LETTERATURA SPAGNOLA DAI “NOVATORES” ALLE AVANGUARDIE STORICHE

The aim of this course is to provide basic hermeneutic tools in order to allow for a conscious and autonomous critical analysis of the works in the syllabus. Given the premise that each work, no matter in what historical period it is produced, exists as a semiotic object, its reading and interpretation cannot ignore the relations that it entertains, implicitly or explicitly, with the culture and the society of its time (or immediately preceding it), both at a national and a transnational level. In order to grasp such co-relations – as well as to shed light on those textual values that escape a merely aesthetic examination – an interdisciplinary approach is crucial: this means, during the analysis, to make use of narratology, cultural history, philosophy, theories of identity and alterity (especially indebted to gender studies), and, wherever useful, to psychoanalysis.

Lectures.

- critical history of Spanish literature: a) from the slavish imitation of hegemonic European literatures to the construction of a “national” literature, 18^th-19^th centuries; b) fin de siècle literature (between the 19th and the 20th century), between catholic-casticismo and avant-garde: the necessity of a critical revision of “generation” as a historical category; c) innovation of the literary genres of drama, novel and poetry in the light of tradition (from 1898 to 1927); d) “high” literature, consumer literature and the reading public at the time of dictatorships (from Primo de Rivera to Francisco Franco); e) exile literature, literature of the regime, and the role of the intellectual (1939-1975);

- texts: with the aim of moving beyond a narrowly and hierarchically understood idea of canonical literary texts, the texts chosen all belong in the margins of the hegemonic biopolitical discourse, negotiating some of its instances in different, at times contradictory, ways. not unlike canonical texts, each of them contributes to sketching out – sometimes belatedly, at other times unexpectedly in advance – the history of (not only) the aesthetic-literary ideas developing in Spain across the centuries after the Siglo de Oro. Rather than in their conversation with contemporary literature, the most valuable merit of such literary output lies in their shared, textually performed refusal of both stifling and acritical views of notions such as “nationality”/“hispanicity” as well as in reclaiming through their dissident discourse the authoritative agency of peripheral subjects.

Methodological texts

- ♣ Bernardelli, A., La narrazione, Laterza “Alfabeto letterario”, Roma-Bari, 1999 (138 pp.);

- ♣ Marchese, A., Dizionario di retorica e stilistica, Mondadori, Milano, 1990 (only the following entries: allegoria; ambiguità; amplificazione; anacoluto; anafora; analessi; analisi; attante; autore; bildungsroman; canon; captatio benevolentiae; carattere; citazione; cliché; codice; comparazione; comunicazione letteraria (paragraph 3 of the entry “comunicazione”); connotazione; contenuto; contesto; corpus; cultura; denotazione; descrizione; destinatario; deus ex machina; dialogo; digressione; disambiguamento; discorso; dispositio; elocutio; eroe; ex abrupto; extratestualità; fabula; figura; flusso di coscienza; fruizione; generi letterari; grado zero; ideologia; incipit; in medias res; intenzionalità; interpretazione; intertestualità; intratestualità; intreccio; inventio; iperbato; iperbole; ipotassi; ironia; isotopia; leitmotiv; letterarietà; letteratura; lettore; locus amoenus; macrotesto; metafora; metonìmia; mise en abìme; mito; monologo; narrativa; narratore; narrazione; norma; novella; opera aperta; orizzonte d’attesa; ossimoro; paratassi; paronomàsia; pastiche; peripezia; personaggio; polisemia; prolessi; prosa; punto di vista; reticenza; retorica; ridondanza; romanzo; simbolo; similitudine; sinèddoche; stile; straniamento; suspense; testo; tópos; trama; weltanschauung; voce).

History of Literature

♣ Alvar, C., Mainer J.C., Navarro, R., Breve historia de la literatura española (pp. 431-614).

Main texts to read

- Burgos “Colombine”, C. de, La mujer fría, Prensa Popular, Madrid, 1922 (http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra/la-mujer-fria-novela-inedita-1053275/);

- Jiménez, J.R., Eternidades. Verso (1916-1917), [Ángel Alcoy], Madrid, 1918 (https://archive.org/details/eternidadesverso00jimn/page/n17/mode/2up);

- ♣ Unamuno, M. de, Dos madres, in Id., Tres novelas ejemplares y un prólogo, Alianza, Castalia, Madrid, 2004⁴, pp. 43-71;

- ▼Selected excerpts from texts published between the eighteenth- and the twenty centuries.

Criticism

- ▼ Arrington Bruner Smith, E., (S)Mothering in Miguel de Unamuno’s Dos Madres: the fatal Repercussions of the Nineteenth-Century idealization of the Mother, in «Hispanic Journal», 20, 2, 1999, pp. 351-361;

- ♣ Carilla, E., El problema de las épocas literarias en Juan Ramán Jiménez, in «Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica», 36, 2, 1988, pp. 1251-1264;

- ♣ Foucault, M., a) Sorvegliare e punire, Einaudi, Torino, 1993, only pp. 147-177 (I corpi docili, from the paragraph “I corpi docili” to the paragraph “L’organizzazione delle genesi” included) and pp. 213-247 (Il panoptismo);

- ♣ Freud, S., Il perturbante, in Id., Saggi sull’arte, la letteratura e il linguaggio, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino, 1991, pp. 269-307;

- ♣ Krauel, R., Hacia una redefinición de la sensualidad femenina en la modernidad: La mujer fría de Carmen de Burgos, in «Bulletin of Hispanic Studies», 80, 2003, pp. 525-536;

- ♣ Lotman, J.M., Il metalinguaggio delle descrizioni tipologiche della cultura, in Lotman, J.M. e Uspenskij, B.A., Tipologia della cultura, Bompiani, Milano, 1995, pp. 145-181.

N.B.

a) the texts preceded by the following symbols:

♣ can be found at the Biblioteca delle Scienze dell’antichità, filologico-letterarie e storico-artistiche;

▼ will be available for download on STUDIUM;

b) for the texts that are downloadable in pdf format, a link has been provided in parenthesis after the title;

c) attendance to class is advised but not obligatory; however, all students must attend class at least once in order to understand what will be required of them at the oral exam. All classes will be held during the first semester. Those who, for valid reasons, cannot attend class even on a single occasion, will be allowed to listen to an oral exam.