Francine Masiello's Books

The Senses of Democracy

Perception, Politics, and Culture in Latin America

By: Francine R. Masiello

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The Senses of Democracy

Perception, Politics, and Culture in Latin America

By: Francine R. Masiello

In The Senses of Democracy, Francine R. Masiello traces a history of perceptions expressed in literature, the visual arts, politics, and history from the start of the nineteenth century to the present day. A wide transnational landscape frames the book along with an original and provocative thesis: when the discourse on democracy is altered—when nations fall into crisis or the increased weight of modernity tests minds and nerves—the representation of our sensing bodies plays a crucial role in explaining order and rebellion, cultural innovation, and social change. Taking a wide arc of materials—periodicals, memoirs, political proclamations, and travel logs, along with art installations and fiction—and focusing on the technologies that supplement and enhance human perception, Masiello looks at the evolution of what she calls “sense work” in cultural texts, mainly from Latin America, that wend from the heights of romantic thought to the startling innovations of modernism in the early twentieth century and then to times of posthuman experience when cyber bodies hurtle through globalized space and human senses are reproduced by machines. Tracing the shifting debates on perceptions, The Senses of Democracy offers a new paradigm with which to speak of Latin American cultural history and launches a field for the comparative study of bodies, experience, pleasure, and pain over the continental divide. In the end, sense work helps us to understand how culture finds its location.

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Page Count

342

Publisher

University of Texas Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1477315063

ISBN 13

9781477315064

Between civilization & barbarism

women, nation, and literary culture in modern Argentina

By: Francine Masiello

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Between civilization & barbarism

women, nation, and literary culture in modern Argentina

By: Francine Masiello

Evoking the famous watchwords of Argentine president Domingo Sarmiento (1868–74), Between Civilization and Barbarism explores the positioning of women within the Argentine nation and argues that women neither sought alliance with the “civilizing” agenda of leading statesmen nor found identity in the extreme poses of “barbarism,” to which some intellectuals had condemned them. Instead, women used literary and political texts to surpass the tightly outlined roles assigned to them. Beginning with literary and journalistic texts written by and about women from the time of Sarmiento, Francine Masiello traces strategic shifts in the discourse on gender at moments of national crisis. She considers not only novels and guides to female behavior written by and for privileged women but also newspapers and political tracts produced by women of the working class. Extending her study into the urban expansion and modernization of the 1920s, Masiello explores the nature of gender relations posited in treatises on crime and public disorder and in the texts of avant-garde and social-realist writers. In addressing such representations of women, as well as the effects of ideology and history on writing, Masiello offers bold new insights into the development of Latin American women’s literature and illuminates the role of women in forming the culture of present-day Argentina.

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Page Count

268

Publisher

U of Nebraska Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

080323158X

ISBN 13

9780803231580

The Art of Transition

Latin American Culture and Neoliberal Crisis

By: Francine Masiello

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The Art of Transition

Latin American Culture and Neoliberal Crisis

By: Francine Masiello

The Art of Transition addresses the problems defined by writers and artists during the postdictatorship years in Argentina and Chile, years in which both countries aggressively adopted neoliberal market-driven economies. Delving into the conflicting efforts of intellectuals to name and speak to what is real, Francine Masiello interprets the culture of this period as an art of transition, referring to both the political transition to democracy and the formal strategies of wrestling with this change that are found in the aesthetic realm. Masiello views representation as both a political and artistic device, concerned with the tensions between truth and lies, experience and language, and intellectuals and the marginal subjects they study and claim to defend. These often contentious negotiations, she argues, are most provocatively displayed through the spectacle of difference, which constantly crosses the literary stage, the market, and the North/South divide. While forcefully defending the ability of literature and art to advance ethical positions and to foster a critical view of neoliberalism, Masiello especially shows how issues of gender and sexuality function as integrating threads throughout this cultural project. Through discussions of visual art as well as literary work by prominent novelists and poets, Masiello sketches a broad landscape of vivid intellectual debate in the Southern Cone of Latin America. The Art of Transition will interest Latin Americanists,literary and political theorists, art critics and historians, and those involved with the study of postmodernism and globalization.

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