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Este artículo explora las características de la temporalidad en la televisión; en concreto, las capacidades estéticas propias que la pequeña pantalla tiene a su disposición en virtud de su temporalidad distintiva. Partiendo de una metodología que combina los estudios sobre serialidad que han proliferado tanto en los Television Studies como en la Filosofía de la Estética, este texto apunta, en primer lugar, cómo las nociones existentes de “serialidad” no ofrecen una descripción completamente adecuada del particular carácter temporal de la televisión y de sus capacidades estéticas. Por esta razón, se propone un nuevo concepto: la “prolongación temporal”. Esta abarca, a diferencia del concepto de serialidad, tanto la manera específica en la que el medio televisivo emplea la temporalidad, así como los efectos estéticos que este manejo genera en formatos y géneros tan diversos como interminables soap-operas, dramas seriales con arcos argumentales horizontales, procedimentales episódicos, comedias de situación, telediarios, emisiones deportivas, concursos semanales, telerrealidad e, incluso, documentales. Para respaldar nuestra argumentación, el artículo profundiza en tres casos de estudio que apuntalan la validez de nuestra teoría. En primer lugar, se abordan las series de ficción autoconclusivas, de las que se espiga el funcionamiento de la prolongación temporal en los gags recurrentes, en la estructura del monstruo de la semana y en la ruptura que suponen los “episodios especiales”. El segundo caso de estudio es la figura del presentador de televisión informativa, donde el concepto de familiaridad establece unas recompensas estéticas privativas gracias al paso del tiempo. El último caso que se examina es el de programas de telerrealidad, con Kitchen Nightmares como botón de muestra, donde las variaciones en las expectativas son esenciales para establecer una comparación fructífera con episodios anteriores.

This dissertation is a literary analysis of the popular culture phenomenon of a component of Uruguayan Carnival – the murga. Murga is a musical theater form whose members sing and act on tablados – neighborhood makeshift stages – and is the most politically subversive component of Carnival. My study traces the origins of murga and analyzes historically significant shows as well as contemporary performances. This project also includes an anthology of transcribed and annotated murga repertoires and interviews, which fills a gap in the study of Uruguayan popular culture as such research has never before been conducted. Chapter 1 examines the origins of Uruguayan Carnival and murga in particular, both in concrete history as well as in its “mythical origin,” a term used by Uruguayan historian Milita Alfaro to describe the collective idea of popular culture phenomena. In the 20th century, murgas became a crucial form of resistance during the military dictatorship as murguistas could subvert censorship and voice criticism of the regime. The chapter concludes with a discussion of present-day murga and its evolution into a Carnival institution, considering how the function of murga has changed in today’s society. Chapter 2 presents a close reading and literary analysis of two historically important murga performances, Falta y Resto in 1992 and Agarrate Catalina in 2011. These two years are significant because of their political context; in 1992, Uruguay was in a moment of post-dictatorship transition, and 2011 was the “honeymoon” period of the leftist Broad Front Coalition. In particular, I examine the intellectual, meta-literary nature of murga lyrics and their ever-present social commentary. Chapter 3 is a comprehensive study of three shows from 2017 and is based on research conducted in Montevideo, and also includes interviews with historically important murga figures including Milita Alfaro, creator of Falta y Resto Raúl Castro, and Edu “El Pitufo” Lombardo, one of the most recognized murga performers. The full transcriptions of the performances are collected and annotated in chapter 4. This final chapter, as well as the included appendices, represent the foundation of a murga archive and the construction of new primary texts as a base for future research.

