Madrid: Literary Fiction and the Imaginary Urban Destination (original) (raw)
Related papers
2010
This article outlines two types of progressive relationships the protagonist of Eduardo Mendoza’s detective trilogy (El misterio de la cripta embrujada, El laberinto de las aceitunas, and La aventura del tocador de senoras) has with his urban space. These evolutions highlight the ability of the protagonist to represent Barcelona as its mask – an identity marker that resets the guidelines that condition interpersonal interaction – over time. By applying the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin, the author argues that masking at various textual levels allows the image of Barcelona to be a Thirdspace of possibility in which the characters are able to achieve liberty and resolution, rather than merely an unchanging city brimming with social injustices. Ultimately, it is an anonymous protagonist, rather than political leaders, who most completely embodies Barcelona’s heteroglossia and multiculturalism, and resolves the tension between the city’s social (dialogic) and programmed (monologic) functi...
Shifting Modern Identities in Madrid’s Recent Urban Planning, Architecture and Narrative
Cities, 2003
Compared to some major urban centers in Spain that have successfully participated in the fierce competition over cultural capital since the 1980s (such as Barcelona, Seville, or Bilbao), Madrid seems not so much to look outward to the international community to sell its image but to more reflectively construct and critique life, on the periphery of what was previously the center of an extremely centralized state. The power to build and shape Madrid during the 1980s and 1990s often found inspiration in the more disposable and ephemeral forms of culture circulating in its immediate environment, just as cultural forms and cultural content drew directly from the desire to represent human reactions to this urban setting. The conservative Partido Popular has taken credit for the positive urban reforms of the Socialists and criticized them for the failures, while giving Madrid over to the car and abandoning the progressive social housing policies of earlier years, which were based on rational Modernist planning and the political possibility of the Modernist project. Much recent literature and film about Madrid focuses on the resulting ideological, political and economic shifts.
This essay focuses upon the politics of place-in so far as they concern the city of Madrid-in Fernando León de Aranoa's 1997 film Barrio/Neighbourhood. Drawing on the writings of Michel de Certeau and particularly recent work by Guiliana Bruno, it offers an analysis of the ideological and historical implications of both municipal urban development-above and below ground-and mobility through the landscape of the city. Human movement, it argues, disturbs and nuances a space that is undergoing continual renewal and reproduction, an urban field in which the past and present coexist in the city's architectonics.
The Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies, 2022
Over the past decades, the growing interest in the study of literature of the city has led to the development of literary urban studies as a discipline in its own right. The Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies provides a methodical overview of the fundamentals of this developing discipline and a detailed outline of new directions in the field. It consists of 33 newly commissioned chapters that provide an outline of contemporary literary urban studies. The Companion covers all of the main theoretical approaches as well as key literary genres, with case studies covering a range of different geographical, cultural, and historical settings. The final chapters provide a window into new debates in the field. The three focal issues are key concepts and genres of literary urban studies; a reassessment and critique of classical urban studies theories and the canon of literary capitals; and methods for the analysis of cities in literature. The Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies provides the reader with practical insights into the methods and approaches that can be applied to the city in literature and serves as an important reference work for upper-level students and researchers working on city literature.
In P. GIACONIA, E. PANDOLFINI (ed.), The Kent State Forum on the City. Madrid: Visions, strategies and practices for the contemporary European metropolis, dpr-barcelona, Barcelona, 2013
A critical analysis of the public spaces realized in Madrid during the last decade should not prescind from an observation of the disparity between how the central core of the city has been dealt with if compared to the less fortunate, newly built neighborhoods. A disparity which is not at all quantitative, as significant amounts of money have been invested both in the centre and in the outskirts of Madrid (at least until the explosion of the financial bubble in September 2008, an infamous date to which we should also add a small “tail” of public investments, known as “Plan España”, promoted by the Zapatero government in 2009 in order to drive the private sector through public works), but still a disparity – of method, instruments, goals and results.
Revista de Comunicación, vol. 22, N°2, 2023
La Peste series (Movistar Plus+) represented a pre-pandemic benchmark in transmedia and hybrid (online and offline) fictional storytelling. This research delves into the keys for the construction of suspense through the development of interactive actions that place the public in a leading position in the story through the dialogue between geographical, fictional and expanded space. Therefore, we will examine the resignification of the city through the image built up by the participation of the viewer –in the series– and the user –in the transmedia actions–. We address both the study of the fictional and augmented space, taking into account the territory occupied by the different strata that made up the city in the sixteenth century, and the processes of expansion of the contents through interactive cartographies, movie maps, and alternative reality games (ARG). As a result, we observe an expansion of the series through the metaphor of the map in an expedition that flits between past and present; fiction and reality; geographical space and cyberspace; the traditional medium -television series- and multiplatform formats, which produces at the same time a novel approach to the urban space of Seville from an experiential perspective.
Street Guide as a Literary Genre: La Manada City
Arts
This study thoroughly examines La Manada (The Wolf Pack) City, an artwork that illuminates the various forms of violence and oppression experienced by urban communities, particularly women and marginalized groups. Our research specifically focuses on the literary elements of this painted map which demonstrates the transition from defensive to artistic strategies as a means of survival. Initially, we aim to provide a comprehensive background of the artwork, including its title, social context, the incidents that inspired the idea, and the author’s activism. Subsequently, we scrutinize the literary resources of the 257 items that comprise the street guide of the map. By analysing the various names given to locations on the map, including literary devices and semantic fields, we observe reminiscences of classic surrealist paintings and the artist’s ability to protect herself while revealing the violence hidden behind the guise of antithesis, alliteration, metaphor, and other literary d...