A leading young Italian semiologist scrutinizes today's cultural phenomena and finds the prevailing taste to be "neo-baroque"--characterized by an appetite for virtuosity, frantic rhythms, instability, poly-dimensionality, and change. Omar Calabrese locates a "sign of the times" in an amazing variety of literary, philosophical, artistic, musical, and architectural forms, from the Venice Biennale through the "new science" to television series, video games, and "zapping" with the remote control device from channel to channel! Calabrese admits that he begins the book with a refusal to distinguish between "Donald Duck and Dante." Avoiding hierarchies or ghettos among works, he takes his readers on a fast-paced expedition through contemporary culture that closes with an elegant essay on evaluation and classical form. According to Calabrese, the enormous quantity of narrative now being produced has led to a new situation: everything has already been said, and everything has already been written. The only way of avoiding saturation has been to turn to a poetics of repetition. The author shows that pleasure in texts is now produced by tiny variations, and a certain kind of citation from other works has taken on a central importance that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. In describing this development, and others shared by both avant-garde and mass media, he makes us aware of the rapid shrinkage in the once ample space between "highbrow" and "lowbrow." Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Tracing the logic of media history, from the baroque tothe neo-baroque, from magic lanterns and automata to film andcomputer games.

Emotion and the Seduction of the Senses, Baroque to Neo-Baroque examines the relationship between the cultural productions of the baroque in the seventeenth century and the neo-baroque in our contemporary world. The volume illuminates how, rather than providing rationally ordered visual realms, both the baroque and the neo-baroque construct complex performative spaces whose spectacle seeks to embrace, immerse, and seduce the senses and solicit the emotions of the beholder.

The Theater of Truth argues that seventeenth-century baroque and twentieth-century neobaroque aesthetics have to be understood as part of the same complex. The Neobaroque, rather than being a return to the stylistic practices of a particular time and place, should be described as the continuation of a cultural strategy produced as a response to a specific problem of thought that has beset Europe and the colonial world since early modernity. This problem, in its simplest philosophical form, concerns the paradoxical relation between appearances and what they represent. Egginton explores expressions of this problem in the art and literature of the Hispanic Baroques, new and old. He shows how the strategies of these two Baroques emerged in the political and social world of the Spanish Empire, and how they continue to be deployed in the cultural politics of the present. Further, he offers a unified theory for the relation between the two Baroques and a new vocabulary for distinguishing between their ideological values.

Pablo Baler studies the ruptures and continuities linking the de-centered dynamics of the 17thcentury to the logic of instability that permeates 20th century visual and literary production in Latin America. Bringing philosophy, literary interpretation, art criticism, and a poetic approach to the history of ideas, Baler offers a new perspective from which to understand the uncanny phenomenon of baroque distortion. This interdisciplinary inquiry not only leads to a more specific formulation regarding the singularity of the reappropriations of the baroque in Spanish America, but also allows for a more comprehensive assessment of its historical reach in the broader context of the representational crisis of modernity.

Severo Sarduy never enjoyed the same level of notoriety as did other Latin American writers. On the other hand, he never lacked for excellent critical interpretations of his work from critics like Roberto Gonz lez Echevarr -a, Ren (c) Prieto, Gustavo Guerrero, and other reputable scholars. Missing, however, from what is otherwise an impressive body of critical commentary, is a study of the importance of painting and architecture, first, to his theory, and second, to his creative work. In order to fill this lacuna in Sarduy studies, Rolando P (c)rez's book undertakes a critical approach to Sarduy's essays"Barroco, Escrito sobre un cuerpo, Barroco y neobarroco, and La simulaci 3n "from the stand point of art history. In short, no book on Sarduy until now has traced the multifaceted art historical background that informed the work of this challenging and exciting writer. It will be a book that many a critic of Sarduy and the Latin American baroque will consult in years to come.

Baroque New Worlds traces the changing nature of Baroque representation in Europe and the Americas across four centuries, from its seventeenth-century origins as a Catholic and monarchical aesthetic and ideology to its contemporary function as a postcolonial ideology aimed at disrupting entrenched power structures and perceptual categories. Baroque forms are exuberant, ample, dynamic, and porous, and in the regions colonized by Catholic Europe, the Baroque was itself eventually colonized. In the New World, its transplants immediately began to reflect the cultural perspectives and iconographies of the indigenous and African artisans who built and decorated Catholic structures, and Europe’s own cultural products were radically altered in turn. Today, under the rubric of the Neobaroque, this transculturated Baroque continues to impel artistic expression in literature, the visual arts, architecture, and popular entertainment worldwide. Since Neobaroque reconstitutions necessarily reference the European Baroque, this volume begins with the reevaluation of the Baroque that evolved in Europe during the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth. Foundational essays by Friedrich Nietzsche, Heinrich Wölfflin, Walter Benjamin, Eugenio d’Ors, René Wellek, and Mario Praz recuperate and redefine the historical Baroque. Their essays lay the groundwork for the revisionist Latin American essays, many of which have not been translated into English until now. Authors including Alejo Carpentier, José Lezama Lima, Severo Sarduy, Édouard Glissant, Haroldo de Campos, and Carlos Fuentes understand the New World Baroque and Neobaroque as decolonizing strategies in Latin America and other postcolonial contexts. This collection moves between art history and literary criticism to provide a rich interdisciplinary discussion of the transcultural forms and functions of the Baroque. Contributors. Dorothy Z. Baker, Walter Benjamin, Christine Buci-Glucksmann, José Pascual Buxó, Leo Cabranes-Grant, Haroldo de Campos, Alejo Carpentier, Irlemar Chiampi, William Childers, Gonzalo Celorio, Eugenio d’Ors, Jorge Ruedas de la Serna, Carlos Fuentes, Édouard Glissant, Roberto González Echevarría, Ángel Guido, Monika Kaup, José Lezama Lima, Friedrich Nietzsche, Mario Praz, Timothy J. Reiss, Alfonso Reyes, Severo Sarduy, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Maarten van Delden, René Wellek, Christopher Winks, Heinrich Wölfflin, Lois Parkinson Zamora