The Concept Of Fluidity In The Baroque Age

The Baroque world was a flowing one, a realm of slippery presences in constant flux. Everything seemed to be in endless motion –space, time, emotions and the individual itself. It was a deeply shifting world, and this absence of solidity and certainty would come to define both the macro and the microcosms of these inconstant times. Like other Baroque phenomena, fluidity encompassed a rather complex and wide-ranging set of manifestations – from the swirls of angels on the ceilings of Pietro da Cortona and the polyvalence of space in the complex interiors by Guarini, to the fluidity of being that marked equally the statues of Messerschmidt and Bernini’s Borghese mythologies. This book charts different aspects of this fluidity, discussing fluid geographies, fluidity of presence, fluidity of spaces and materials, fluid souls and water in Baroque culture.

This book presents, from the point of view of the early modern historian, the legacy of Baroque thought in modern and contemporary literature, a highly under-researched subject that spans two disciplines and several centuries. Its purpose is not to discover the direct links and references of one culture in the other, but, rather, to present the patterns of thought that our time owes to the age of Baroque, namely both temporal and spatial plurality. The books explored here (Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino, Rings of Saturn, by W.G. Sebald, and The Investigator, by Dragan Velikić) are not novels that are consciously or purposefully Baroque in their structure, or use the age of the Baroque as the setting of their narratives. However, the Baroque is still present in them all, primarily as the aesthetic principle, as that invisible heritage that shapes the worldviews of their characters. They are Baroque in the sense of space they inhabit, and in the way reality and imagination are interwoven.

Throughout history, the research of space has always been an issue of great interest. Since classical Antiquity, the physical space itself and its imperfect double, the illusionary space used in the visual arts, have been one of the perpetual obsessions of man. However, there are very few studies that question the reality of represented space, and deal with those liminal phenomena that exist on the blurred boundary between reality and imagination. Such spaces were never defined by carefully drawn borders; they were usually outlined by the ephemeral and ever changing barriers. For that very reason, liminal spaces describe those curious worlds confined in gardens and collections, they underpin all those dreams of ideal societies, and construct visions of unobtainable and distant shores. Liminal spaces are the territories not usually found on maps and in atlases, they are not subjected to laws of perspective and elude the usual representations. They are always beyond and behind the established depiction of space. Often, they possess yet another layer of signification, that transforms a mere image of nature into a political manifesto, the lines on precious stones into the shapes of vanished cities, and private art collections into a dream of absolute power. This book explores different representations and forms of liminal spaces, that on the one hand, deeply influenced the history of the early modern imagination, and, on the other, established the models for our own understanding of liminal spatial phenomena.

The essays in Disguise, Deception, Trompe-l'oeil: Interdisciplinary Perspectives investigate the subject of deception and falsehood from various perspectives. Classical, modernist and postmodern texts and art forms, both visual and performative, are examined in frames of reference that range from aesthetics and literary theory to cognitive science. In some cases, deception and falsehood are seen to have positive connotations, and, in other cases, their negative dimensions are highlighted. The complexity of these terms and their relationship with truth and truthfulness are put on display by the contributors to this volume.

This handbook provides an extensive overview of traditional and emerging research areas within the field of intermediality studies, understood broadly as the study of interrelations among all forms of communicative media types, including transmedial phenomena. Section I offers accounts of the development of the field of intermediality - its histories, theories and methods. Section II and III then explore intermedial facets of communication from ancient times until the 21st century, with discussion on a wide range of cultural and geographical settings, media types, and topics, by contributors from a diverse set of disciplines. It concludes in Section IV with an emphasis on urgent societal issues that an intermedial perspective might help understand.

Turning Points demonstrates the role of style and form in promoting and shaping cultural development by studying important critics, and analyzing cultural change in literature, music, art, and philosophy.

Many American writers visited Morocco. Paul Bowles ended up living there for fifty-two years. This book looks at how Bowles’s preoccupation with Moroccan customs, specifically “meditations and a state of being ‘in-between’” permeated his work.

This book challenges and renews the discussions that have historically characterized the tradition of continental thought in the areas of ethics, feminism, aesthetics, and political theory. The classical origins of this tradition--phenomenology, existentialism, and hermeneutics--emerged according to models that were foundational and systematic in character. The book shows that continental philosophy is now woven between counter-discourses and concrete interventions, complicated in the relationship between theory and practice; that is, in the transition between concept and determination, idea and intuition, the ontic and the ontological, experience and judgment.