20th Century Sociocultural Synthesis: Art, Literature, and Politics
20th Century Sociocultural Synthesis
The twentieth century saw improvements in the distribution of work and leisure time, enhancing access to information and culture. It was not only the century of the popularization of the press, the telegraph, telephone, and cinema, but also the appearance of radio, TV, PCs, and artificial satellites.
European Art Scene
In the European art scene, the avant-garde stands out, with surrealism as one of its most representative movements. Other leading movements include Futurism, which pursued art full of technical innovations, and Dadaism, characterized by its fight against artistic conventions.
After the two World Wars, literature emerged from a school of thought committed to social and political reality.
Major Currents
Key 20th-century attitudes include existentialism, psychoanalysis, and Marxism.
Existentialism
Existentialism was a European ideological movement of the twentieth century, marginalized by the major traditional philosophical systems. Martin Heidegger held that man comes from nowhere, and death is his final destination.
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is a therapeutic method developed by Sigmund Freud, based on the conviction that there are conflicting elements of past life, covert by oblivion, that unwittingly revive in the mind and create trauma. Its influence can be seen in the works of Thomas Mann, James Joyce, and D.H. Lawrence. The clearest use of psychoanalytic theory is given in Surrealism, especially with regard to the discovery and revaluation of the subconscious. Representatives include André Breton, Louis Aragon, and Paul Eluard.
Marxism
Marxism is a scientific-philosophical theory developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The Marxist analysis of capitalist society examines its history and the development of its structural manifestations. The engine of this theory is the class struggle and the division of labor.
The Spanish Framework
Disaster of 98 to 1923
Between 1875 and 1931, primarily in Spain, was the period known as the Restoration. During the regency, an event occurred that profoundly marked the fate of Spain: the war in Cuba in 1895, whose outcome is known as the Disaster of ’98. The Regenerationist movement revealed the real problems of the country and proposed different solutions, establishing the proletariat.
The Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera
In 1923, Miguel Primo de Rivera was vested with absolute powers. He suspended the constitutional system, established rigid censorship, and banned political parties and trade unions. He began an ambitious reform project that promoted education, modernization of the army, and the revision of relations between the church and state.
The Franco Regime
The Franco regime designates the dictatorial regime imposed by General Franco after the Civil War. The decade of the 1940s was the hardest stage of the regime, marked by repression and hunger. During the sixties, the Spanish situation improved. Mass tourism revived the economy and introduced more open-minded ideas.
Spanish Literature in the Twentieth Century
Early Century to the Civil War
At the end of the nineteenth century, modernism, with its fascination for luxury, the exotic, and elegance, gave way. It developed alongside the Generation of ’98, which was concerned with the problems of the country. Its main exponents were Unamuno, Valle Inclán, Baroja, Azorín, and Antonio Machado. By 1910, a group of intellectuals tried to encourage the arts and sciences. They were known as the Novecento (Generation of 1914).
Postwar to Present
The position of the authors presented a bleak picture, as the press and literature, dominated by power, were under severe censorship. In the 1940s, two poetic currents distinguished themselves:
- Rooted Poetry, focused on the intimate and traditional metric.
- Uprooted Poetry, which was part of the existential trend (Camilo José Cela and Carmen Laforet).
The realistic trend of the 1940s resulted in the social literature of the 1950s. The writer became aware of history and social reality, and his work became a vehicle of complaint and protest. The poetry of the 1960s returned to privacy, personal themes, and covered topics such as the evocation of childhood and adolescence as Paradise Lost, or the transience of life. The novel and the theater, in turn, sought new ways of expression and embraced experimentalism. In the late sixties, new movements arose, which proclaimed the autonomy of art and disregarded traditional forms. After these movements came the posnovísimos, whose poetry covered trends from classic traditionalism to the poetry of silence and symbolic rurality. Meanwhile, the novel was characterized by the search for new roads and new narrative forms.