Post-War Spanish Novel

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

In this course, we will cover several of the most influential Post-War Spanish authors such as Camilo José Cela, Juan Goytisolo, Maria Laforet, Juan Marsé, Carmen Martin Gaite or Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio—who produced their best work under Francoist dictatorship—and post- Francoist transitional authors such as Javier Marías, Eduardo Mendoza, Antonio Muñoz Molina, Cristina Fernández Cubas or Enrique Vila Matas; we will also cover a younger generation of Spanish authors including Javier Cercas, Belén Gopegui, Antonio Orejudo, or Rafael Reig. The objective of this course is to read all these canonical authors and its younger counterparts with fresh critical eyes. We will place their works in their turbulent Spanish historical context in which they were produced, but also in the rich theoretical context provided by critics such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Roland Barthes, Peter Brooks, Paul de Man, Terry Eagleton, Wolfgang Iser, D.A Miller, Franco Moretti, Richard Poirier, Edward Said, among others. Following Jonathan Culler ́s taxonomy of literature, our aim will be to read these novels as historically bound literary artifacts attempting to perform a foregrounding and integration of language, offering themselves not only as paradigms of fiction but as aesthetic, self-reflexive objects. We will pay particular attention to the literary manipulation of space and time to recreate a constrictive Spanish social milieu or to imagine what Richard Poirier has termed a “world elsewhere” where characters can “swell into shapes or defy the realities of space and time.”