View Of Spain Research Articles

Nikos Kazantzakis's Bergsonian Spain : Connecting Philosophy, Spanish Literature and Cultural Landscapes

Nikos Kazantzakis's Bergsonian Spain:Connecting Philosophy, Spanish Literature and Cultural Landscapes Benjamin Fraser Anyone who goes to Spain today has a great responsibility, if he decides to report her fearful tragedy to other human beings. He is no longer out of danger. He can no longer be irresponsible, free to portray costumes, landscapes, gardens and old churches and pretty scenes, or exotic spectales: the gypsies of Seville, the dancers and the castanets and the bullfights. Nikos Kazantzakis, Spain 159-60, penned in Autumn, 1936 We may never know what French philosopher Henri Bergson might have written had he been able to travel extensively throughout Spain1 — but thankfully we have Nikos Kazantzakis's Bergsonian travelogue Spain (Taxidhevontas Ispania, 1937) to consider. Kazantzakis (1883-1957) — one of the most significant Greek authors of the twentieth century2 — was, like many Spaniards themselves,3 a former student of Bergson's in Paris (Poulakidas 267; see also Owens, Creative 56-64). It is clear that these classes, which he attended between 1907-1908, resonated powerfully with Kazantzakis — in 1913, he published a lengthy article on Bergson's thought in the Bulletin of the Educational Society, in 1915 he translated Bergson's Laughter into modern Greek, and as Andreas Poulakidas convincingly argues in his "Kazantzakis and Bergson," the Greek novelist's fiction is heavily marked by the French philosopher's intuitions regarding temporality, memory and consciousness (Poulakidas 267, 273, 268-72; on Bergsonian influence see also Middleton 4-7; Dombrowski 9-26; [End Page 37] Bien, Kazantzakis 36-53). N. Georgopoulos alleges an even more profound connection between the thought of each, writing that, "the element that gave that wholeness [of Kazantzakis's thought] its encompassing and integral character and the thread that lent it continuity was the philosophy of Henri Bergson" (34; also Bien, Nikos; Friedman). Even later in life, Kazantzakis would write to a friend, recalling those days in Paris when "awe-struck, I used to attend the courses of my revered master, Henri Bergson" (letter to Börje Knös dated October 4, 1946; excerpt reprinted in H. Kazantzakis 459). Surprisingly, the Greek's travelogue itself has scarcely been touched by Hispanist critics — just as it has been overshadowed by studies of Kazantzakis's fiction within the humanities more broadly considered. It would seem that the only notable exception to these trends is Emmanuel Hatzantonis's essay titled "Kazantzakis's Spiritual Journey through Spain," published in Hispania in December of 1966. Therein, Hatzantonis provides a general overview of Spain, mentioning that in 1926, Kazantzakis visited Spain for the first time and had an interview with Primo de Rivera. Six years later he returned to Madrid, meeting such old friends as Timoteo Pérez Rubio and Juan Ramón Jiménez, and making the acquaintance of Lorca, Benavente, Valle-Inclán and other eminent writers. As a result of his intensive study of Peninsular literature, Kazantzakis undertook the translation into modern Greek of selected poems from the works of Unamuno, Salinas, Lorca, Aleixandre, Alberti, Moreno Villa and other contemporary Spanish poets. Unfortunately his enthusiasm for work was interrupted by the news of his father's sudden death. Overwhelmed with grief, he sought relief by means of a long trip throughout the Peninsula, but he came back to Madrid disconsolate and shortly after, left Spain (March 23, 1933). He returned three years later as a correspondent covering the Civil War, and in 1950 as a tourist accompanied by his wife and some friends. (787) The brief essay goes on to highlight a number of pertinent details—namely that Kazantzakis's volume eschews a romantic/touristic view of Spain and gives priority to Spain's literature4 — yet this approach to "Greece's first travel-book" (790) is in the main focused on pointing out that "Evidently, Kazantzakis's Spain is neither a tourist's chronicle nor a travelogue offering a host of major or minor 'useful' data intended to instruct the prospective Greek tourist" (790). Given that Hatzantonis's published overview is so brief, that it is relatively descriptive instead of analytical, and that it was published over fifty years ago, it is imperative to suggest that there may be much more...

