Dark Assemblages Pilar Pedraza and the Gothic Story of Development [Hardcover]

In arguing for the significance of contemporary Gothic fiction, Kay Pritchett brings to bear on the subject an apt and effective critical vocabulary enlivened by the work of two of the twentieth centurys most gifted thinkers, Gilles Deleuze and F?lix Guattari. True to the spirit they embodied, she brings to her own work a social commitment meriting much praise and commendation.In Dark Assemblages, Kay Pritchett, after surveying the novelistic production of celebrated Neo-Gothic writer Pilar Pedraza (1951-), focuses on the relevance of the Spanish author's fiction to contemporary social concerns. Pedraza's Gothic stories of development reveal the power of conventional representations (fixed images) to undermine personal growth, bringing identity into line, rather, with the objectives of oppressive social structures (dark assemblages).This book examines strategies of transformation (becomings, image-making, and the phantasmagoric) that figure in four stories and a novel by Gothic fiction writer Pilar Pedraza (Spain, 1951). While critics have long associated the Bildungsroman with Gothic fiction, this study takes a close look at the developmental process itself: the means by which a protagonist, young or old, might transcend a deprived status to achieve a complete sense of self. Pedraza's works imply that, regardless of the path followed, a character's ability to think differently is crucial to progress. The fixed image, representative of an inflexible, socially determined mindset, arises as an obstacle to maturation. In D?as de perros, for example, a triangular arrangement of coins in a cigar box elucidates the connection between individual lives and the social order or assemblage. Literary texts, such as this one, serve as collective assemblages of enunciation, capable of exposing fixed images as powerful instruments of control. Tristes Ayes del ?guila Mejicana discovers fixed images among the icons of Colonial Spain's exequias reales, used in this case to terril“!