madrid’s majos are their marginalization and unsettledness. I draw on Kristeva’s notion of ‘abjection’ to approach some of the ways in which majos are at the same time familiar and foreign/ different, central and marginal, and argue that majos configure an abjection inherent in the cultural construction of ‘castizo’ community belonging during the past

Neural evidence for "intuitive prosecution": The use of mental state information for negative moral verdicts

Moral judgment depends critically on theory of mind (ToM), reasoning about mental states such as beliefs and intentions. People assign blame for failed attempts to harm and offer forgiveness in the case of accidents. Here we use fMRI to investigate the role of ToM in moral judgment of harmful vs. helpful actions. Is ToM deployed differently for judgments of blame vs. praise? Participants evaluated agents who produced a harmful, helpful, or neutral outcome, based on a harmful, helpful, or neutral intention; participants made blame and praise judgments. In the right temporo-parietal junction (right TPJ), and, to a lesser extent, the left TPJ and medial prefrontal cortex, the neural response reflected an interaction between belief and outcome factors, for both blame and praise judgments: The response in these regions was highest when participants delivered a negative moral judgment, i.e., assigned blame or withheld praise, based solely on the agent's intent (attempted harm, accidental help). These results show enhanced attention to mental states for negative moral verdicts based exclusively on mental state information.Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical ImagingSimons FoundationNational Science Foundation (U.S.)John Merck Scholars Progra

Sobre la dificultad de ser Carolina Coronado: contemplación y praxis fenomenológica

Este ensayo ofrece una aproximacion a un grupo de poemas tempranos escritos por Coronado en los años 40. Motivado por la aparente dificultad de trascender un marco analitico de polarizaciones entre, por ejemplo, represion y libertad, masculino y femenino, etc., el ensayo enfoca la «contemplacion» empleada por la poeta para profundizar cuestiones de la naturaleza del conocimiento mismo. El analisis de las funciones de tres nucleos semánticos –«amor,» «cantar» y «espíritus»– por medio de los cuales la voz poética de Coronado se concentra en el fenómeno (para decirlo así) de la propia presencia, revela evidencia de una «praxis fenomenológica» llevada a cabo por Coronado: esto es, la indagación, llevada a cabo por el yo poético de Coronado, acerca de la complejidad de la experiencia vivida; y a la voz del sujeto discursivo que reflexiona sobre las implicaciones del fenómeno de ser dentro, y a través, de marcos temporales. Estos tres nucleos semanticos le permiten al poeta indagar en la propia existencia humana vivida como sintesis en desarrollo (Alcoff). Un ejercicio en el cual el sujeto poético, enmarañado en lo que Merleau-Ponty elaborara como «el mundo de la carne», se empodera para articular la complejidad inherente en cualquier historia personal del «cuerpo fenomenal».This essay offers an approach to a group of poems written by Coronado in the 1840s. Motivated by the apparent difficulty of transcending a critical framework marked by polarizations such as masculine vs. feminine, repression vs. freedom, etc., the present discussion focuses on the «contemplation» employed by the poet to explore questions concerning the nature of knowledge itself. Analyzing the functions of three interrelated semantic nuclei – «amor,» «espiritus» and «cantar» – this essay argues for evidence of a phenomenological practice elaborated by Coronado: that is, of the poetic self’s inquiry into the complexity of lived experience; and the discursive subject’s reflection on the implications of phenomenal being in and across temporal frameworks. A critical approach informed by phenomenology reveals that these three semantic nuclei permit the poet to interrogate (her) human existence as a developing synthesis (Alcoff), and enable the poetic subject to explore the difficulties and complexities of the the phenomenal body enmeshed in the world of flesh (Merleau-Ponty)

¿Emoción o aplicación? Petimetría, o la economía del deseo

After Mandeville, there arose theories of national economic prosperity that argued against the negative connotations of luxury, creating a positive linkage between commerce (the abundant production and trade of goods), and expanded consumption. This current of eighteenth-century thought conceived of the impulse to do productive work, and to purchase goods (and thus happiness) with the fruits of work, as prerequisites to national prosperity. Petimetría, associated with leisure, excess consumption, and overspending, is a conceptual category that captures the opposite of productive work yielding personal happiness and economic health. Petimetres and petimetras are used in a variety of eighteenth-century texts to explore cultural tensions around the links between desire and work, desire and consump­tion, and national prosperity during a period in which consumption was increasingly aligned with public virtue. This study argues that petimetría can be conceived of as an «economy of desire»: a shadow economy, a spectre of the abject figuring the negation of neoclassical economic theories that stipulated a regulatory role for the virtuous and patriotic consumer, and thus a fundamental «»function for desire within the ideology promoting commerce as crucial to national economic growth.Después de Mandeville, surgieron teorías de prosperidad económica, que argumentaron en contra de las connotaciones tradicionalmente negativas del lujo, ideando una nueva conexión positiva entre el comercio (producción y venta abundantes de bienes), y la expansión del consumo. Esta corriente filosófica del siglo XVIII concibió el impulso hacia el trabajo productivo y el consumo de bienes (y por consiguiente hacia la creación de la felicidad personal por medio de los frutos de la aplicación) como prerrequisitos para el cultivo de la prosperidad económica nacional. Normalmente asociada con el consumo excesivo, con e/lujo y con el ocio, la petimetría es una categoría conceptual utilizada por escritores y pensadores para captar las conexiones entre trabajo productivo, deseo, prosperidad económica, y felicidad en un período durante el cual el consumo cobraba creciente importancia como demostración pública de virtud. En este trabajo la petimetría se conceptualiza como una «economía del deseo»: una economía en sombras que funciona como el espectro de lo abyecto, figura de la negación de las teorías económicas neoclásicas que estipulaban un rol regulatorio para el consumidor virtuoso y patriótico y, por consecuencia, un papel fundamental para el deseo dentro de una ideología promotora de la conexión comercio-desarrollo económico nacional