Funded by the Government of Ontario's Early Research Award 2007-2011
This project will evaluate how knowledge about time was created, stored, circulated and accessed during the Baroque period in the transatlantic area of the Spanish empire. In order to do so, a team of researchers will take on the study of various kinds of literature that originated between 1550 and 1700 and whose ascription to specific genres is problematic because of their hybrid nature. The hypothesis is that these new forms of “literature” are the result of the increasing complexity created alongside the formation of the first bi-continental and colonial cultural system of Modernity. These new documents are better understood if considered as the emergent products of the complex interactions between the Old and New World. They are repositories in which the new cultural system, developed as a product of the discovery and colonization of Latin America and the consequent realignment of Spain, stored the knowledge created to harness the resulting complexity. Following a model that defines cultural complexity as the result of the relations among circulation of information, modes of representation and forms of domination, the team will analyze how these three “attractors” shape the production and storage of knowledge and how this knowledge is circulated as the common element that will help to keep the cultural area together and to create common patterns of identity. The selection of time as the focal point is the result of previous work by the P.I. in which he uncovered the changing models of time representation in Spanish baroque drama resulting from the discovery of America, the popularization of the mechanical clock and the dependence of early capitalism on the control of time.