Susan Larson

Cities, culture capital? Recent cultural studies approaches to Spain's cities

Review texts Resina, Joan Ramon (ed.) (2000) Iberian Cities (New York: Garland Publishing). 400pp. ISBN 0815334850 (hb). Smith, Paul Julian (2000) The Moderns: Time, Space, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Spanish Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press). 206pp. ISBN 0-19-81600-3 (hb) 0-19-816001-1 (pb). Vázquez Montalbán, Manuel (1998) La literatura en la construcción de la ciudad democrática (Barcelona: Grijalbo Mondadori). 196pp. ISBN 847423856-0 (pb).

Modernism and Its Merchandise: The Spanish Avant-Garde and Material Culture, 1920–1930 by Juli Highfill (review)

Deep philosophical questions, aesthetic experimentation, and radical politics all worked their way into the European historical avant-garde in ways that we are still thinking through today. Those caught in the maelstrom of European modernity were simultaneously amazed and perplexed by new technologies that facilitated greater access to industrially produced cultural forms and products. One hundred years ago, increasing numbers of urban citizens looked to cinema, radio, and the popular press to figure out how to be modern, and the acquisition of a seemingly endless stream of new products was a central part of this modernization process. New fashions, cosmetics, cameras, gramophones, typewriters, appliances—not to mention medicines and new modes of transportation and communication—would all become, as Juli Highfill argues in Modernism and Its Merchandise, intriguing objects of inquiry for Spanish writers and artists of the early twentieth century. Highfill begins her study with a concise summary of Heidegger’s etymological discussion of the history of the word “thing” (dinc in old German), which was understood as a “matter under discussion, a contested matter,” which coincided with the Latin word res, meaning “that which is pertinent, that which has bearing” (2). Heidegger observed that in the Romance languages, the terms for thing (cosa, chose, coisa) come from the Latin causa, meaning a “case, topic or question,” which, Highfill argues, likewise suggests a “thing at issue,” something “under discussion” (3). By drawing attention to the diachronic and synchronic convergences of meaning, as well as the fact that these meanings still resonate in everyday language today, Highfill (through Heidegger) starts her book with the argument that “things” (and cosas) refer to a very broad range of objects, entities, and situations that arise as issues or as matters of primary concern. This study hinges on Highfill’s assumption that “things” are inherently social, and therefore have meaning only within networks of social, material, and linguistic relations:

“Cinegrafía” and the Abject in Federico García Lorca's Viaje a la luna (1930)

Abstract Federico García Lorcas screenplay Viaje a la luna (1930) is an example of what Spanish film critic Antonio Espina called “cinegrafía” in that it theorizes the relationship between the written word and the film image. It is also a work that intertwines the desire for sexual freedom with an anxiety for artistic innovation. Drawing on Julia Kristevas psycho-linguistic feminist rereadings of Freud and Lacanian formulations of the construction of human subjectivity known as the abject, this article explains how Lorca looked for new ways to enlist the possibilities of film in his search for a more open and fluid artistic subjectivity and ways of representing normative and non-normative sexual identities.

Introduction: Peripheral Modernities of the Spanish Novel of the 1920s and 1930s

n today’s cultural climate, studying the narrative of the 1920s and 1930s in Spain can feel like an increasingly nostalgic enterprise. In recent years, mega-mergers by the increasingly powerful Bertelsmann media group comprising firms like Random House, Knopf, Sudamericana, Planeta, and Seix Barral (just to name a few) have reshaped the way we think about literature through their use of expansionary market practices now accepted as commonplace. Has mainstream fiction exhausted every creative possibility, making further experimentation and questioning a mere ironic exercise? Can the avant-garde only exist now in arts such as independent and documentary film, underground music, and the graphic arts, for example—artistic forms that can exist below the radar of the mass media and comment more directly and incisively on the politics of everyday experience? The articles in this issue of Romance Quarterly were written by scholars within the discipline of Hispanic literary studies. They believe a clear understanding of the Spanish novel of the 1920s and 1930s is hindered by narrow views of literature that put too much emphasis on “high” culture with little attention paid to sociohistorical context. They believe another impediment to discussing the works is the gross inadequacy of the critical terms used to discuss the works. From the start, postmodernism incited skepticism in cultural critics, especially from those outside of the Anglo-American academy. After all, hadn’t the various avant-garde writers already performed all the tricks now being called postmodern? In the largely AngloAmerican literary tradition from which much postmodern literary theory stems, there is no significant avant-garde movement (dadaism, cubism, futurism, surrealism) to complicate the clear division between the modern and the postmodern. The challenge to the totalizing metanarrative of modernity in Jean-François Lyotard’s La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir (1979), for example, may be useful for