Plumbing the Depths of Galdos’s View of Spain: The Confounding Accomplishment of José Bergamín

Plumbing the Depths of Galdos’s View of Spain: The Confounding Accomplishment of José Bergamín1 Peter Bly In Memoriam Nigel Dennis (1949–2013) The name of José Bergamín (1895–1983), generally ranked as a minor poet of the Generation of 1927, is not one that contemporary scholars would automatically and firmly associate with Galdós criticism, yet barely two months ago, during the X Congreso Internacional Galdosiano, the novelist and writer, Juan José Armas Marcelo, pointedly did so in his plenary paper, as was reported on-line: Relató cómo José Bergamín le dijo en los años 70 que las novelas de Galdós y los Episodios Nacionales “le parecieron rancios, viejos, y sobre todo, mal escritos.” “Pasados los años, volvió a releer a Galdós y quedó deslumbrado y, sobre todo, sorprendido porque en la primera lectura no había visto con ojos objetivos la grandeza literaria que significaba,” rememoró. (Álamo) In fact, Armas Marcelo was repeating a “tópico” or common place in the history of Galdós criticism, however insignificant it may seem, to wit, that Bergamín—like a number of other members of the Generation of 1927—changed over time his evaluation of Galdós’s work. Equally representative of this “tradition” were the vagueness and confusion generated by Armas Marcelo’s words: it is not clear whether Bergamín revised his opinions in the 1970s or earlier, although, if the latter, the exact time is not indicated. Furthermore, the reasons Armas Marcelo gives for the revision merely relate to the perceived greatness of Galdós’s work on a second reading, whatever that may mean. None the less, his comments have the merit of being the reported words of Bergamín himself. It was J. E. Varey (1), in his 1970 review of post-1920 views of Galdós, who first called attention to the initial—negative—phase in Bergamín’s opinions, as displayed in a 1933 article (see below), but without referring to the later ones, an omission that Stephen Gilman (249, note 4) subsequently followed. In his mammoth critical review of Galdosian criticism, Anthony Percival (86) did highlight Bergamín’s 1957 essay on Galdós and Goya as one of only a few on the topic, but failed to identify his 1933 dismissal of Galdós, merely noting that like other writers between 1920–35, he tended to ignore Galdós’s work (205). Percival then identifies (209) Bergamín as one of the many exiled Spaniards who wrote in 1943 centenary studies on Galdós in South American journals, but without ranking his contribution amongst the more interesting ones that he cites. Even those scholars who have treated, for example, the topic of “Tolstoy and Galdós” that Bergamín had treated before them, either fail to acknowledge his work (Arnáiz Amigo, Colin) or ignore it as too general (Turner “Metaphor” 895). For their part, Bergamín scholars have been equally remiss in providing concrete data about their author’s [End Page 11] writings on Galdós, likewise preferring to make general statements. Diego Martínez Torrón includes—albeit with qualifications—the name of Galdós in his chapter on Bergamín’s literary mentors: También hay otros autores del XIX, si bien no muchos, a que se refiere Bergamín, por ejemplo, a Galdós, que podría parecer muy lejano de la estética de nuestro poeta. Le interesa la España de Galdós y el tema religioso en su novela, siguiendo los criterios de Menéndez Pelayo y Azorín. Y en otro sitio se refiere a Galdós y al pueblo español. Obviamente la influencia galdosiana incide más como guía populista y sentimental que de eficacia en el modo de expresión poética. (44) Even the recently departed and sadly missed doyen of Bergamín scholars, Nigel Dennis, committed the same error, albeit with his customary wryness, in a footnote to his edition of the writer’s collection of essays, El pasajero: Es curioso constatar en los escritos de Bergamín anteriores a 1935, aproximadamente, una notable indiferencia o incluso hostilidad...

Estampas y retratos de España en el "Viaje" de Sarmiento

This article explores one of the most representative titles in Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s oeuvre: the narrative of his journey to Spain ( Viaje ), undertaken in 1846. The Argentinean writer and politician articulates, with extraordinary stylistic flair, a critical view of Spain founded on his aesthetic perceptions. Sarmiento puts together a mosaic of sketches, etchings, portraits, and painterly allusions to the history of Spanish art as well as descriptions of Spanish cities, people, customs, and habits. It adds up to a museum of ignorance and underdevelopment: the panorama of a country reluctant to open itself up to the progressive currents of the nineteenth century. In this way, Sarmiento conveys the perspective of a genteel intellectual who never failed to feel a literary fascination towards the faces of barbarism.

