Avisos de Viena https://journals.univie.ac.at/index.php/adv <p><em>Avisos de Viena</em> is an online academic journal offering new perspectives on Spanish cultural history. We offer short articles that take an interdisciplinary approach to a variety of research interests, such as the culture of childbirth, family networks, soundscape and aesthetics, or the social qualities of prose and theatre, which may be of interest to both academic readers and the wider public.</p> en-US Avisos de Viena 2710-2629 <p>© Open Access, CC BY 4.0</p> The uterus and (the) beyond https://journals.univie.ac.at/index.php/adv/article/view/8769 <p style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="color: #000000;">“</span><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span lang="en-GB">Being born and dying – two actions like one”, writes Calderón de la Barca around 1650; </span></span></span><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span lang="en-US">“Life and death are but two phases – antithetical, but complementary – of a single reality”, writes Octavio Paz three and a half centuries later. </span></span></span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span lang="en-GB">Thinking of birth and death in analogy to one another enabled these two authors and some of their contemporaries to generate literary “Lebenswissen” (Ette) and thus fill in the voids of those two events that elude our conscious experience: death and birth. The 28 text passages in the corpus of this thesis negotiate the analogy of birth and death on four thematic axes: At the level of the </span></span></span><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span lang="en-GB"><em>processual</em></span></span></span><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span lang="en-GB"> (in which direction are we born and in which direction do we die?), the </span></span></span><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span lang="en-GB"><em>surrounding</em></span></span></span><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span lang="en-GB"> (what is the setting for both birth and death?), the </span></span></span><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span lang="en-GB"><em>emotional</em></span></span></span><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span lang="en-GB"> (if we cry at birth, do we also cry at death?) and the </span></span></span><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span lang="en-GB"><em>eventfulness</em></span></span></span><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span lang="en-GB"> (what rituals accompany birth and death and what do we celebrate in the process?). Using texts from these four thematic categories, this Master’s thesis approaches the question of how the analogy of birth and death is represented in baroque and neo-baroque literature and why concrete, sensual, painful, female experience of life at certain times in certain forms of expression so strongly determines, frames and thus guides reflection on the representation and imagination of the great unknown death.</span></span></span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify">&nbsp;</p> <p style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span lang="en-GB">This work is based on the homonymous Master Thesis published in 2023.</span></span></span></p> Hannah Mühlparzer Copyright (c) 2024 Hannah Mühlparzer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 2024-06-07 2024-06-07 8 1 103 10.25365/adv.2024.8.1.8769 Front matter https://journals.univie.ac.at/index.php/adv/article/view/8771 Copyright (c) 2024 Avisos de Viena https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 2024-06-07 2024-06-07 8