20th Century Spanish Literature: An Overview
20th Century Spanish Literature
Poetry
Miguel Hernandez
His work combines the popular with the cult. The most characteristic of his poetry is metaphorical richness and passionate tone. His career is a clear example of the evolution of poetry: from the dehumanization of the early moments to commitment. He is considered a poet of transition, an epigone of the Generation of ’27 for some authors and belonging to the Generation of ’36 for others.
Works: Expert in Moons, Lightning That Does Not Stop, Songbook and Ballads of Absences.
Lyric Currents After the Civil War
After the Civil War, Federico García Lorca and Antonio Machado had died, and other major poets like Juan Ramon Jimenez and Rafael Alberti were exiled. The literary landscape was desolate. Two great poetic tendencies manifested in the forties: rooted poetry and uprooted poetry.
Rooted Poetry
This current belonged to almost all authors of the Generation of ’36 who remained in Spain and initially identified with the Franco regime but later distanced themselves from it. Its components, who called themselves “creative youth”, were linked to the Escorial and Garcilaso magazines that published their poetry. They favored a traditional courtly poetry inspired by Garcilaso de la Vega as a symbol of balance and recovery of the values of the Spanish Empire.
Key features of this current:
- Detached world view of reality
- Religious harmony
- Classical metric
- Themes of love, religion, and patriotism
Authors: Luis Rosales, Leopoldo Panero.
Uprooted Poetry
This poetry opposed the previous rooted style and expressed the disorientation and chaos of life, with the poet expressing discontent with the world.
It was characterized by:
- A feeling of anguish and despair
- Solidarity
- Colloquial language
- Topics: death, loneliness, violence
Authors: José Hierro, Blas de Otero.
Theater
Theater was conservative in Spain, whereas in Europe a new theatrical movement was emerging. Some Spanish poets tried to renew it without success due to the tremendous political and economic crisis and cultural isolation that kept the country separated from the rest of the continent. Spanish society was sufficiently depressed with the situation and preferred a theater that offered escapism from everyday misery rather than one with a deep message.
Entrepreneurs sought successful plays (with little money to invest) and censorship limited literary creation; dramatists went into exile or died.
Types of Theater:
- High Comedy: Offered mild criticism of bourgeois morals and conflicts and featured luxurious settings and very careful language.
- Humorous Theater: Addressed the surface with a simple plot that resolved favorably. Presented popular and authentic characters that were amusing for their language. Example: Miguel Mihura’s Three Hats of a Cup.
- Social Theater: Addressed issues of social injustice and the conditions of the proletariat. Characters were victims of misery. Used colloquial language. Authors: Alfonso Sastre and Antonio Buero Vallejo.
- Unrealistic Theater: Focused on the destruction of the internal character. The action and language were parabolic, and the scene was invaded by symbolic objects. Example: Antonio Gala’s works.
- Theater of the Last Years: Returned to a more traditional line.
Hispanic Novel
The 1960s saw the final consecration of the Hispanic American novel, due both to its intrinsic quality and to extraliterary factors, including the triumph of the revolution in Cuba, the development of the Spanish publishing industry, and political attempts to retrieve the Hispanic American book market that existed before the war. In these years, a wave of novelists emerged who starred in an authentic literary and publishing phenomenon known as the ‘Boom’ of Hispanic American literature.
The importance of this period:
- Concern for narrative structures that require an active reader capable of organizing the story. Example: One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel García Márquez).
- Development of linguistic experimentation and new techniques and ways to tell a story. Example: Hopscotch (Julio Cortázar).
- Invention of different fictional universes. Example: Comala in Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo.
- Appearance of socio-historical novels.
- Preference for existential themes, psychological aspects of the characters, and deepening in the mythical. Authors: José Lezama Lima, Augusto Roa Bastos.
In recent decades, established artists of the 20th century continued publishing, although many were forced into exile. In Spain, writers produced less demanding novels for the reader, including several about the figure of the dictator and other subjective and intimate themes.
Spanish of America
Spanish is spoken in a large territory and has many varieties in the Americas. Along with the logical variations of a language spoken in such a vast and diverse territory with different linguistic substrates, it presents a number of common characteristics:
- Phonetics: The lisp, aspiration of “s” in implosive position (e.g., “cajtanya” for “castaña”), “yeísmo” (pronouncing “ll” as “y”), and use of “yave” for “llave” (key) are the main features of this phonetic variety of Spanish, all common to the speech of southern Spain.
- Morphosyntax: The “voseo”, replacement of the pronoun “tú” (you) for “vos”, and use of a monophthong form of the second person plural (e.g., “sentís” for “sentáis”) are archaisms preserved from peninsular Spanish in Argentina and Uruguay. Use of diminutives and augmentatives differs from the peninsular variety.
- Semantics and Lexicon: The main lexical-semantic features are a greater persistence of archaic terms and a more abundant use of terms from Amerindian languages.
Despite the rich variety of nuances of a language spoken throughout this vast area, Spanish is characterized by its linguistic unity.
Formation of Words
- Learned Etymologies: Prefixes and suffixes from cultured languages, Greek or Latin.
- Evolution from Latin: a) Learned words (little evolution) b) Common words (much evolution). Some words are doublets, meaning they have two evolutions from the same Latin root.
- Loanwords (Foreign or Xenisms): From French (e.g., “hereje”), Galician (e.g., “caramelo”), Catalan (e.g., “naranja”), Arabic (e.g., “aceite”), German (e.g., “espía”, “guerra”), pre-Roman languages (e.g., “barro”), Turkish (e.g., “moreno”).
- Acronyms (e.g., USA) and Initialisms (e.g., AIDS).
- Derivation (e.g., “zapato” – “zapatilla”), Composition (union of words: e.g., “girasol”), and Parasynthesis (prefix + root + suffix = lexeme: e.g., “aterrizar”).
- Diversity: “Colon” – “colonias”.
Bilingualism
Can apply to a person, region, country, or community where two languages are used equally.
Diglossia
Occurs when a group of people in a region use two or more languages, but not equally (not in equal percentages), depending on the context. In communities with several co-official languages, all speakers (native) of that area have the obligation to know (study) all of them and the right to use the one they want.
Scientific Text
Uses jargon with cryptic value (concise language understood by specialists), sources from acronyms (e.g., radar, laser), and composition. Monosemy (scientific words have a single meaning to facilitate understanding). Technicalities are not translated but adapted to the language. Absence of connotations and polysemantic words. Predominance of nominalization (nouns are preferred over adjectives for specificity). Verbs have less value and appear in the indicative mood. Present gnomic (timeless and universal). The syntax is functional for clarity and understanding, and impersonality is often used (e.g., passive reflexive). The main function is representative (to provide information).
Essay
It is a treatise on any topic in the humanities with an intellectual character that expresses an argued opinion. It can present a structure that is: a) deductive (theory and then arguments to convince), b) inductive (arguments and then the main idea that acts as the backbone of the text), or c) circular (thesis + argument + argument, returning to the thesis). The principle of authority (using prestigious sources for conviction) is common. Essays are hybrids of science and literature.
Character: The register is semi-formal (high) and requires a certain degree of knowledge. It is aimed at a select group of people (i.e., a niche audience). The structure is very open and varied. Predominance of subordination and the subjunctive mood. Use of varied pronouns. Predominance of the 1st person (the writer’s opinion); recurrence of abstract language and literary figures. Functions include appeals (emotional, metalinguistic, phatic).