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Juli Highfill |
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Areas
20th Century Peninsular Literature, 19th Century Peninsular Literature, Latin American Poetry, Brazilian Literature, Literary Theory Interests and Current Work My current research project is tentatively titled The Vitality of Things: The Spanish Avant-garde in Commodity Culture. What interests me is the marked preoccupation with 'objects' that is so evident in the cultural production of the historical avant-garde, 1918-1936. Artists and writers of that time were engaged in a broad re-examination of relations between subject and object, art and life, artistic object and commodity. In their artistic practice they staged these preoccupations by incorporating objects of commodity culture into visual and literary texts: machines, mannequins, fashion, shop windows, newspapers, ticket stubs and the detritus of modern urban life. My project examines the effects of this broad inquiry into the object, as revealed in visual, literary, filmic, and theoretical texts. The writers and artists I consider include Borges, Picasso, Salinas, Ayala, Jarnés, Mallo, Dali, and Buñuel. Future research projects will concern the politically engaged literature and art that developed under the pressures of war and fascism, a project that I will be exploring in courses on the Spanish Civil War and post-war periods. My course offerings in the past have focused on the modern Spanish novel from the 19th-century realism to the
post-Franco period. Increasingly, I am turning to multi-genre courses that integrate historical texts, film, drama,
poetry, narrative, literary and cultural theory. The graduate courses I have taught include: 'Modes of Fictional
Being'-a seminar exploring problems of subjectivity through readings of modern Spanish novels; 'Narrative Modes in
Spanish Literature'-an introductory course on narrative theory and the modern novel; and 'Avant-garde Objects/Avant-
garde Texts'-a seminar exploring the art, literature, and film of the Spanish vanguard (1918-1936) with particular
emphasis on the troubled status of art within commodity culture. "Metaphoric Commerce: The Greguerías novísimas and Their Circumstance." Special Issue, Matters of the Market . Eds. Christine Henseler and Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola. The Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 9 (2005). 119-36. "Ramón Gómez de la Serna in the Atomic Age." Romance Quarterly 52.3 (2005): 233-52. "La fe contra los hechos: El fracaso de la ilustración." Archipiélago 65 (2005): 3-4. "Economies of Cultural Production" Introduction. Economies of Cultural Production . Special Issue of the Journal of Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 9.1-2 (2003). 1-20. "An Aesthetics of Transience: Fashion in the Spanish Avant-garde." Agítese bien! A New Look at the Hispanic Avant-gardes . Eds. Rafael Hernández and Maria T. Pao. Newark, Delaware: Juan de la Cuesta, 2002. 243-73. Portraits of Excess: Reading Character in the Modern Spanish Novel. Boulder: Society of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies, University of Colorado, 1999. |