Productive Negation, Intimacy, and Cursilería
- Autores: Nöel M. Valis
- Localización: Romance notes, ISSN 0035-7995, Vol. 64, Nº. 3, 2024, págs. 365-371
- Idioma: inglés
- Enlaces
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Resumen
Cursileríawas endemic in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spain. An untranslatable term, cursi comes closest in meaning to kitsch, but encompasses much more than "trash," cheap sentimentality, or tackiness, traits commonly associated with kitsch. It was also associated with the domestic, the feminine, and the intimate. How do we deal with a much-criticized cultural phenomenon that one commentator in 1899 called a "palabra negadora de moda," or the verbal whip of fashion (Llanas Aguilaniedo 380)? For José María Llanas Aguilaniedo, negation acts as a spur to produce the disequilibrium or rupture necessary for thought and creativity to develop. Is the notion of productive negation an apt way to approach unacceptable cultural objects? Or could we also consider them under the lens of what I call textual closeness and category closeness as a way of foregrounding our intimate relationship to such objects? Alternatively, is there a way for both productive negation and textual/category closeness to work together?
