The Electric Comedy - Softcover

Perez, Rolando

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1887276238 ISBN 13: 9781887276238

Publisher: Cool Grove Press, 2000

Synopsis

The Electric Comedy is a retelling of the ancient epic about the perennial war between the forces of greed, power, ignorance and (virtual) sex on one side and the deployments of generosity, empowerment, love and enlightened example, on the other, brought to life against the backdrop of the inescapable hyper-reality of our digital web. Grave questions emerge from the deep. Who is helping whom? Who is the spider and who is the fly? Is anyone winning in this scenario?Just as Dante's Divina Commedia dealt with the political and social conditions of Renaissance Italy, Rolando Perez's The Electric Comedy takes the reader through a journey of the soul, in the contemporary global landscape of simulated love, internet capitalism and the new metaphysics of virtual realities. With God dead and Minerva slain, Dante's guiding light is transformed into the artificial light of electricity and a new conception of "vision" with no possibility of redemption. Everyone from Plato to Wired, from Lao-tzu to Bill Gates and beyond end up in the pages of this book. Perez's guide is not Virgil but some old maps left behind by Nietzsche.

About this title

About the Author

Rolando Pérez is professor of Spanish and Latin American literature and philosophy at the Romance Languages Department of Hunter College-CUNY. He is the author of numerous publications on the Neo-Baroque, and the relation between literature, the visual arts, and philosophy. He has written on Severo Sarduy, César Vallejo, Alejandra Pizarnik, Octavio Paz, as well as on Bartolomé de Las Casas, Enrique Dussel, Gilles Deleuz & Félix Guattari, Emmanuel Lévinas, Alain Badiou, and François Laruelle. Pérez is also the author of a number of literary works, some which have been anthologized in The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature (2012). His most recent publication, Severo Sarduy and the Neo-Baroque Image of Thought in the Visual Arts was published in 2011 by Perdue University Press. 2016 saw the publication of of two edited books of essays, Agorapoetics: Poetics after Postmodernism, and Filosofía y culturas hispánicas: nuevas perspectivas, co-edited with Nuria Morgado. And 2017 saw La comedia eléctrica, a translation by Óscar Curieses of The Electric Comedy was published by Amargord Ediciones in Madrid.

From the Back Cover

Just as Dante’s Divine Comedy dealt with political and social conditions of Renaissance Italy, Rolando Perez’s The Electric Comedy takes the reader through a journey of the soul in the contemporary global landscape of simulated love, Internet capitalism and the new metaphysics of virtual realities.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cool Grove Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1887276238
• ISBN 13: 9781887276238
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 164