Juana of Castile: History and Myth of the Mad Queen (review)

Reviewed by: Juana of Castile: History and Myth of the Mad Queen Kevin Poole Gómez, María, Santiago Juan-Navarro, and Phyllis Zatlin, eds. Juana of Castile: History and Myth of the Mad Queen. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2008. Pp. 267. ISBN 978-0-8387-5704-8. In recent years the figure of Juana "la Loca", daughter of the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, has become the subject of much study. The legend of her madness, created by her husband Phillip "the Handsome", her father, and her son Charles V, was for nineteenth-century Romantics an attractive story of emotion and intrigue that shaped their understanding of Spanish history and identity. From the 1850s on, a fictionalized Juana has appeared in literary, dramatic, and visual arts throughout the world. Likewise, numerous biographies have been written, some more fictional than historical, in an attempt to understand Juana's life and condition. This book, "the first interdisciplinary book that looks at both sides of the story—history and myth, fact and fiction" (27), explores the Juana phenomenon from various angles, presenting her madness as a social and political construct and her victimization as the result of her gender. In the first part of the book, "The Historical Context", Bethany Aram and Elena Gascón Vera present a partial history of Juana's life in order to clarify some of the misconceptions created by previous biographers. Aram clearly explains the court manipulations to which Juana fell victim, while Gascón describes the similarities between Juana's situation and that of her sister Catherine in the English court. Both authors rely on primary documentation, but their goal is to interpret those documents through the lens of modern feminism. There are, however, contradictions that create confusion for the reader. Aram claims that the deaths of three people allowed Juana to ascend to the Castilian throne (34), but the book's introduction says that the number was four (12). Gascón claims that Juana's formation was not political yet also claims that Isabella trained her to be a ruler (48). Such statements should be clarified. The second part of the book, "Juana of Castile in Spanish Literature", analyzes Juana as a Spanish literary creation of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. David George explores necrophilia in Manuel Tamayo y Baus's play La locura de amor (1855). José Luis Mora García gives an excellent analysis of the religious and social theories of Benito Pérez Galdós seen in his 1918 drama Santa Juana de Castilla. Mercedes Tasende studies the use of humor as an alternative interpretation to Juana's tragic situation in Ramón Gómez de la Serna's superhistory Doña Juana la Loca (y otras). Federico García Lorca's "Elegía a Doña Juana la Loca", as well as other works in which victimized women appear, is the subject of Salvatore Poeta's study of Lorca's personal feelings for Juana and her situation of repression and sadness. Finally, Vilma Navarro-Daniels offers a very well written analysis of the use of Erasmus and Humanism in Manuel Martín Mediero's 1982 drama Juana del amor hermoso. "Foreign Representations of the Mad Queen", part 3 of the book, centers on Juana in non-peninsular literature. Becky Boling explains Miguel Sabido's use of Juana's femininity in his drama Falsa crónica de Juana la Loca to represent Mexico as the "Other" during the Colonial Period. Tara Foster summarizes the works of several French authors, pointing out French Romanticists' view of Spain as a land of cruelty and backwardness and modern writers' use of Juana as alter-ego or as a means by which to explore one's own psyche. After a somewhat chaotic introduction, Phyllis Zatlin summarizes the lives and works of the dramatists Emmanuel Roblès, José Martín Elizondo, Christine Wystup, and Eduardo Manet, analyzing the character of Juana created by each. Juana's appearance in painting, opera, and cinema comprise the fourth part of the book, "Juana of Castile in Opera and the Visual Arts". María Elena Soliño explains the role of historical paintings from the period of Isabella II to Alfonso XII...

