Reading Twentieth-Century Spanish Literature: Selected Essays

Reading Twentieth-Century Spanish Literature: Selected Essays By Noël Valis This book is conceived as a companion piece to Valis's Reading the Nineteenth-Century Spanish Novel: Selected Essays, which appeared with Juan de la Cuesta in 2005. The eighteen essays, published between 1983 and 2013, represent thirty years of thinking and writing about the poetry and narrative of twentieth-century Spanish literature. In the first part, the narratives studied include Ramón del Valle-Inclán's Sonata de otoño, Felipe Trigo's El Semental, Juan Ramón Jiménez's Platero y yo, Ramón Gómez de la Serna's El novelista, Pedro Salinas's Víspera del gozo, Francisco Ayala's Diálogo de los muertos, Jorge Semprún's Autobiografía de Federico Sánchez, Carme Riera's Cuestión de amor propio, and Ana Rossetti's Plumas de España. The second part focuses on the poetry of such writers as Antonio Machado, Marina Romero, José Hierro, Manuel Mantero, Julia Uceda, Sara Pujol Russell, and Noni Benegas. Threading through these essays are themes and issues centering on the relation between gender-genre, sex-text, author-reader, margin-center, the institution of writing and the writer's status, the unsayableness of language and the unlived life, from modernism to the avant-garde, exile to women authors. A major concern of this book is the role gender (and sex) have played in writing and the institution of literature, as well as in the limits and marginalization of the literary expression of experience, for it is precisely in this period that both the professionalization of the writer and the rise of the woman writer appear. NOËL VALIS teaches at Yale University. Her books include The Culture of Cursilería: Bad Taste, Kitsch and Class in Modern Spain (Duke UP), which won the Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize, Teaching Representations of the Spanish Civil War (MLA), Sacred Realism: Religion and the Imagination in Modern Spanish Narrative (Yale UP), translations including Burning Cartography, poetry by Noni Benegas (Host Publications) (winner, New England Council of Latin American Studies Best Book Translation Prize), a book of poetry, Mi casa me recuerda/My House Remembers Me (Esquío), and a novella, The Labor of Longing (Main Street Rag Publishing) (Finalist, Prize Americana for Prose; Finalist, Next Generation Indie Book Awards, for Novella and Regional Fiction).