In this dissertation I argue that the modernist breakthroughs achieved by José Martínez Ruiz’s La voluntad (1902), Ramón del Valle-Inclán’s Sonata de otoño (1902), and Miguel de Unamuno’s Niebla (1914) emerged as a response to the shortsightedness of the revolutionary politics that had taken root in Restoration Spain. I examine how these writers take the historical materials of their sociopolitical world—its tropes and uses of language—and reconstellate them as artworks in which the familiar becomes estranged and reveals truths that have been obscured by the ideological myopia of Spain’s radicalized intellectuals. Accordingly, I demonstrate that the tropes, language, and images that constitute La voluntad, Niebla, and Sonata de otoño have within them a historical sediment that turns these seemingly apolitical works into an “afterimage” of Spain’s sociopolitical reality. Thus I show how sociopolitical critiques materialize out of the dialectic between historical materials and their artistic handling.

Although La voluntad, Sonata de otoño, and Niebla seem to eschew political themes, I contend that they are the product of their authors’ keen understanding of the politics of their moment. As such, these novels bear a critical relation to the sociohistorical that is based not on protest or denunciation but on the careful judgment and observation of the hidden patterns of Spanish society and turn-of-the-century revolutionary culture. Consequently, the stylistic affectations and rarefied conceits of these works are not so much rejections of the sociohistorical as aesthetic refashionings of it.

Chapter 1 discusses the intellectual and socipolitical dynamics that led Martínez Ruiz, Valle-Inclán, and Unamuno to reconsider their understanding of literature’s place in society. In particular, the chapter examines how the positivist ideology that came to dominate liberal thought resulted in a leftist rhetoric that replicated the capitalist ethos it claimed to denounce and protest. This ideological incongruence came to the fore in the critical reception and public commotion of two plays, Juan José (1895) by Joaquín Dicenta, and Electra (1901) by Benito Pérez Galdós, which prompted the three modernist writers to reconfigure their understanding of art and artistic autonomy.

Chapter 2 argues that Martínez Ruiz’s La voluntad is a product of the lessons learned from the liberal euphoria that was unleashed by Galdós’s Electra. It traces how La voluntad, through its formal innovations and the texture of its language, steers away from the habit that many left-wing radicals had of reducing literature to a pseudo-sociology that conformed to their sociological principles and liberal platitudes. In doing so, the novel makes possible forms of thinking that had been increasingly obscured by the abstract rationalism of Spain’s liberal culture. Prior to this reading the chapter examines critically a reception history that has erroneously considered La voluntad as a sign of Martínez Ruiz’s turn away from the sociohistorical.

Chapter 3 argues that Valle-Inclán’s Sonata de otoño is not a withdrawal from or rejection of the sociohistorical but is rather an artwork that grounds itself deeply in the political dynamics of its historical moment. By examining the Sonata’s patterning of motifs and language, the chapter demonstrates how Valle-Inclán refashions the narcissistic and terroristic tendencies of revolutionary politics. Moreover, by refashioning these historical materials into a highly stylized and polished literary work, the Sonata vindicates moral virtues that had been discredited by the impatience and zeal of Spain’s radicalized liberals.

Chapter 4 contends that Unamuno’s Niebla, despite its rarefied and humorous content, bears a critical potency with deep historical and political implications. By examining how Niebla plays with language and a series of motifs, the chapter reveals the novel’s critique of the sorry state of Spain’s revolutionary culture. More specifically, what Niebla throws into relief is the obsession that Spanish socialists have with modeling their politics after the revolutionary history and culture of France. The chapter then argues that Niebla vindicates the Spanish tradition of aristocratic idleness and offers it as a counterargument to the socialist acquiescence to all things French. By insisting on idleness as a space for critical agency, Niebla suggests that a tradition rejected offhand by socialists turns out to be a salutary exercise for a liberal polity.

