Content

 

Dr. Antonio Penedo-Picos Antonio.Penedo@uab.cat

 

 

1. Parameters and key concepts of Cultural Studies.

2. The connection between Cultural Studies and the epistemological Canon of the twentieth century: formalism, structuralism, semiotics, phenomenology, hermeneutics and deconstruction.

3. Ideology and aesthetic experience.

4. Fiction, History and ‘Social Reality’.

5. The circuit of culture: hegemony, margins and centrality - Who decides and why?

6. Meaning and sense, biology, neurobiology, corporality and sciences of the spirit - Quantum physics.

7. Economy, technology and (new) social classes.

8. Subjectivity, identity and ‘semiotic training’ of the person.

9. Media orders and ethical orders: the artwork as mediation.

10. Ethnicity, raciality, nationalism and globalization - alterglobalization.

11. Sexuality, gender (s) and aesthetic representation.

12. From the theocentric society to the new urban models: the debate on the concepts of sacred and secular - Towards a redefinition of the civil and political.

13. Myth, symbol and canon in the new cultural models: a) ‘convergence culture’. b) ‘crossmedia’ c) television, film, videogame and Internet formats.

 

 

 

SCENARIOS: TRANSFORMATIONS AND METAMORPHOSIS

 

Dr. Núria Santamaria Roig Nuria.Santamaria@uab.cat

 

The performing arts have often used the idea of mutation and transformation in order to formulate the kind of artistic and intellectual refraction that involves the staging, or at least, the stageable. Starting from this conceptual axis, the first session focuses on the environment of the dramaturgical transformations that try to provide the classic with contemporary eloquence. Thesecond session reproduces the idea of metamorphosis associated with a reflection on theatrical languages, procedures and techniques that speculate on identities.

 

 

 

I. Metamorphosis of the textual

 

1. Canon and tradition revisited.

2. Loans, quotes, translations and replies: contemporary rewritings of the classics.

3. Bastard theatricalities: parasitic dramaturgies and current staging.

 

 

II. Metamorphosis of the corporal

1. Entities and / or wrappers:

  a. Interpreters and actors.

  b. Costume and nudity.

2. Dynamic identities and alchemies of identity: transformism, fregolism and transvestism

 

Latin American cultural studies

Dr. Beatriz Ferrús

 

 

 

1. Latin American criticism: genealogy of inclusions and exclusions

2. European cultural studies and continental re-reading

3. Postcolonialism, subalternity, gender studies and other concomitant categories

4. Dialogue with the United States

5. Case studies: “The war of images: from Malinche to narcoculture”

6. Case studies: The boom as a cultural object

7. Conclusions

 

 

ONTOLOGY OF THE PLAIN SAILING

Dr. Martín Mora

 

Temary:

Haute Couture or the Being as a straitjacket.

DIY (Do it  Yourselft) or the Being as performance of recycling.

 

 

 

The seminar will approach the relationships between body, trendy, daily culture and ontology. It is actually a pre-text to address, freely and aesthetically, two great themes, one frivolous and the other transcendent: Ontology as a frivolity and costumes as the transcendent. So we will set up a virtual catwalk with clothingelements to wander around the formations of being and revisiting examples of music, video, bodyart and contemporary art in a trivial sense.

 

POETICS OF THE END OF THE WORLD: TRANSITS THROUGH DYSTOPIAN UNIVERSES

Dr. Iván Gómez García ivangg@blanquerna.url.edu

UNIVERSITAT RAMON LLULL-BLANQUERNA

 

Presentation of the sessions: Historians and economists often remind us that they do not deal with the future, because it is something unknown and unpredictable. But there are few who have wanted to imagine, from the field of fiction, what will be the future that awaits us.

Authors as diverse as Aldous Huxley or William Gibson have explored the implications of our future through capital works, lighting up a subgenre within science fiction, the dystopian, which has shown itself as one of the most active and recurring in cinema and literature.

Through these sessions we will explore the political implications of a series of essential works of the dystopian genre, studying cinema and literature in a comparative way, analyzing in detail the ideas and positions that important authors have developed over the last century.

Dystopia works not only as a warning of our (in) avoidable future, but also as a critical diagnosis of our most immediate present.

That’s why the objective of the study is not only to map the dystopia genre but to explore how, through imagination, these works have thought about the future, have developed a discourse on our present and have positioned themselves on issues essential within our cybercultural landscape.

 

Content of the sessions: Poetics of the End of the World: Transits through the dystopian universes

 

   1. Utopia: The questioned idea about a better future.

   2. About the (im) perfect  kingdoms: the topos of a good life.

   3. The era of turbocapitalism: a countergeography of  the"fragile" capital.

   4. The hell of a mechanized world: classical dystopias (from Orwell to Bradbury)

   5. Cyberpunk as an (inner) image of capital (from J.G. Ballard to William Gibson)

   6. (Dat) Apocalypse Snow: the world buried by information.

   7. Industrialization, modernization and rationality: Exposure to urban life.

   8. The city as an emerging system: urban environments and information.

   9. About the end of progress: poetics of the end of the world.