Alfo Aguado (NYU)
“Two Films by Juan Antonio Bardem. Italian Neorealism as a Toolkit for Reassessing the Spanish Civil War.”
My dissertation studies the circulation of Italian neorealist cinema in Spain and Latin America in the 1950s. The project aims to show how filmmakers in Spain, Argentina and Mexico took the experience of Italy’s postwar neorealism as a cultural model that allowed them to challenge and reassess elements of their own national identities. The research that I will present in El Taller is the dissertation’s second chapter, which focuses on the cinema of Juan Antonio Bardem and neorealism in Spain. The chapter’s main argument is that in 1950s Spain, communist intellectuals such as Bardem imported the rhetorical devices of neorealist debates in Italy to advance an anti-Francoist agenda without engaging in overt political discourse. In the films Muerte de un ciclista (1955) and Sonatas (1959), Bardem borrowed images, themes, and styles associated with the legacy of Italian neorealist culture. In these films, Bardem challenged various aspects of Spain’s political reality. My chapter pays particular attention to Bardem’s veiled references to the Spanish Civil War, an element common to these movies that has been generally overlooked in the scholarship so far.
Respondents:
Eduardo Matos Martín (NYU)
Steven Marsh (University of Illinois, Chicago)
Adrienne Banko (University of South Carolina)
From a 21st century viewpoint, the interview collections España para ti…para siempre (1976) and Cinco años de País (1982) can be seen as artifacts of the Spanish Transition to democracy and should be regarded as lieux de mémoire. Scholars chronicling the Transition and its impacts have positioned Rosa Montero as a linchpin between the social and political transitions interwoven into the foundation of Spain’s democratic emergence from Francoism. Reading these works and seeing the accompanying portraits of popular and influential individuals from our contemporary vantage point, one can begin to interrogate the trajectory of public opinion of the Transition as a kind of ideological reckoning. Montero’s contributions in the form of these literary interviews have helped form the identity of contemporary Spain and give voice to its history of becoming.
My research is not an exhaustive study of the Spanish Transition nor of Rosa Montero’s canon. I analyze how she participates in, influences, and presents the political and social transitions in Spain since the death of Franco, arguing that these interview collections should be considered lieux de mémoire contributing to the Spanish collective memory of the Transitional period in “radical” defiance of the “grand narrative” of the Franco regime.
Respondents:
Sebastiaan Faber (Oberlin)
Evelyn Scaramella (Manhattan)
Aaron Forman (NYU)
This paper explores the political transformation of Al-Andalus that occurred in the mid-twelfth century as a result of the Almohad invasion, and analyzes Jewish sources that react to the changes. I begin by examining how the Almohads’ attitudes toward dhimmis became embedded in the ideology of a powerful empire, even though such views were unprecedented before the twelfth century in Islamic territory. I then turn to Abraham Ibn Ezra’s “Lament for Andalusian Jewry” and Joseph Ibn Aqnin’s Tibb al-Nufus (Healing of the Soul) to present the different ways that Jews described and memorialized these events from both within and outside the Iberian peninsula. My research demonstrates the degree to which the Almohad invasion impacted Al-Andalus’ Jewish community, especially those who chose to continue to identify themselves as Jewish even after converting to Islam under duress.
Respondents:
Ross Brann (Cornell)
Isabelle Levy (Columbia)
Laura Keyt (NYU)
This work-in-progress is one part of a two-part Chapter and I intend to argue that the form (shape) and object of the cofre is a seventeenth-century evolution of the velatio-revelation dialectic I trace throughout my Dissertation in relation to framed tales and the body. I will argue that the frame’s extrication in Cervantes evinces new relationships between the text and the body involving concepts of the nation, blood purity, and other Counter-Reformation cultural changes. I call this chapter ‘Un-framing in Cervantes’ oeuvre’ because I read the Novelas ejemplares and the Ocho comedias, alongside the ‘Curioso impertinente’, as complexly overlaid disavowals of the repetition of generic forms that point to ritual and affect as sites of signifying repetition that confound the text and the body. For Bachelard, the cofre is a site of (the psychology of) secrecy, a container of the unforgettable, and a nexus of the meaning-making operation of the interior-exterior dialectic. I intend to utilize a 1662 archival case from the Ducado of Béjar (connected textually-topographically through DQ’s dedicatoria) to explore juridical language around the cofre as a unique container and a uniquely violable object as well as exploring the spatialization of the town and the power relations revealed by that representation.
Respondents:
Julia Hernández (NYU)
Jesús Velasco (Yale)
Robert Myak (Princeton)
“The Malnourishment of the Metropolis: Humoristic Representations of Hunger in Madrid’s Postwar Culture of Autarchy”
This presentation originates in the on-going investigation that I am conducting for the second chapter of my dissertation, which is tentatively titled The Francoist Peace: XXV Years of Hunger, the Black Market, and Survival. Spain 1939-1964. This chapter explores the medical humor of the period following the Spanish Civil War (1941-1945), as presented in the satirical magazine La codorniz. I sustain that in this epoch characterized by poverty and famine, the humorists of La codorniz, notably Wenceslao Fernández Flórez, address the experience of living in a modern metropolis. The metropolis examined is Madrid, for until 1945, the magazine was solely published there, humorously criticizing its social life. While censure rendered abject criticism of the period’s social ills impossible (Peiró and Rosón 13), the writers were able to tangentially allude to the health crisis wrought by famine through two sorts of humor that I tentatively label the humor of lack and the humor of ineptitude. For this presentation, I will focus on the former, which is demonstrated by such diverse articles as the comical story of a fisherman who fishes for “nothing” because of his wife’s doctor’s orders to eat less (no. 95) or the article concerning “leche sucedánea” / substitute milk (no. 108)
Respondents:
Jo Labanyi (NYU)
Paul Julian Smith (CUNY)