In this study I show that from the middle of the nineteenth century on, there emerged a number of talented women writers in Mexico who challenged their male colleagues' reductive textual representations of women and their attempts to limit their sphere of action and silence their voices. These women effectively negotiated an ever widening space for themselves and later generations of women, by appropriating the rhetorical strategies of their male counterparts for their own liberationist ends. They transformed the predominant topoi for the construction of female subjects in their representations of themselves within their texts and displayed their mastery of all the topics that had been described by some of the most important Mexican writer statesmen as beyond the reach of their inferior feminine minds. They managed to simultaneously follow and defy the roles that their male counterparts had defined for them through the use of a double discourse. In order to set the stage for these transformations, we contextualize the experiences and education of these women within the broader history of eighteenth and nineteenth century Mexico in the first chapter. We are careful to consider at all times the specific class origins of these women and the particularity of their opportunities as well as of the limiting prescriptions for their behavior. To do so we take from the works of several specialists on Mexican women's history the data that corresponds to women of the middle and upper classes to which the writers belonged, and check it against the biographical information we possess about them. We describe the changes of mentality and circumstances that began in the eighteenth century that made the appearance of these women writers possible in a variety of Mexican periodicals and anthologies from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards. We then examine representative texts about women, written by some of the most influential Mexican writer-statesmen of the period, and in particular one by Francisco Zarco. We use his text to dissemble the liberals attack on women in general and on (dangerous) women writers in particular. We expose the purposes of his astute rhetorical strategies, and place his campaign in the context of the liberals' challengers: the monarchists and the liberal women within their circle who had their own thoughts and literary talents as well as access to the corridors of power. In the third chapter, we explore a wide array of poetic texts by a number of women writers from the second half of the nineteenth century to show how some of them appropriated the ambiguous rhetoric of a Zarco to realize their own liberationist ends.

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This dissertation takes dramatic theater and cultural performances as objects of analysis to explore a series of discursive mechanisms by means of which a hegemonic ideal of national identity (essentially Castilian) was rehearsed, reproduced, and naturalized during Spain's Second Republic (1931-1936).

In order to consolidate its power, the newly established Republican State needed actively to orchestrate consent and elicit loyalty among the Spanish people, especially in those areas (rural Spain) that didn't vote for the Republic. Therefore, since almost half of the population in 1930's Spain was illiterate, theater and cultural performances became a privileged instrument to incite the people to imagine the new nation in accordance with the nationalist program of the Republic. The new national ideal was disseminated both deliberately and unconsciously by those cultural agents in charge of spreading the jewels of Spanish culture throughout the national territory.

One of the most ambitious cultural projects fostered by the Republican-Socialist coalition were the so-called Misiones Pedagógicas, by means of which a group of volunteer misioneros traveled from village to village to bring Spanish culture and the “fruits of progress” to the long forsaken members of the national community. Thus, while the republican idea of the nation was staged by the misioneros through different cultural activities, the peasants were being constituted, through this performative interpellation, as new citizens of the old “integral&rdquo Spain. The culture presented to the peasants as “Spanish&rdquo was indeed embedded with many nationalist assumptions that were tacitly naturalized by means of repetition.

The Republican-Socialist coalition also turned to theater and spectacle in order to reach out to the urban masses and integrate them into the nationalist project of imagining the nation along Republican and Castilian-centric lines. These initiatives included the endeavor to create and organize a National Theater and the staging of plays, which performatively commemorated the Republican tradition presumably embedded in Spanish Golden Age Theater and by means of which the construction of an ideal national audience was attempted. More specifically, this dissertation examines the theater sponsored by the Republican-Socialist coalition in contrast to the commercial comic theater that dominated Madrid's main stages.

This study deploys the Spanish illustrator Francisco Rivero Gil (1899-1972) as a paradigmatic figure of the graphic arts in order to explore the relationships between image and text being played out in representation as expressions of Spain's unique process of modernization. The meanings of these graphico-lexical relationships reveal themselves through Rivero's work, as well as through his praxis, over time, through geographical displacement and changing historical contexts. As a result, the study interweaves biography, history and graphico-lexical textual analysis in a combined diachronic and synchronic approach. Its first chapter, meant to bridge the gap between the graphic arts and Hispanic literary studies, provides an introduction to the graphic arts in the context of Spain's modernization, as well as a review of recent research pertaining to the nexus of these two fields. The main chapters are divided into three time-spaces, which cover Rivero's beginnings in Santander from 1914 to 1923, including a tour of duty in Morocco as a rank-and-file soldier after the Annual Disaster; the mid `20s to the mid `30s in Madrid; and the late `30s during the Spanish Civil War in Valencia and Barcelona.

