Nöel M. Valis

Sacred realism : religion and the imagination in modern Spanish narrative

In this thoughtful and compelling book, leading Spanish literature scholar Noel Valis re-examines the role of Catholicism in the modern Spanish novel. While other studies of fiction and faith have focused largely on religious themes, Sacred Realism views the religious impulse as a crisis of modernity: a fundamental catalyst in the creative and moral development of Spanish narrative.

‘Tell it Slant’: Defamiliarizing Spanish Realism

Abstract Focusing on Spanish realism, this article argues that content-oriented critics have become overly familiar with realism, ignoring its literariness, what Emily Dickinson referred to as telling ‘all the Truth but tell it slant’, so that ‘Truth’s superb surprise’ may dazzle gradually. Shklovsky’s defamiliarization is also a way of telling it slant, revealing the inner forms of realism and making visible something that was invisible to us, the out-of-the-ordinary inside the ordinary world that in turn possesses its own special aura.

The Novels of Jacinto Octavio Picon

Offers detailed analyses and reconstructions of Picons eight novels. Of special significance to modern readers are his conceptions of Spanish history and character, patriotism, and women and sex--conceptions that for their day may be considered advanced.

Julia Uceda and the Work of Invisible Grace

Catholic theology defines grace in general as a gift of God to human beings, and sanctifying grace as the kind that remains in the soul. The operation of invisible grace is not, strictly speaking, ...

Crisis, Religion and Turn-of-the-Century British and American Travel Writing on Spain

Abstract This article focuses on the awareness of Spanish crisis and its relation to religion as found in under-examined British and American travel writings on Spain. The turn-of-the-century brought renewed interest in the country, this time less in her past and more in her conflict-ridden present, though the past, or at least a particular slant on the past, continued to inform the perspectives of British and American travel writers. The enduring presence of anti-Catholicism throughout the nineteenth century, still drawing on the image of Spain as a land of persecution and intolerance, found common ground in the later anti-religious, anticlerical strain of thought at the end of this period. Both the belief system of individual writers and the complicated, mutually persecutory dynamic between nineteenth-century Protestants and Catholics (often attached to anti-Protestantism), need to be examined. What these writers share, whether Protestant, Catholic or anticlericalists, is a sense of investment in a particular vision of modern Spain as flawed and yet stubbornly pertinent to the world, a peculiar reembodiment of the missionary spirit to convert and reform having left its religious and political trace in these writings.

Lorca's ‘Agonía republicana’ and Its Aftermath

The afterlives of Federico García Lorca are many. His violent death at the hands of the extreme right during the Civil War has been remembered and imagined in a variety of ways, thus bringing the Republican poet back to life in a strange kind of afterglow and symbolically completing his earthly trajectory. Republicans naturally claimed him for their own cause, but surprisingly, a few on the right made similar title to Lorca. I focus on that claim as part of the aftermath of the poets death, re-examining some of the early right-wing reaction to Lorcas assassination, subsequent commentary, and one especially pertinent case, that of the South African poet, Roy Campbell. The aim is to shed more light on the motivation or circumstances that produced such claims and on the ideological contentiousness that so politicised Lorcas life and work.

The Society Reporter, Status and Writer Impotence in Felipe Trigo's El Semental

Felipe Trigos rapid rise to literary fame and almost equally rapid fall provide a useful point of departure for examining the changing place of literature and the writers role in mass society. Relentlessly driven to professionalize the writing life, Trigo was obsessed with status. One of his boldest, yet little known, stories, El Semental, in which the first-person narrator is a society reporter, centrrs on the importance of the writers status and authority and the role class and gender play in both shaping and destabilizing that status. El Semental has much to say about the fleeting, unstable nature of writing and the writer and in that sense represents the reverse of canonicity. By anchoring his narration in the lowly, sexually indeterminate society chronicler, who is also attached to the fading old regime, Trigo brings into ironic play the vexed issue of the writers status in the incipient mass society of early twentieth-century Spain.

When the Dead Are Always with Us: Ayala's Diálogo de los muertos

This article places Francisco Ayalas Didlogo de los muertos (1939) beyond the context of the book, Los usurpadores, in which it eventually appeared, by discussing the text as part of a larger tradition of the dialogues of the dead, the dialogue form in general, and the funeral oration. In both diverging from, and following this literary-cultural tradition, Ayalas text ultimately gives form and meaning to the Civil War dead by making the dead necessary to the living.

Machado's Poppies

ooking upon the successive photographic images of Antonio Machado, one is struck by an oddly blurred quality captured in the face of the Spanish poet. It is not only the yellowing passage of time, of prewar Spain and its fathomless reserve; it is not only the haunting melancholy of an individual mourning the premature loss of his wife, his youth, and life itself that makes the man an enigma. For although all these things may be seen in the dry-edged photographs that so often are reproduced, none of them provides the ultimate key to Machado’s life and poetry. One senses that in each of the images Machado is the same and yet not the same, distinct yet blurred in our perception of his essential being; that, in truth, we do not really know Machado at all. Like the poet himself commenting on an enigmatic Iberian divinity saying, “Who has seen the face of the Spanish God?” we, too, cannot be sure of having looked upon the face of the Spanish poet Antonio Machado.1 This mystery is of a piece with Machado’s poetry. As one critic aptly observed, Machado specialized in mystery (González Muela 261). In this regard, the poet once said that “to create enigmas artificially is something as impossible as attaining absolute truths” (“[c]rear enigmas artificialmente es algo tan imposible como alcanzar las verdades absolutas”) (“Sobre las imágenes” 83). In the same passage he also talks about the “direct names of things,” noting that “to silence the direct names of things, when things have direct names, what stupidity!” (“Silenciar los nombres directos de las cosas, cuando las cosas tienen nombres directos, ¡qué estupidez!”) (83). But immediately after that he wrote: