This module seeks to introduce students to the varied and fecund literary experimentation that took place in Spain during the early decades of the twentieth century and beyond. By examining outstanding examples of the novel, this course encourages students to view writing in Spain during this period from the wider perspective of Modernism as a worldwide literary movement. In addition. It is an ideal introduction to the philosophy and fiction of the Generation of 1898 (and the considerable impact of this grouping on twentieth-century Spanish culture), literary experimentation, metafiction, and the literary exploration of the relationship between narrative and authority, literature and philosophy.

• Assess the nature of literary experimentation and activity that took place in Spain before the Spanish Civil War.
• Analyse this in terms of the wider global movement known as Modernism.
• Discuss a wide-range of Peninsular Spanish and European cultural contexts.

Weekly seminars in which students offer a presentation in pairs upon a given aspect of the works in question, before taking part in a discussion of themes that arise from this, and engaging in a close-reading of the texts.

ACADEMIC

Students will gain the practical ability to: think and speak clearly about cultural history and literature. Write critically about cultural history and literature. Apply these ideas to extrinsic models.

SUBJECT SPECIFIC

Understand the role of literature in modern Spain. Analyse, discuss and write critically upon an aspect of modern Spanish literature, and its implications within contemporary cross-cultural and political parameters.

EMPLOYABILITY SKILLS

Think and communicate clearly about literature and culture in general. Give and receive constructive criticism concerning complex ideas through the medium of group seminars and presentations. Research topics of a challenging intellectual nature and present their findings through the construction of a clear and well-written analytical argument.

This overview of literary achievements in Spain during the Modernist period will examine a broad range of topics. Through the delivery format of seminar presentation and discussion, students will be able to shape their contribution to the module and carry out their own research related to their assessments and interests.

The course will survey the prose writing of the Generation of 1898, its historical and intellectual context, its philosophical emphases, and its uses of the Spanish landscape and the Spanish cultural tradition in its construction of meaning, in addition to its contribution to new modes of narrative in Spanish fiction, the literary expression of competing philosophical outlooks, of conflicting models of intellectual formation and development, and of opposing interpretations of landscape and historical past. Students will also discuss the Generation’s intimate focus on the physiognomy of contemporary Spanish society and its relationship with the national cultural tradition, and reflect on writers’ conscious use of cultural icons in their projection of an historically specific artistic perspective.

It seeks to familiarise students with procedures such as: pictorial and impressionistic description as a form of representation; the appeal to cultural archetypes in the construction of intimate meaning; the structures and semantic content of literary language in the expression of mysticism, spirituality and the ennobling power of art; the use of cultural artefacts in literary meditation on history; literary characterisation as the exemplification of larger philosophical patterns and the intellectual formation of the literary protagonist. As well as perennial philosophical themes represented in these works, students will consider the more focussed questions of narrative technique and point of view, the relationship between author, reader, narrator and protagonist, early manifestations of metafiction in Spanish literature and its concern with authorship, and the literary investigation into the nature of truth and reality.

Primary Sources:

Ramón del Valle-Inclán. Sonata de otoño (1902).

Pío Baroja. El Árbol de la ciencia (1911).

Antonio Machado. Campos de Castilla (1912).

José Martínez Ruíz (“Azorín”). Castilla (1912).

Miguel de Unamuno. Niebla (1914).

Secondary Sources:

Mary Lee Bretz. Encounters Across Borders. The Changing Visions of Spanish Modernism, 1890-1930 (London: Associated University Presses, 2001).

Peter Childs. Modernism (London: Routledge, 2002).

E. Irman Fox. La crisis intelectual del 98 (Madrid: Editorial Cuadernos para el Dialogo, 1976).

H. Ramsden. The 1898 Movement in Spain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1974).

D.L. Shaw. The Generation of 1898 in Spain (London: E. Benn, 1975).

A full list of journal articles will be provided in the course kit for this module.