Sidney's "mongrell tragicomedy" and Anglo-Spanish Exchange in the New Arcadia

In 1586, Sir Philip Sidney died fighting the Spanish in the Netherlands.1 His death marked one episode during the conflict between Spain and England that would reach its apex with the launching of the Armada in 1588. Yet political and personal records give us ambivalent rather than strictly oppositional views of Sidney's dealings with the Elizabethans' most formidable enemy. Fulke Greville relates that the Spanish ambassador, upon learning of Sidney's demise, could not but lament to see Christendome depriv'd of so rare a light in those cloudy times; and bewail poor widow England-so he term'd her-that having been many years in breeding one eminent spirit, was in a moment bereaved of him, by the hands of a villain (36). Despite his own anti-Spanish political leanings, Greville acknowledges an Anglo-Spanish connection that transcends Christian and national divides to include Sidney in a community that encompassed the Spanish nobility. Fascinated by Spanish accomplishments, Sidney recommended that his brother travel in Spain to learn good and grave proceeding, their keeping so many provinces under them, and by what means, with the true points of honour (Major Works 286). Though Sidney never traveled to Spain, and though much of his career was dedicated to quelling Spanish power, his Hispanophilia manifests itself in his New Arcadia. This essay contends that Sidney's view of Spain was equivocal, marked by admiration and envy as well as by distaste and fear. With intertextual and topical references to Spain in his New Arcadia, Sidney opens a counterdiscourse to the English extremes of anti-Spanish sentiment in the 1580s. Attending to generic politics in the storylines of Miso, a celestinesque bawd, and Philisides, Sidney's aristocratic Iberian alter-ego, discloses textual borrowings from Spanish literature and ambivalent representations of Spanish identity. Sidney's equivocal stances toward the mixed generic model of tragicomedy and toward Spain come to the fore in his romance, where tragicomic admixture tempers the melancholic humor of Anglo- Spanish discord. Thus the presence of these suspect forms and cultures in the New Arcadia ultimately works to defuse generic and political tensions.Tragicomic organizes Sidney's New Arcadia, which has been called the supreme Elizabethan example of . . . the mixed mode (Greenblatt 269). The generic mixture of the romance's is characterized by the alternation of exposition and action, of tragic and comic, but the huge structure of the romance is controlled by narrative patterns and echoes based on parallel or contrasting sequences of action which form a commentary on each other and underline the common moral issues (Evans 41). While adding variety to the romance, Sidney balances contrasting tragic and comic elements through systematic structural control. The resulting juxtapositions harmonize and amplify underlying themes, such as the depiction of Spanish identity, a technique that echoes tragicomedy's workings.2 It is not surprising to find tragicomic elements in the Arcadia, because, like tragicomedy itself, romance is generically mixed. In grappling with new genres that did not fit into classical poetics, Renaissance theorists often extrapolated rules about long narratives from precedents for drama, which were more clearly defined in antiquity. Alonso Lopez Pinciano, for example, calls the epic genre un monton de Tragedias (a heap of tragedies; 1: 240), and when speaking of the Aethiopica, an ancient romance that Sidney imitates in the Arcadia, Martinus Crusius believes [t]otam vero Historiam, veluti Tragicocomoediam dicentes, haud errauerimus (truly, if we treat the whole History as if it were a Tragicomedy, we wouldn't err; 8). Romance could, I suggest, be considered the long version of tragicomedy. In this case, generic mixture sheds light on social tensions. Viewing Sidney's Spanish connections from the perspective of theories of generic mixture alongside English estimations of Spain illuminates their implications for Anglo Spanish exchange. …

"Do You Know What It Will Look Like?": On the Relevancy of Adorno's Theory of Society

"Do You Know What It Will Look Like?"On the Relevancy of Adorno's Theory of Society Rolf Tiedemann (bio) Translated by Sean Nye (bio) Like the Pyramids or the Acropolis, Auschwitz is a fact. It is the sign of the human. The image of man is from now on inseparable from the gas chamber. —Georges Bataille Whoever comes from Germany to Spain in order to speak about Adorno is absolved from the difficulty of needing to introduce an unknown author.1 Just in my own, by no means complete, collection of translations of Adorno's writings into Spanish and Catalan, I count no fewer than twenty-four volumes: almost as many as Adorno himself published in German; with the exception of two volumes that were translated while he was still living, although they were all first published after 1969, the year of Adorno's death. And already in 1983, the philosopher must have been so popular in your country that he was inducted into the trivial immortality of a crime novel with one of his most difficult books; in any case, Montalbán considered Aesthetic Theory worthy to be cited in one of the famous auto-da-fés by his "Pepe" Carvalho. Thereafter, everyone who wanted to tackle practically self-evident lecture topics such as "Adorno and Spain" or "Adorno's view of Spain" would, however, have fallen into the greatest imaginable difficulties: there aren't any topics of such a kind, and Spain was certainly not one of Adorno's topics. He did not speak Spanish, nor did he ever visit Spain. The great paintings of Spain lay outside of his interests, so much so that Greco is named just once or twice as a precursor to Expressionism; Velazquez and Goya are not found in his works. Neither did he seem to take note of the musicians Albéniz or Granados. De Falla was for him, wrongfully and unsustainably, more [End Page 123] craft than art; "Noches en los jardines de España" even refined and noble kitsch. Adorno cites Calderón a single time, but only to cast doubt that he could have known Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic. He once encountered Ortega y Gasset in Darmstadt towards the beginning of the 1950s, and he had nothing but contempt for his writings. To be sure, one encounters Don Quixote comparatively more often, and he held extraordinarily high regard for such poetry as Lorca's dramas, but with that, Spanish literature in his writings and indeed also in his knowledge may admittedly be largely exhausted. The novel of the errant knight primarily served him as an early example of the bourgeois "experience of the disenchanted world" (Notes to Literature, 30, 11/41), but he scarcely had an eye for the exemplary, and last but not least exemplary Spanish, art of Cervantes. He wrote about Lorca, but not about the poet of "Poeme del cante jondo" or "Bodas de sangre"; instead he wrote on the occasion of a desolate sentence he found in a German magazine and which says nothing about the poet but only makes known much about the, already at that time, "political climate spreading in Germany": "One may only think of the victims of fascism as though they were the real criminals: otherwise not only would Mr. Franco be insulted, but also the threatening, healthy and cozy common sense" ("Gleichwohl," 20.2/499). Spain—you won't want to hear it, and I say it only hesitantly and with the request that you not see in it any affront to your hospitality—Spain was in Adorno's intellectual household, first of all, the Falangist dictatorship, which outlasted the National Socialists in his own land for three decades; Spain was for him the land of Caudillo Francisco Franco, who would outlive Adorno himself by five years. He rejected repeated invitations to Spain, always with a reference to Franco. During the mid-1960s, a singer who had befriended him and with whom he often performed publicly had once almost talked him into performing together in Madrid, but at the last moment, he still declined: with the explanation that he could not step foot in the country where...