The analysis of the various editorial projects included in these chapters shows how a different project of modernity was gestating in the field of the graphic arts, where interactions between image and text enacted a peculiarly Spanish conceptualization of the Other, based on cordiality, that contained radical implications for social change and laid the conceptual groundwork for a non-violent social revolution. This version of modernity, contrary to others advocating a rupture with the past, easily integrated traditional forms by modifying them to suit modern needs. The study shows how the graphic arts may be understood as a site that facilitated a cordial engagement with the Other, containing and channeling the many tensions of Spain's modernization, as it contributed to the formation of new citizens and a vision of modernity firmly rooted in the past. This dissertation is the first part of a book length project covering Rivero's life and work in Spain. Future research will take on the transatlantic dimension of his life and the work he produced as an exile in France, the Dominican Republic, Colombia and Mexico.

This dissertation explores the manifestations, uses and appropriations of history in key Spanish plays from the 1950s to the present. The relationship between the stage and history casts new light on Spain's most critical phases in recent history. The authors studied were and are conscious of making history under the dictatorship, during the Transition and at the dawn of the 21st century. As instruments of civic action, their plays perform that awareness and invite spectators to recognize themselves as players in the process.

The dissertation opens with a comparative analysis of plays written by Antonio Buero Vallejo and Alfonso Sastre between the 1950s and the Transition (1977). While scholars have tended to contrast these two playwrights focusing on their responses to censorship, I propose that Buero and Sastre gravitated towards a poetics of forgiveness through the model of the failed tragic hero. The following chapter explores plays written by José Sanchis Sinisterra during the Transition and the outset of the new democracy (1977-1994), that problematize the tension between the new political order and the old, imperial rhetoric of the Franco regime. Turning to Juan Mayorga in Chapter 3, I consider how his dramas transmit a bitter image of humanity's decadence and loss of moral sensitivity. Largely influenced by a European perspective, Mayorga deploys cartoonish characters in real historical circumstances in order to cast a detached comic eye on the role of the bourgeoisie in the mapping of history during the past two centuries. My final chapter analyzes the topic of religion within the new Spanish democracy in three comic plays by Fermín Cabal, Concha Romero and Carmen Resino. This chapter proposes that the powerful role of religion has not waned since Franco's death and continues to shape Spanish culture, despite the nation's reconfiguration of its Catholic views. These authors dramatize the tensions between modern secularization and traditional Catholic faith, turning to comedy and satire to explore the complex presence of religion in the lives of Spaniards.

This dissertation brings together Spanish, Cuban, and Puerto Rican novels written in the late 19th century, a period covering the 1868 Revolution and the Restoration, up to independence. These novels expose the conflictive political and economic integration of both peninsular and overseas territories, which configures social relations in a web of mutual influence. I focus in particular on the representation of imperial discourses as articulated by, and informing, discourses of gender, class, sexuality, race and geopolitical situation.

A fundamental claim of my work is that these novels cannot be understood apart from the transatlantic economic, political, social and cultural ties between peninsular Spain and the Caribbean. Thus, my dissertation attempts to question the concept of the `national' as it has been applied to Spanish and Spanish-Caribbean cultural traditions of the 19th century. This approach requires detailed engagement with the historiography of the period, both because of Spain's troubled relationship with its imperial past throughout much of the 20th century, mirrored in the historical record until recently, and because of a predominance of post-independence interpretations of Caribbean novels.

I begin with Hostos' La Peregrinación de Bayoán (1863) and Alas' La Regenta (1884-5), focusing on the representation of imperialism before and after the Six Year Revolution, from the point of view of the Puerto Rican white Creole class and the Spanish provincial bourgeoisie respectively. I show how these two perspectives present different and opposed political models, which are illuminated and enacted by different gender discourses. Chapter Three offers a comparative reading of Pardo Bazán's La Tribuna (1884) and Morúa Delgado's Sofía (1894) focusing on the representation of exploited parties within the realist/naturalist genre. In both novels women are depicted through discourses of race and slavery, but in different ways and to different ends. Chapter Four, on Galdós' La Desheredada (1881) and Villaverde's Cecilia Valdés (1882), addresses the failure of modern society to live up to its liberal ideals, such as social equality and mobility, especially because of self-reinforcing social structures of exploitation and consumerism. These exploitative structures, based on gender and class distinctions, are connected figuratively and materially with colonial exploitation, especially the slave trade.