La experiencia del turbulento siglo xx ya nos ha mostrado demasiado bien los peligros derivados de los programas modernizadores. La literatura distópica nacida también de esta misma modernidad ambigua, luminosa y terrible, tuvo la misión de alertar sobre los daños que unos totalitarismos animados por causas redentoras podían causar a millones de personas

This dissertation looks at an expressive musical-poetic form that has developed over the last hundred years, maracatu de baque solto of Pernambuco, but which has only recently begun to receive critical attention. Featuring poetic duels between poet-singers (or mestres) of different groups, maracatu draws on a variety of regional musical genres while also engaging creatively with mass-mediated cultural production. Maracatus organize performances in their local neighborhoods, present in neighboring towns and cities during Carnival, and participate in large festival productions. Based on three years of ethnographic and historical fieldwork in and around the town of Nazaré da Mata from 2009 to 2012, the dissertation looks at different understandings of authenticity and the dynamic relationship between modernity and tradition as articulated differently within maracatu and by its intermediaries. In exploring how the expressive genre of maracatu continues to develop, I examine how cultural identities and practices can shift, calcify, or transform over time in relation to socioeconomic change, political developments, or interaction with other social groups. Since its “discovery” by elite artists, researchers, and funding institutions, the emphasis on maracatu’s rural identity and origins on the sugar plantations has often minimized or obscured its subsequent development by generations of working-class practitioners in the urban and semi-urban peripheries since the rural exodus of the middle twentieth century. Institutional frameworks created by folklore research and elite intellectual production about popular culture have shaped the ways in which maracatu eventually achieved recognition among a broader public in Pernambuco as well as other regions of Brazil. My research touches upon the strengths and limits of cultura popular as a form of resistance by exploring how elite interventions and popular practices have become entwined. I develop the idea of coronelismo cultural, or “cultural boss-ism,” as a way of analyzing how maracatu has developed within the persisting structures of patronage and domination that are strongly rooted in the region’s history. As maracatu is only sparsely represented in the academic literature, it is hoped that this dissertation will contribute to our understanding of similar expressive forms elsewhere in Latin America and the Caribbean.

La metamorfosis de un humano en lobo es un elemento presente tanto en la tradición textual como en las llamadas «culturas populares» europeas. Este trabajo presenta un recorrido por las diferentes explicaciones ofrecidas para interpretar semejante transformación, intentando desvelar la estructura común que subyace tanto en los relatos populares como en el tratamiento del fenómeno por parte de la cultura letrada. El caso del hombre lobo gallego (lobishome o lobo da xente) sirve como piedra de toque para valorar la contribución de esas explicaciones a la comprensión del fenómeno en un ámbito concreto.

En este artículo se recogen las diversas percepciones que la reacción contrarrevolucionaria de la Vendée provocó en España y cómo se utilizaron a lo largo del siglo XIX para fundamentar y legitimar las culturas políticas de liberales y tradicionalistas. Aunque se analizan preferentemente las visiones historiográficas y políticas, también se incluyen reflexiones sobre su influencia en la cultura popular, principalmente a través de traducciones y adaptaciones de narrativas francesas.

Within the world of Andalusian music called flamenco, popular language first, and later intellectualised reflections by cultural elites have coined a term, duende [charm ], whose purpose is either the process of generation of artistic creation, or the specific manner of emotional intercommunication between artist and audience, or the formal objectifying of the tragic spirit in a peculiar manner of flamenco expression called cante jondo [deep song]. Ever since Federico García Lorca in the 1920s, a number of theories have emerged, one of whose main axis has been the attempt to clarify such an ineffable experience. Therefore, this work intends to do a critical survey of some of the texts which flamencology considers canonical for the understanding of duende and cante jondo. We will not regard cante jondo here as a subset of styles within the flamenco musical current, but as a particular way of interpreting this kind of music, consisting of the expression of tragic and pathetic contents subjected to minimalist, primitivist forms developed during the second half of the 19th century, following the premises of romantic aesthetics. For that very reason, we thought it necessary to do research into the concept of the tragic and its links to the aesthetic category of the sublime in the context of the reflections on art produced in European pre-romanticism and romanticism. One of the aims of the present study is precisely to link the experience of duende to the experience of the sublime, considered as a phenomenon of the transcendence of being in search of the ultra-sensitive. However, we also intend to displace the clichéd notion that flamenco is an eminently tragic genre, given its stylistic variety, which allows for a wide emotional range, with room for anything from overflowing cheerfulness to the deepest sadness.