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Defining the Infinite: Technologic and Transatlantic Perspectives of the (Neo)Baroque in Iberia and Latin America
Raines, Scott
Raines, Scott
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Abstract
The following dissertation explores and defines the Baroque as a recursive, atemporalaesthetic expression that comes about as a reaction to the technological advances of its time. As different technologies develop and progress, they open windows of infinite knowledge that were previously unknown. This knowledge, beyond what was once understood and accepted prior to any technological change, can become terror-inducing. In light of these overwhelming infinites, the baroque artist uses the limits of painting, music, architecture, or literature to contain or rebind those infinites into some finite form. Among other examples of this aesthetic reaction to technological advance, this dissertation analyzes the development of perspectival painting and the vanishing point that eventually allowed for Diego de Velázquez’s Las meninas; the advance of the printing press that gave way to Cervantes’s Don Quixote; the shifts and developments in the sciences that inspired Sor Juana’s Primero sueño; and the twentieth-century advent of global war and destruction that resulted in novels such as Alejo Carpentier’s Los pasos perdidos and João Guimarães Rosa’s Grande Sertão: Veredas.With such a definition of the Baroque, this dissertation shows how we can and must move beyond the normative conceptualization of a singularly “historical Baroque” toward an understanding that includes the same recursive essence found in modern and postmodern instantiations of the same aesthetic occurrence (Neobaroque, hyper-Baroque, ultra-Baroque, etc.). As we begin to understand the Baroque not as an historical framework, but as an essence that repeats across time, texts like the above begin to inform each other in a transatlantic exchange of ideas and finite bindings of the infinite. The ultimate aim in this conceptualization of a recursive Baroque is to set the stage for further scholarship beyond this dissertation that might help us understand the seemingly hyper-Baroque era of our contemporary Internet age.
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2024-05-31
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University of Kansas
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1076538_1.pdf
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Literature, Baroque, infinity, Neobaroque, perspective, technology