Abstract

Writing Spain: Race, Migration, and the Construction of the Pueblo by

Holly Jackson Weiss

Doctor of Philosophy in Hispanic Languages and Literatures University of California, Berkeley

Professor Daylet Domínguez, Co-Chair

Professor Dru Dougherty, Co-Chair

Focusing on literature from the twentieth century, this dissertation analyzes how intellectuals have represented the pueblo of Spain through the lens of personal or intergenerational experiences of migration and diaspora. The dissertation considers work by Southern Spaniards, Catalans, Latin Americans and North Africans on the Peninsula, asserting the centrality of postcolonial and plurinational figures—largely absent from Spanish cultural studies or confined to niche canons—to antifascist critiques of Spain. The dissertation focuses on the junctures that punctuate narratives of twentieth-century Spain: the Spanish Revolution and Civil War, the Franco dictatorship, and the Transition to Democracy. Noting the unresolved and discursive quality of these events, the dissertation looks at their representation in the work of Nicolás Guillén, Juan Goytisolo, Najat El Hachmi and others; these writers problematize the imaginaries of race, ethnicity and nation that are latent in official national narratives.

Through analysis of the poetry of Latin American intellectuals, the dissertation shows antifascism in the Spanish Revolution and Civil War to be an anticolonial project, reconceiving the 1930s resurgence of transatlantic solidarity as a decolonial practice of critique. The dissertation then considers the mid-century turn to neoliberalism in Spain through analysis of an exilic memoir, arguing that the economic dispossession of Spain’s southern emigrants and the simultaneous rebranding of the Mediterranean coast as a postcard-ready paradise are the economic and representational legacy of colonial Cuba. From there, the dissertation analyzes two memoirs by Moroccan-born Catalans, arguing that Reconquista-era ethno-racial constructs are central to the discourse of Catalan identity that reemerged in the Transition to Democracy.

Tracing the ways in which the (re)appropriation of the idea of Spain happens in the sign of the pueblo, the dissertation invokes this category as one that is as deconstructive as it is constitutive of Spain, and proposes pueblo as the nation in its erased, unofficial, nonlinear and pluralist histories, on the one hand, and as a hermeneutical category for imagining a community through critique of power relations, on the other. In its reading of transatlantic, transmediterranean and subnational constructions of the pueblo, the dissertation posits an archive that dismantles the homogenizing, centralizing and modernizing discourses of the last century in Spain.

Beyond Referentiality: New Language and Meaning in Spanish Avant-garde Novels of the Twentieth Century (and Beyond) examines how language is treated as material (rather than medium) in Spanish experimental novels of the twentieth century. Chapter One centers on Cazador en el alba by Francisco Ayala and Víspera del gozo by Pedro Salinas, two key figures of the Spanish historical avant-garde. I demonstrate how these novelas líricas, using uniquely poetic language that embodies the rebellious artistic impulses of the period, rebuff narrative convention and thus compel a reconsideration of meaning. In the absence of plot, these richly sensorial works invite the reader to truly see language not as avenue to story, but as a carefully crafted art object that is itself inherently worthy of appreciation. Taking us into the future of Franco’s dictatorship, Chapter Two analyzes Volverás a Región by Juan Benet, an exemplar of the (revolutionary) nueva novela whose painstakingly dense language obscures narrative action even as it tackles the tragic (and long-lasting) destruction of the Spanish Civil War. I argue that Benet uses linguistic opacity—for him, the zone of the irrational—as an alternate way of comprehending the incomprehensible. In Chapter Three, I study Larva: Babel de una noche de San Juan by Julián Ríos, a product of the lighthearted Movida (and a newly democratic Spain) that nevertheless engages in its own intensely objectifying formal transformations. I show how narrative structure and language are (playfully) mutilated beyond recognition, leaving the reader to contend with an incredibly complex textual labyrinth in which signifiers do not straightforwardly (or reliably) signify. Here, as in the earlier instances, meaning is not a matter of interpretation, but instead attention, a shift that accentuates language’s (innately) material identity.

I will conclude my consideration of Spanish narrative objecthood by turning to the future, the (decidedly contemporary) concept of literary archaeology guiding me through a closing (and again, contemporary) counterpoint –the Proyecto Nocilla by Agustín Fernández Mallo. How do these twenty first century avant-garde novels compare (and contrast) with the earlier examples? What objectifying strategies do they share? What is new? And lastly, how do their particular formal innovations inform—and alter—my understanding of the previously discussed experimental works? In all cases, radical form makes narrative language uniquely dimensional. How does such dimensionality manifest differently in these different historical periods? These are the questions I will answer in order to demonstrate the shared, yet singular materiality that characterizes the language-focused novels of Francisco Ayala, Pedro Salinas, Juan Benet, Julián Ríos, and Agustín Fernández Mallo.