Books
The book Don Quijote: Sad Countenances is published at the occasion of the world premiere of the sixteen-channel video exhibition of the same name in the Småland Kulturparken. But it is not really a catalogue. The idea is to analyze the connections between the video work and a study based on - but not simple “about” - the monument of Spanish literature. Cervantes’ Don Quijote has become a world-wide classic. It has not lost any of its actuality. With struggle, strife, and slavery all over the world, revisiting this four centuries-old text provides revealing insights in problems that plague our world. The book strikes a balance between artistic and academic understanding.
This anthology explores narratives in the spirit of a nostalgic methodology, thus revealing unexpected and unfamiliar aesthetic and political dimensions of our present moment’s diverse transient textual communications. The collection includes nostalgic analyses of the life writing of Vladimir Nabokov and Orhan Pamuk, transnational and transracial adoption narratives, the poetry of Tony Harrison and Lars Gustafsson, nostalgic representations of Europe by American artists such as Mary Maxwell and Woody Allen, contemporary nostalgic commemorations of The First World War, Fred Boot’s musical Soldier of Orange, Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle, the Harry Potter series, and two seminal nostalgic films from the 1970s, American Graffiti and The Last Picture Show.
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Comets and other celestials as fictional devices offer, as this collection of essays show, a tremendous opportunity to radically cut up the infectious wounds of our post-industrial society for close inspection and anamnesis. This volume contains fluid examples of how comets, suns, moons, planets all have contributed to creating speculative yet sensitized narratives about some of the most urgent existential, ontological and ecological matters in the modern world.
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