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Y Tu Mamá También (2001), an intelligent and sensual road movie directed by Alfonso Cuarón and co-written by him and his brother Carlos, is both an acclaimed feature by a director who would go on to win Oscars and a box office success abroad and in its native Mexico, where it was the biggest grossing local film of all time. Its teenage protagonists Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna went on to be major stars of global cinema.

Yet on its release the film was vilified by established Mexican critics as a coarse comedy and 'Penthouse fantasy' of youthful lust for an older woman. Paul Julian Smith's lucid study of the film argues that Y Tu Mamá También not only addresses with playful seriousness such major issues as gender, race, class, and space, which are yet more urgent now than they were on its release; but that the film's apparently casual aesthetic masks a sophisticated audiovisual style, one which brings together popular genre film and auteurist experiment.

Smith suggests Y Tu Mamá También remains an example for world cinema of how a very local film can connect with a global audience that is ignorant of such niceties. Combining production and distribution history, based on unexplored material held in Mexico City archives, with close textual analysis, Smith makes an argument for Cuarón's film as an enduring masterpiece that hides in plain sight as an ephemeral teen movie.

By Zoltan Varga (Ph.D. '13, Comparative Literature)

Drawing on the analogy between musical meaning-making and human subjectivity, this book develops the concept of the acoustic self, exploring the ways in which musical characterization and structure are related to issues of subject-representation in the modernist English novel. The volume is framed around three musical topics—the fugue, absolute music, and Gesamtkunstwerk—arguing that these three modes of musicalization address modernist dilemmas around selfhood and identity. Varga reflects on the manifestations of the acoustic self in examples from the works of E.M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, and Virginia Woolf, and such musicians as Bach, Beethoven, Handel, and Wagner. An additional chapter on jazz and electronic music supplements these inquiries, pursuing the acoustic self beyond modernism and thereby inciting further discussion and theorization of musical intermediality, as well as recent sonic practices.

This book offers a new perspective via visual culture of the reimagining of history for contemporary Spanish media audiences. It gives close readings of major recent texts in a number of media (theater, cinema, television, and streaming) which have yet to receive scholarly attention and are closely connected to each other. And it stresses the intermediality of the visual by calling attention to connections between those media and others such as painting. From Picasso to the Javis and from the classic serial to Netflix, this book shows how Spanish history is radically reimagined through recent visual culture.