The Marriage of Art and Honor: Anamorphosis and Control in Calderón's La dama duende
Anamorphosis, broadly speaking, refers to visual tricks and conceits that arise with the invention and development of Renaissance single point perspective. The plays of Calderón de la Barca not only make generous use of visually anamorphic strategies to simultaneously illuminate and hide the progress of their intriguing plots, the language of painting and baroque theories of representation are important structural and narrative elements in his dramatic practice. This study examines Calderón's use of anamorphosis in his drama of intrigue La dama duende, concluding that the playwright dramatizes the relationship between art and the human faculties of the imagination and judgment in order to circumscribe the production of marvelous artistic spectacles within the social and political arena of honor. (BJN)
TOWARDS A DEFINITION OF CALDERONIAN TRAGEDY
It is generally considered that Spain has made no significant and original contribution to tragic drama. The belief is in fact prevalent that the Spanish drama possesses no real tragedies. This is often explicitly stated in general histories of the European theatre. In particular studies of Tragedy it is explicitly stated, for instance, in Herbert Muller's The Spirit of Tragedy, where there are separate sections on the tragedy of the Greeks, of the Elizabethans, of the French and of modern times, and where the Spanish drama is dismissed in eighteen lines, among which we find this statement: “For Spain remained orthodox, Catholic, hierarchical; and Spain wrote no tragedy. Its greatest dramatist, Calderon, presented some nominally tragic actions but always arrived at a pious or patriotic conclusion, resounding with devotion to God, king or country.”
The micro-mechanical behaviour of artificially cemented sand particles under compression and shear
The mechanical behaviour of cemented sands at macro-scale has been widely studied in the past, while there is still a lack of laboratory test data for the micro-mechanical response. Therefore, a series of uniaxial compression and tangential shear tests on artificially cemented sand particles have been conducted using a microscope to observe their behaviour. First, the consistency of cemented particles with different cementing agents is discussed. Three breakage modes are proposed according to the images taken using a microscope camera. A new parameter named ‘local roundness at contact’ is introduced to emphasise the effect of contact morphology on sample strength. Moreover, the effect of bond thickness on the mechanical response of cemented particles has been investigated. Finally, the shear strength parameters of artificially cemented sand samples have been determined for two different sample diameters.