A Romantic in Spain: The Finnish Nineteenth-Century Painter Albert Edelfelt's Andalusian Dream

Nineteenth-century painters were an important part of the creation of a particular Spanish imagery. This construction was produced through differentiation and the exaggeration of (cultural) stereotypes: Flamenco dancers, bullfighters, gitanos, sun-drenched cityscapes and ethnographic pictures of the local people. This imagery is still valid and further cemented within the frames of heritage tourism, which mirrors a relatively unaltered, however reconstructed imagery that previously was experienced by ‘adventurous’ nineteenth-century artists. The Finnish painter Albert Edelfelt's (1854–1905) letters and pictures from his Spanish journey in 1881 reveal that his view of Spain was dependent on a previous, Romantic imagery. During the 1870s, Edelfelt studied in Paris, and his view of Spain is hence to be seen through the concurrent French espagnolisme. Particularly the French writer and art critic Théophile Gautier's (1811–1872) Voyage en Espagne (1843) constituted a powerful referent and guide. In Spain, Edelfelt visited all the main attractions: the art collections in Madrid, Granada with the Alhambra palace, Flamenco performances in Seville, the great mosque in Cordoba and the medieval Toledo. The painter Edelfelt was, indeed, acting like a tourist in Spain, who participates in and takes snapshots of the most ‘typical’ features of foreign culture. The idea of Spain was a mental construction, which the visiting painters sought in reality during their journeys. In my article, I analyse Edelfelt's travel pictures from Granada and his travel letters within the frame of semiological tourism research. From the early nineteenth-century, Spain was regarded as a place where one still could experience a pre-modern time. The motivation for tourism, as the sociologist Dean MacCannell argued in 1976, is that reality and authenticity are thought to be elsewhere: in other historical periods and cultures, in purer, simpler lifestyles. Therefore, the increasing interest in Spain is to be seen as associated with the nineteenth-century anxiety against modernity, a phenomenon that evolved from the rapid economic development, industrialisation, urbanisation and the dilution of national characteristics, in addition to a feeling of timelessness. Travels to Spain were hence an expression of nostalgia, which is one of the main forces of tourism. Nostalgia for history and authenticity are plainly articulated also in Edelfelt's letters and pictures from Granada.

The writing of A Woman Unknown

Lucia Graves discusses the process of writing A Woman Unknown, her memoir about the years she lived in Spain from 1946 to the 1990s and the social changes she witnessed during that time. In this article she discusses the structure of her book, the link between memory and emotion, and how she selected her memories to fit into the various themes covered, or vice versa. She writes about her use of poetry and song to give support to her recollections, the need for research for accuracy, and how various real-life characters are used as prototypes to represent different types of Spanish women, illustrating events that have taken place over the years. The article also touches on the subjects of bicultural upbringing, identity and translation, on her own personal attachment to Spain - and Catalonia - and her view of Spain both as an ‘outsider’ and an ‘insider’.

Galdôs' Attitude Towards Spain as Seen in the Characters of Fortunata Y Jacinta

Galdós' sympathetic resignation to the shortcomings of Spain, already manifested in El Amigo Manso (1882), is artistically expressed in Fortunata y Jacinta (1886–87). No longer preoccupied with censuring social customs or rationalizing contemporary conditions as he had been in his early novels, published from 1870 to 1882, the author imparts his positive view of Spain through the creation of characters who belong to all strata of society. Spain is not envisaged as a divided nation where classes are pitted against each other, but rather as one which embraces heterogeneous groups and individuals. The lives of the characters are not interwoven as a result of superimposed conditions, but because of their intimate problems. Love is the driving force which causes the juxtaposition of their destinies.

Wordsworth's Debt to Laborde's View of Spain

Wordsworth's Debt to Laborde's View of Spain