Poetics and Politics of Representation in 19th-Century Spanish Realism

3 units

This course will examine the ways in which reality is constructed in the Spanish realist narrative, drawing both on nineteenth-century novelists' own conceptualizations of realism and on modern theoretical approaches to this problem. We will explore the evolving notions of realism in the nineteenth-century in view of the esthetic and ideological projects of individual authors, focusing in particular on the ways in which issues of gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity and national identity find articulation in realist discourse. Literary readings will include narrative fiction by such canonical figures as Galdós, Clarín, Pardo Bazán, and Valera, as well as a representative sampling of works by lesser-known women and popular novelists of the period.