Samuel Amago

Bio: Samuel Amago is an academic researcher from University of Virginia. The author has contributed to research in topics: Narrative & Spanish Civil War. The author has an hindex of 6, co-authored 17 publications receiving 106 citations. Previous affiliations of Samuel Amago include University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill & University of Notre Dame.

Unearthing Franco's Legacy: Mass Graves and the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain

Abstract: Unearthing Franco's Legacy: Mass Graves and the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain addresses the political, cultural, and historical debate that has ensued in Spain as a result of the recent discovery and exhumation of mass graves dating from the years during and after the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). The victor, General Francisco Franco, ruled as a dictator for thirty-six years, during which time he and his supporters had thousands of political dissidents or suspects and their families systematically killed and buried in anonymous mass graves. Although Spaniards living near the burial sites realized what was happening, the conspiracy of silence imposed by the Franco regime continued for many years after his death in 1975 and after the establishment of a democratic government. While the people of Germany, France, and Italy have confronted the legacies of the repressive regimes that came to power in those countries during the 1920s, '30s, and '40s, the unearthing of the anonymous dead in Spain has focused attention on how Spaniards have only recently begun to revisit their past and publicly confront Franco's legacy. The essays by historians, anthropologists, literary scholars, journalists, and cultural analysts gathered here represent the first interdisciplinary analysis of how present-day Spain has sought to come to terms with the violence of Franco's regime. Their contributions comprise an important example of how a culture critiques itself while mining its collective memory. "For anyone interested in understanding the lasting impact of the Spanish Civil War on contemporary society, Unearthing Franco's Legacy is required reading. The editors of this book have brought together, and placed in constructive dialogue, a comprehensive group of international authors whose contributions result in a sweeping and devastating account of the war's deep wounds on individual lives and collective histories. Meticulously studying Franco's policies, their impact on the war's victims, and representations of the war's stories, both those unearthed and others that continue to be buried, this book makes terribly clear that the Spanish Civil War and its memory continue to teach us lessons about the responsibility of scholarship in deciphering the complexities of the past." --Jordana Mendelson, New York University "Unearthing Franco's Legacy is a timely contribution to a subject that has provoked serious discussion both in Spain and abroad. The scholars and practitioners whose work is represented in this volume address the issue of historical memory from different disciplinary angles, and the interdisciplinarity of the approaches adds much to the book's value and to the debates that persist regarding this topic." -- David T. Gies, Commonwealth Professor of Spanish, University of Virginia

Todo sobre Barcelona: Refiguring Spanish Identities in Recent European Cinema

Abstract: This essay considers the transnational intercultural dimensions of two European co-productions set in Barcelona — Todo sobre mi madre (Pedro Almodovar, 1999) and L'Auberge espagnole (Cedric Klapisch, 2002) — in terms of how these films reflect non-traditional notions of European, Spanish and Catalan identities. It investigates how Barcelona's African communities are represented cinematically, and how these representations challenge conventional notions of what it means to be Catalan, Spanish or European. In Todo sobre mi madre, through its themes, soundtrack and carefully composed background, Almodovar emphasizes the multicultural fabric of contemporary Barcelona by drawing explicit attention to African Spaniards and African culture. In L'Auberge espagnole, Klapisch foregrounds within the film an explicit discussion about the linguistic and cultural underpinnings of the national, subnational and transnational identities that comprise modern-day Spain. Both films exploit the real space of Barcelona...

Lesbian Desire and Related Matters in Carmen Laforet's Nada

Abstract: Sexual repression is a constant theme in Nada (1945), and in the absence of any sort of traditional plot, Carmen Laforet's characters seem to be searching to define themselves socially and sexually in an atmosphere characterized by disorder. While scholars have emphasized both Laforet's use of an ambiguously constructed discourse and the overall tone of sexual repression in the novel's characters, aside from the obvious heterosexual tensions of the novel, there exists in Nada a series of exceptionally suggestive homoerotic undercurrents that have remained largely unexamined. An important question has remained unanswered: What is the function of the undeniably homoerotic undercurrents of the novel, particularly insofar as Andrea's physical obsession with Gloria and her complex, deeply affectionate relationship with her friend Ena? Through an analysis of both the highly charged female relationships and episodes of homoerotic desire and the contrasting instances of Andrea's indifference, repulsion, and fear of heterosexual relationships with men, it is the purpose of the present study to attempt to show that homosocial desire is encoded in the social structures detailed in the novel, and that same-sex friendship serves as a socially acceptable device through which Andrea can derive emotional fulfillment independent of traditional heterosexual social constructs.

The archaeology of knowledge

Abstract: We may not be able to make you love reading, but archaeology of knowledge will lead you to love reading starting from now. Book is the window to open the new world. The world that you want is in the better stage and level. World will always guide you to even the prestige stage of the life. You know, this is some of how reading will give you the kindness. In this case, more books you read more knowledge you know, but it can mean also the bore is full.

Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern BodiesThinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary WestYearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural PoliticsGender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

Abstract: Preface (1999) Preface (1990) 1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire I. 'Women' as the Subject of Feminism II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire III. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate IV. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary and Beyond V. Identity, Sex and the Metaphysics of Substance VI. Language, Power and the Strategies of Displacement 2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix I. Structuralism's Critical Exchange II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender IV. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification V. Reformulating Prohibition as Power 3. Subversive Bodily Acts I. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva II. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity III. Monique Wittig - Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex IV. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions Conclusion - From Parody to Politics

Wittgenstein의 哲學에 關하여

Abstract: My main goal in this paper is to examine critically, in order to put an end to it once and for all together with all it has brought about, what from my point of view is a very harmful myth, ascribed to Ludwig Wittgenstein by several distinguished scholars, viz., the myth of the so-called ‘hinge propositions’. From the point of view of the history of ideas, the effects of this myth just cannot be ignored. Indeed, based on this myth it now has become a sort of unavoidable fashion to speak of a “third Wittgenstein”, a thinker who apparently would have superseded or overcome his own magnum opus, i.e., the Philosophical Investigations. According to those who support this reading of Wittgenstein’s work, he would have left behind his own phase of grammatical analysis in order to enter a new field of philosophical speculation, a new kind of therapy (whose nature, by the way, has never been made quite clear), much more similar to the sort of rational adventure which is practiced in traditional metaphysics than to the kind of analysis which Wittgenstein painfully managed to developed and practice and which, last but not least, brought him so many good results. Now in order to count with more elements to carry out our examination it’ll be convenient to have at our disposal a simple but neat and well argued panorama, a global but a convincing one too, of the philosophical background in which Wittgenstein has recourse to the expression ‘hinge’, which so many headaches has already caused. We are thus forced to exercise ourselves in a task of reconstruction of ideas. Our starting point, therefore, can only be the following: if we contemplate his work in toto: how many Wittgensteins is it reasonable to think there are? To answering this question I’ll devote the first part of this essay.

Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines: Interfaith Relations and Social Power in Medieval Iberia

Abstract: Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines investigates the political and cultural significance of marriages and other sexual encounters between Christians and Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula, from the Islamic conquest in the early eighth century to the end of Muslim rule in 1492 Interfaith liaisons carried powerful resonances, as such unions could function as a tool of diplomacy, the catalyst for conversion, or potent psychological propaganda Examining a wide range of source material including legal documents, historical narratives, polemical and hagiographic works, poetry, music, and visual art, Simon Barton presents a nuanced reading of the ways interfaith couplings were perceived, tolerated, or feared, depending upon the precise political and social contexts in which they occurred Religious boundaries in the Peninsula were complex and actively policed, often shaped by an overriding fear of excessive social interaction or assimilation of the three faiths that coexisted within the region Barton traces the protective cultural, legal, and mental boundaries that the rival faiths of Iberia erected, and the processes by which women, as legitimate wives or slave concubines, physically traversed those borders Through a close examination of the realities and the imagination of interfaith relations, Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines highlights the extent to which sex, power, and identity were closely bound up with one another

Nouveaux réalismes et imaginaires sociaux de la modernité dans le roman espagnol contemporain (2001-2011)

Abstract: Cette these porte sur le renouvellement du realisme dans la production narrative espagnole des annees 2000, a partir d’un corpus de quatre romans, et se demande : en quoi consiste l’esthetique realiste actuelle, quelle est son epistemologie et quel lien entretient-elle avec d’autres discours de savoir ? Quel role jouent les recits realistes dans la configuration des imaginaires sociaux, alors que sont remis en question l’heritage de la transition democratique et le recit de la modernisation espagnole ? Sont d’abord examinees les conditions de possibilite historiques, socio-economiques et culturelles d’un renouveau du realisme – cartographie dans le champ litteraire des vingt dernieres annees. Hypothese centrale : le realisme ressurgit du fait que les debats de memoire historique depuis 2000 et la crise economique, sociale et politique depuis 2008 engagent une revision du mythe de la Transition et du projet de la modernite qui structurait les imaginaires sociaux espagnols depuis les annees 1960. Trois parties proposent des etudes de poetiques realistes, en diachronie et en synchronie, pour mettre en valeur l’evolution des modes de referentialite realistes entre le debut des annees 2000 et le debut des annees 2010, avec la crise de 2008 et ses premices pour point d’inflexion. La premiere partie porte sur deux romans (Antonio Munoz Molina, Sefarad, 2001 et Ignacio Martinez de Pison, Enterrar a los muertos, 2005) qui dialoguent avec la fabrication sociale de documents et l’historiographie pour reinterpreter la guerre de 1936, de la dictature et de la transition. Les deuxieme et troisieme parties (Rafael Chirbes, Crematorio, 2007, et Isaac Rosa, La mano invisible, 2011) analysent l’elaboration d’un recit collectif de l’Espagne developpementaliste, a l’aube de la crise, par des romans qui dialoguent avec la theorie economique et la sociologie historique. Au carrefour du litteraire, des discours sociaux, de l’histoire et de la sociologie contemporaine de l’Espagne, cette these soutient que la reappropriation du realisme dans les annees 2000 participe a la remise en question d’une identite nationale democratique et moderne, au resurgissement d’une realite problematique et d’imaginaires sociaux paramodernes apres l’ecroulement du metarecit d’une transition modele. Si les romans cherchent tous a prendre en charge le reel social selon ses representations, ils se differencient par leur traitement de la question politique de ce que « reel » veut dire, par le choix du chemin selon lequel le decrire, et par l’evaluation de la nature des causes historiques et materielles de la realite qu’habitent les ecrivains.