Glen Close

University of Wisconsin-Madison, Spanish and Portuguese, Faculty Member

Followers

Following

Mentions

268

Public Views

Professor of Spanish at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
B.A. in Latin American Studies from Wesleyan University
M.A. and Ph.D. in Spanish Literature from Yale University
Author of La imprenta enterrada: Baroja, Arlt y el imaginario anarquista (2000) and Contemporary Hispanic Crime Fiction: A Transatlantic Discourse on Urban Violence (2008)
Translator of Josefina Ludmer's The Corpus Delicti: A Manual of Argentine Fictions (2004)
Address: Madison, WI

less

InterestsView All (8)

Uploads

Papers by Glen Close

Mexico City

Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2008

The Novela Negra in a Transatlantic Literary Economy

DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), Jun 1, 2014

Demetrio Estébanez Calderón provides the following definition of novela negra: "Denominación que ... more Demetrio Estébanez Calderón provides the following definition of novela negra: "Denominación que se aplica a un subgénero narrativo (relacionado con la novela policíaca), que surge en Norteamérica a comienzos de los años veinte, y en el que sus autores tratan de reflejar, desde una conciencia crítica, el mundo del gansterismo y de la criminalidad organizada, producto de la violencia y corrupción de la sociedad capitalista de esa época" (1999: 760). 2 Among the most elaborate of such homages, we might recall the Catalan writer Maria Aurèlia Capmany's 1972 novel El jaqué de la democracia (El chaqué de la democracia in Castilian translation) with its coded but prominent invocation of Dashiell Hammett, as well as appropriations of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe character by Argentine Oswaldo Soriano in Triste, solitario y final (1973) and Uruguayan Hiber Conteris in El diez por ciento de vida: el test Chandler (1985).

Download

Contemporary Hispanic Crime Fiction

Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2008

respectively, and I reproduce them here with the kind permission of the editors there. I am also ... more respectively, and I reproduce them here with the kind permission of the editors there. I am also indebted, as the reader will quickly appreciate, to many scholars whose work I cite in the pages that follow. I especially thank those critics and researchers of crime fiction on whose information and insights I have relied time and again.

Download

Barcelona

Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2008

Intensive Industrial Livestock Production: Envisioning the Burden on Animals and the Environment

A Companion to Spanish Environmental Cultural Studies, Jan 17, 2023

In 2006 the U.K.-based Animal Studies Group implicated global factory farming in “a holocaust of ... more In 2006 the U.K.-based Animal Studies Group implicated global factory farming in “a holocaust of immense proportions.” Global meat production increased eightfold in the half-century to 2010, and in 2018 more than 72 billion animals were slaughtered for food. Spain is one of the world’s largest meat producers, holding Europe’s largest livestock population and largest population of caged animals, many of whom spend their entire lives tightly confined. It is Europe’s second largest producer of meat from pigs, veal calves and sheep and goats, and fourth in poultry. Due to the consolidation, corporatization and industrialization of meat production, farmed animals have become nearly invisible to European citizens even as they have been subjected to increasingly extreme deprivation, suffering and pain. In this context, photographic and videographic documentation of the excruciatingly miserable lives of industrially farmed and slaughtered animals emerges as a crucial tool in the cultural struggle for a humane biopolitics. Spanish activist organizations have displayed great ingenuity and courage in covertly obtaining graphic evidence of widespread abuses. I examine contemporary initiatives to counteract the invisibility of intensive industrial livestock farming and slaughter, including current campaigns to institute permanent video monitoring in slaughterhouses. I devote special attention to the work of Aitor Garmendia, a trenchantly abolitionist photographer and video documentarian whose images of slaughterhouses and factory farms have achieved unprecedented international recognition, including Picture of the Year International photojournalism prizes in each of the last three years, due to their shockingly brutal content and extraordinarily high visual quality.

Download

Bogota

Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2008

Autopsias, morgues y vivisección : escenarios literarios de poder, deseo e impiedad

Autopsias, morgues y vivisección : escenarios literarios de poder, deseo e impiedad, 2015

Restos del narco: el impulso necropornográfi co en la narconovela mexicana

Narcoficciones en México y Colombia, 2016

Intensive Industrial Livestock Production

A Companion to Spanish Environmental Cultural Studies, Jan 17, 2023

Literature and politics in early twentieth-century Argentina: The anarchist modernism of Roberto Arlt

Screening Slaughter. The Repressed Politics and Troubled Aesthetics of Gabriel Serra Argüello’s La Parka (2013)

Humanimalia, 2020

This article operates on two premises: 1) that contemporary practices of intensive industrial liv... more This article operates on two premises: 1) that contemporary practices of intensive industrial livestock farming are producing catastrophic ecological effects, and 2) that, in the capitalist drive for maximum productive efficiency and the absence of effectively enforced animal-welfare legislation, industrial meat producers currently inflict atrocious abuses on animals on a historically unprecedented scale. Taking a cue from Michael Pollan’s proposal of glass-walled slaughterhouses as a remedy for the presently unchecked brutality, I examine a text that would appear to offer extraordinary insight into a highly secretive operation: a contemporary documentary film shot primarily in a Mexican cattle slaughterhouse yet circulated internationally, screened for the Mexican Senate, and nominated for a U.S. Academy Award. My argument is that, like the makers of previous slaughterhouse documentaries, La Parka director Gabriel Serra overcame the taboo against showing real animal slaughter in la...

Download

Iberian and Latin American Crime Fiction

The Cambridge Companion to World Crime Fiction

Buenos Aires

Rosario Tijeras":: Femme Fatale in Thrall

Revista De Estudios Hispanicos, 2009

Brazilian Review - Life in the Megalopolis. Mexico City and São Paulo (review)

Luso Brazilian Review, 2009

Antinovela negra: Cristina Rivera Garza’s La muerte me da and the Critical Contemplation of Violence in Contemporary Mexico

MLN, 2014

Download

Open up a few corpses: Autopsied cadavers in the post-boom

Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 2008

... so, but I invoke it cautiously here on the basis of the definitions offered by Roberto Gonzál... more

Corpse Photography in Roberto Bolaño's Estrella distante and Cristina Rivera Garza's Nadie me verá llorar

Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 2014

This article considers corpse photography in novels by Bolaño (1996) and Rivera Garza (1999) and ... more This article considers corpse photography in novels by Bolaño (1996) and Rivera Garza (1999) and argues, following the ideas of Elizabeth Bronfen, that it serves male characters as a technique for the disavowal of two enigmas that permanently threaten the male subject: death and femininity. Parallels are drawn with necropornographic precedents in the novela negra and with contemporary Post-Boom novels by Diamela Eltit and Tomás Eloy Martínez. Artistic practice in the novels is related to the photographic theories of Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, affirming a profound association between the photographic medium and death, as well as to the Surrealist doll photographs of Hans Bellmer and the work of contemporary corpse photographers Joel-Peter Witkin and Andrés Serrano. Corpse photography is considered as an exemplary manifestation of major trends in twentieth-century art and mass-media culture, as described by theorists such as Néstor García Canclini (‘morbid spectacularity’), Alain Badiou (‘passion for the real’), Hal Foster (‘return of the real’) and Paul Virilio (‘pitiless art’). Corpse photographs are shown to set up a dynamic of approximation and distancing termed ‘t(h)an(a)talization’. The article concludes by arguing both photographic and literary representation, converging at the textual site of the corpse photograph, fail incessantly in their aspiration to apprehend the real.