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In this book, Faber assesses the long-term impact of the Spanish Civil War on Hispanic Studies as an academic field in the United States and Great Britain. Combining institutional history with biography, the book gives a compelling account of the dilemmas that the war posed for four Hispanists who turned their love of Spain into their life's work.
At the ideological level, these shifts correspond to the transformation of the traditional intellectual into a state functionary and, ultimately, into a technician or "expert," totally subsumed under capital and charged with the management of "cultural studies." Running alongside, and locked into, this first narrative is a second, which, in the form of three autobiographical essays, traces the author's long trek from his childhood origins in a working-class family, through the institutions of education - and the experience of increasing embourgeoisement - to his attempts, within the Australasian, Caribbean and North-American academy, to retrieve the legacy of socialism.
The central concern of this radically innovative study is to offer a critique of traditional Hispanism in the light of its assumption of a transcendental subject and its corresponding insistence on the autonomy of the literary text. Rereading canonic Spanish texts from Renaissance humanism to modernist literature, Read deploys a theoretical basis of post-structuralist thinking and brings Kristeva, Foucault, Althusser, Eagleton, and other important theorists to bear on a field hardly touched by such approaches. Chapters 1 and 2, dealing with Garcilaso de la Vega and Calderonian drama, respectively, argue the need to relate cultural development to the transition from medieval organicism to bou...
The gravamen of The Matrix Effect is that the discipline of Hispanism is currently suffering from a theoretical deficit of considerable proportions, at the root of which is a pragmatic dependence upon theories developed outside the discipline, which are quite simply â??put to useâ?? indiscriminately, with little attention to, or concern for, their coherence. The phenomenon its author describes â?? descriptive theoretical pluralism â?? is systemic and each of his borings into the disciplinary bedrock of Hispanism reveals a particular layer of it. While in no sense a history of Hispanism The Matrix Effect pursues the consequences of what is commonly known as the â??linguistic turnâ?? acr...
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