Spanish Literature

The course, entitled "Sistemas concentracionarios, literatura testimonial y recreaciones dramáticas," is divided into two parts. The first part (compulsory for all and valid for 6 CFUs) will present a cultural-historical overview of the experience of Spanish Republican exiles in the French and Nazi concentrationary systems during the period 1939-1945. Subsequently, the focus will be on the specifics of testimonial literature of the concentration camps, so as to equip students with the theoretical and methodological tools necessary to deal with a corpus of prose works by representative writers, such as Max Aub (1903-1972), Silvia Mistral (1914-2004), Neus Català (1915-2019) and Jorge Semprún (1923-2011), although a look at the works of other prominent intellectuals will be guaranteed. Through the construction of a network of comparisons and connections, the study of these direct witnesses will allow to acquire a broad, multifaceted and critically rich panorama, reflecting the multiple formal possibilities and different thematic cores typically associated with concentrationist writing.
The second part of the course (optional, for who intend to acquire 9 CFUs), will focus on some recent plays that evoke or recreate, with dramaturgical strategies and different degrees of distancing, the traumatic experience of the Shoah and concentration camps. Since it is not a first-hand experience, the perspective to correctly interpret these plays will be the postmemory theory (Hirsch), The proposed authors will be José Ramón Fernández (1962), Laila Ripoll (1964), Juan Mayorga (1965), Itziar Pascual (1967) and Rubén Buren (1974). When possible, recordings of stagings of their works will also be viewed in class or individually.