Archive for March 2019

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

Wed Mar 06 22:13:25 GMT 2019






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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