[Commlist] new book: Pellucid Paper - Poetry and bureaucratic media in early modern Spain

New book:

PELLUCID PAPER: POETRY AND BUREAUCRATIC MEDIA IN EARLY MODERN SPAIN

OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS

By Adam Wickberg

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/pellucid-paper/

/Pellucid Paper/ offers a new history of the materiality of Early Modern 
poetry and its relation to political power, memory and subject 
constitution. The book explores the broad media practices in which some 
of the most canonical Spanish Golden Age poetry was produced. It departs 
from the intersection of media theory, historiography and materiality of 
Early Modern culture in a radical rethinking of the nature of the 
relationship between the imaginary and the real using the concept of 
cultural techniques. Working with the operative sequences of the 
material and the symbolic of epistemological configurations of art, 
literature and power relations, it demonstrates how media and 
materiality were a crucial part of both the political and the aesthetic 
already in Early Modernity. It studies these operations in Early Modern 
Spain in the reign from Philip II to Philip IV. The development of a 
paper based bureaucracy as a means of sustaining large-scale power 
relations bridging distances in space and time forms the locus of the 
book. /Pellucid Paper/ is informed by German Media theory and 
specifically the more recent developments of Cultural Techniques, which 
enables a fresh and imaginative take on Early Modern culture. The book 
offers a radical account of the dynamic relationship between the death 
oriented aesthetics of vanitas, techniques and media of storage and a 
form of mediated presence that permeates the inseparable spheres of the 
political and the aesthetic.

Endorsments:

//

/I read Adam Wickberg’s Pellucid Paper as the decisive archeological 
reconstruction of the incipient movements in an era of media history 
that is now approaching its end. It was the moment in which the Spanish 
imperial bureaucracy profoundly transformed the relation, so 
foundational for western culture, between knowledge and texts, by 
introducing the regular use of paper. In concentrating on this process, 
Wickberg weaves together a wealth of initiated knowledge with a 
sophisticated level  of philosophical reflection and thus demonstrates 
what Media studies have become capable of achieving today - without ever 
having lived up to this potential before./

//

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Albert Guérard Professor in Literature, Emeritus, 
Stanford University

/This book is extremely lively, intelligent and very pleasant to read. 
It approaches problems which are now fashionable among scholars and 
critics, but it is never anachronistic. It discusses its issues with 
scientific rigour. On the whole, this very stimulating and interesting 
book deserves to be read not only by specialists of Early Modern Spain, 
of Renaissance and Baroque poetry, but also more broadly by anyone 
interested in new methods in the field of Humanities. /

Mercedes Blanco, Professor of Spanish Golden Age literature, Paris 
Sorbonne IV

Author Bio

Adam Wickberg is a Postdoctoral fellow in Media history at the 
Environmental Humanities Lab at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in 
Stockholm and a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for History 
of Science in Berlin (MPWIG I). His current research concerns the Early 
Modern media history of the Anthropocene, where he traces the global 
changes of long distance governing of nature brought about by early 
Spanish colonialism.




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