Art History

Baroque Horrors: Roots of the Fantastic in the Age of Curiosities by David R. Castillo

Baroque Horrors: Roots of the Fantastic in the Age of Curiosities

David R. Castillo

Rights: World
For more info, contact Michael Kehoe at mkehoe@umich.edu

Baroque Horrors takes readers on a journey through the early modern roots of the fantastic via miscellany collections, sensationalist news, exemplary narratives, folk tales and legends from the Spanish Golden Age. This is a "historiographic" gallery in the critical tradition of Walter Benjamin's "materialistic historiography." Though based in the Spanish Baroque, Baroque Horrors illuminates current dreams and fears conditioning our perception of the world and our response to the fictional and historical horrors of the present. The project is animated by a desire to turn the current cultural and political conversation away from familiar narrative patterns generating self-justifying allegories of abjection and to refocus it on the history of our modern fears and their monstrous offspring. A central conclusion of this study is that the shadows that lurk in our closed spaces are symptoms of the baroque horror vacui which continues to haunt the cultural structures of modernity. In this sense, one of the most important lessons we can learn from facing our baroque horrors (fictional as well as historical) is that the monsters come with the house, or as José Monleón put it in his study of the modern tradition of the fantastic, "the monsters were possible because we were the monsters."

David Castillo is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at University of Buffalo, SUNY.

Spring 2010
176 Pages