Approaches to Teaching the Works of Miguel de Unamuno ed. by Luis Álvarez-Castro

Abstract

Reviewed by: Approaches to Teaching the Works of Miguel de Unamuno ed. by Luis Álvarez-Castro Francesc Morales Álvarez-Castro, Luis, ed. Approaches to Teaching the Works of Miguel de Unamuno. Modern Language Association of America, 2020. 247 pp. ISBN: 9781603294423. Miguel de Unamuno is one of the most studied and debated Spanish authors from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is no surprise, then, that one of the last additions to the Modern Language Association of America publications is a book about the Basque-born writer. The following essay reviews the goals, target, and possibilities of Approaches to Teaching the Works of Miguel de Unamuno, edited by Luis Álvarez-Castro. The context in which the volume has been published will also be an element of concern for this academic review. As part of the MLA series, this volume provides instructors with resources to teach certain literary texts. Nonetheless, Spanish letters do not have a strong predicament among the series. If readers look at the one hundred and seventy-one volumes in the collection Approaches to Teaching World Literature, they will see how very few explore Spanish literature. Less than seven per cent are related to authors or works from Spanish letters. Therefore, the book edited by Álvarez-Castro in 2020 is not just a qualitative addition to the ranks of MLA scholarly production, but also a necessary quantitative one. The goal and target of the volume has a clear double intention in mind. On the one hand, "while Unamuno's critical relevance in Spanish studies is secure and indisputable, the author's standing is less prominent in other academic fields and in Spanish literature syllabi at the undergraduate level" (ix). Also, he is greatly underrepresented in the broader context of comparative studies, such as general education courses on world literature, as well as in courses taught by departments of philosophy, religion, French, and English (ix). Indeed, Approaches to Teaching the Works of Miguel de Unamuno is helpful not just for instructors of Spanish literature classes, but also for English and philosophy courses as well. The interdisciplinary nature of the text is the main contribution of the book to the humanities at large because the philosophical aspect of the writer is often neglected. This section needed a better location in the organization of the essays, instead of an odd position next to the last. To effectively organize the 247-page volume, Álvarez-Castro divided the book into two distinctive parts. The first section gives information on different editions and translations of Unamuno's works focusing primarily on scholarly and critical sources. The second section is a group of essays that introduce students to the range of his works in Spanish language and literature, comparative literature, religion, and philosophy classrooms. More so, it includes audiovisual resources still in preparation at [End Page 205] the time of completing the book, such as Alejandro Amenábar's film Mientras dure la guerra, "a historical film based on the last six months of the writer's life" (16). In other words, part one, together with the works cited section at the end of the edited volume, is likely the most complete bibliographical recollection about Unamuno to date. On the other hand, the scope of part two is so vast that it required a subdivision about the writer's biography and his texts as a teaching tool. Indeed, the short essays cover a variety of approaches, including the biographical details. The exile the author suffered in the 1920s is present in several of the essays, such as in the ones by Stephen Summerhill (71) and by Ana Urrutia-Jordana (87–92). Also, the admiration he had for other Iberian cultures, such as the Portuguese and the Catalan, is certainly addressed in the introduction written by Álvarez-Castro himself (19) and in Juan Francisco Maura's text: Unamuno learned that "there is no history of Spain without Portugal and that the history of Spanish literature would be incomplete if it did not embrace Portuguese literature as one of its central components" (77). As Maura asserts in his essay, the Basque writer has a lot to offer given current nationalist polemics in Spain (77). Here we have...