Noel Valis - Böcker

In this thoughtful and compelling book, leading Spanish literature scholar Noël Valis re-examines the role of Catholicism in the modern Spanish novel. While other studies of fiction and faith have focused largely on religious themes, Sacred Realism views the religious impulse as a crisis of modernity: a fundamental catalyst in the creative and moral development of Spanish narrative.

A reflection on Federico García Lorca’s life, his haunting death, and the fame that reinvigorated the marvelous in the modern world  “A galaxy of critical insights into the cultural shock waves circling and crisscrossing Lorca’s execution and his unknown resting place, there is not a single book on Lorca like this one.”—Andrés Zamora, Vanderbilt University  There is something fundamentally unfinished about the life and work of Federico García Lorca (1898–1936), and not simply because his life ended abruptly. Noël Valis reveals how this quality gives shape to the ways in which he has been continuously reimagined since his death. Lorca’s execution at the start of the Spanish Civil War was not only horrific but transformative, setting in motion many of the poet’s afterlives. He is intimately tied to both an individual and a collective identity, as the people’s poet, a gay icon, and fabled member of a dead poets’ society. The specter of his violent death continues to haunt everything connected to Lorca, fueling the desire to fill in the gaps in the poet’s biography.

Not easily translated, the Spanish terms cursi and cursilerÍa refer to a cultural phenomenon widely prevalent in Spanish society since the nineteenth century. Like "kitsch," cursi evokes the idea of bad taste, but it also suggests one who has pretensions of refinement and elegance without possessing them. In The Culture of CursilerÍa, NoËl Valis examines the social meanings of cursi, viewing it as a window into modern Spanish history and particularly into the development of middle-class culture.Valis finds evidence in literature, cultural objects, and popular customs toargue that cursilerÍa has its roots in a sense of cultural inadequacy felt by the lower middle classes in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Spain. The Spain of this era, popularly viewed as the European power most resistant to economic and social modernization, is characterized by Valis as suffering from nostalgia for a bygone, romanticized society that structured itself on strict class delineations. With the development of an economic middle class during the latter half of the nineteenth century, these designations began to break down, and individuals across all levels of the middle class exaggerated their own social status in an attempt to protect their cultural capital. While the resulting manifestations of cursilerÍa were often provincial, indeed backward, the concept was-and still is-closely associated with a sense of home. Ultimately, Valis shows how cursilerÍa embodied the disparity between old ways and new, and how in its awkward manners, airs of pretension, and graceless anxieties it represents Spain's uneasy surrender to the forces of modernity.The Culture of CursilerÍa will interest students and scholars of Latin America, cultural studies, Spanish literature, and modernity.

Courses dealing with the Spanish Civil War are given regularly in literature, foreign language, and history departments, in English and in Spanish. This volume helps instructors plan courses that exploit the interdisciplinary, multigeneric opportunities present in the period's aesthetic output. In thirty-five essays, contributors negotiate the complex relation between art and history in depictions of the war and its aftermath, exploring how memory is shaped.