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Anna Torres-Cacoullos

Profile picture for Anna Torres-Cacoullos

Contact Information

4115 FLB

Office Hours

By appt.
Assistant Professor

Research Interests

20th-21st century Peninsular literature, film, and culture, cinema and media studies, media theory and history, visual and print cultures, modernism and the historical avant-garde, experimental literature, metafiction and self-reflexive aesthetics, fantastic literature, philosophy (primarily Hegelian, and Sartrean phenomenological ontology), and digital humanities. 

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Research Description

Her research interests are interdisciplinary and span a broad range of topics in literature and film of the early 20th  to 21st centuries. Although her current research spotlights practices of experimental film writing, her work has also considered questions of gender, philosophy, and race in contemporary literary and filmic productions within Spain.

Her current book project, Writing for New Literacies: Film Culture and Moving-Image Storytelling in Silver Age Spain (1896-1930), argues that the new storytelling medium of silent film and its accompanying film culture served as a forceful impetus for the expansion of literary genres in the early 20th century in Spain. As cinema’s moving images impelled modernist writers to rethink narrative expression, film fan culture rendered urgent the emergence of radically new types of cultural authority. The production of new genres of storytelling—metafictional prologues, film scripts and novel-films—spoke to an expanding body of cinema-literate readers, now including women and adolescents. Adapting to a new ‘film literacy,’ these experimental literary-cinematographic texts launched inquiries into notions of audience, narration, genre, and medium through their unusual styles, formats, and narrative techniques. In so doing, they challenged the nature of reading and writing, interrogated the multifaceted ways of telling a story, and elicited new demands of critical involvement from the reader—a now new reader-viewer. Ultimately, they advanced a new manner of intellectualized consumer reading, one that blurred the divide between high and lowbrow culture, or between the (literary) intellectual and the (filmic) consumer.

Other research projects:
- Early script culture in Spain and the professionalization of screenwriting practices;
-Tracing a digital archaeology of early Spanish film fandom, particularly the development of the male movie fan, through the text mining of popular Spanish film magazines of the 1920s. 

Education

Ph.D.               Spanish Literature, The Pennsylvania State University, 2020   

M.A.               Spanish Literature, The Pennsylvania State University, 2016  

B.A.                Spanish, The Pennsylvania State University, 2013  

B.A.                Comparative Literature, The Pennsylvania State University, 2013

Grants

Humanities Research Institute (HRI) Campus Fellowship  (2023-2024)

 

Courses Taught

Graduate Courses 

Span 465. People & Environment in Times of Crisis: Views from Contemporary Cultural Productions (20th-21st C Spanish Studies) (Fall '23)

Span 590. Transatlantic Metafictions, Experimental Forms (Spring '23)

Span 528. The Spanish Avant-Garde in the Age of Cinema (Spring '22) 

Undergraduate Courses

Span 312. Strange Worlds (Fall '23)

Span 312. Writing Otherness: Specters, Misfits, and Selves (Fall '22; Spring '23) 

Span/LLS 246. Bodies out of Place: Destabilizing Geographies of Identity in Latina/o Literature and Visual Culture (Spring '21)

Additional Campus Affiliations

European Union Center

Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS)

Highlighted Publications

1) "When Fiction is Stranger than Truth: Metaliterary Preoccupation and Philosophical Burlesque in Locos: A Comedy of Gestures (1936)," Modern Language Notes, Vol. 138, No. 2 (March 2023): 323-342. DOI: 10.1353/mln.2023.a915370. Abstract here.

2) "Unmasking the Metropolis: An Interrogation of Modernity in Orfeu Negro/Black Orpheus (1959)," Bulletin of Spanish Visual Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2 (2023): 245-270. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/24741604.2023.2274219Abstract here.

3) "On Being (Social), Selfhood, and the Creative Experience in the Digital Age in Clara Janés' Vilanos (E-mails) (2004)," Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Vol. 99, No. 8 (2022): 1293-1319. DOI: 10.1080/14753820.2022.2139495

4) "Cinema as Method: Re-vision in Ramón Goméz de la Serna's Film Script Cifras (1930)," Modernism/modernityVol. 29, No. 4 (2023): 717-740. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.2022.0036.  Abstract here.

5) "Writing for New Literacies: Pío Baroja's Novela Film (1929)," Revista Hispánica Moderna, Vol. 76, No. 1 (June 2023): 73-93. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/rhm.2023.0003. Abstract here.

6) “The Possibility of Becoming in Pedro Almodóvar’s Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (1988) and Los abrazos rotos (2009),” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 96.2 (2019): 181-199. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3828/bhs.2019.11.  

7) “‘Salve, risueña mentira’: Cosmic Hyperbole, Confession, and Historical Consciousness in Ramón del Valle-Inclán’s Sonata de invierno (1905),” Bulletin of Spanish Studies (2019): 1-17. DOI: 10.1080/14753820.2019.1613743.