A Literary Journey Through Post-Spanish Civil War Spain
Poetry Post-Spanish Civil War
Miguel Hernandez
His work combines the popular with the cult. The most characteristic trait of his poetry is its metaphorical richness and cálido tone. His passionate life and career are a clear example of the evolution of poetry over time: from the dehumanization of its first moments to compromiso. He is a poet of transition, an epigone of ’27 for some authors and belonging to the generation of ’36 for others.
Works
- Expert in Moons
- Lightning Does Not Stop
- Songbook and Ballads of Absences
Literary Currents
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 picture inside Spain is desolate. Two great poetic tendencies manifested in the 1940s: rooted poetry and uprooted poetry.
Rooted Poetry
The first current belonged almost entirely to authors of the Generation of ’36 who remained in Spain and initially identified with Franco’s regime but later distanced themselves from him. Its components, who called themselves “creative youth,” were linked to the Escorial and Garcilaso magazines that published the poetry of these authors, who gambled on 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 Rooted Poetry:
- Detached worldview 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.
Key Features of Uprooted Poetry:
- A feeling of anguish and despair
- Solidarity
- Colloquial language
- Topics: death, loneliness, violence
Authors:
- José Hierro
- Blas de Otero
Theater
Theater is conservative. Whereas in Europe there is an entirely new theatrical landscape, this is not the case in Spain. Some poets try to renew it without success because of the tremendous political and economic crisis and cultural isolation that keeps the country separated from the rest of the continent. Spanish society is sufficiently depressed with the situation and does not want a theater with a deep message, but rather one that moves away from everyday misery. Impresarios seek successful plays (as they have little money to invest) and censorship limits literary creation; many dramatists go into exile or die.
Types of Theater:
1. High Comedy
This genre offers mild criticism of bourgeois morality and conflicts and features luxurious settings and very careful language.
2. Humorous Theater
It addresses the surface with a simple plot that resolves favorably. It presents popular and authentic characters that are amusing for their language.
Example:
- Miguel Mihura: Three Hats of a Cup
3. Social Theater
This genre addresses issues of social injustice and the conditions of the proletariat. Characters are victims of misery. It uses colloquial language.
Authors:
- Alfonso Sastre
- Antonio Buero Vallejo
4. Unrealistic Theater
This style focuses on the destruction of the internal character. The action and language are parabolic, and the scene is invaded by objects.
Example:
- Antonio Gala
5. Contemporary Theater
In recent years, there has been a return to a more traditional line.
The Hispanic Novel
The 1960s saw the final consecration of the Hispanic American novel, due both to its intrinsic quality and to extra-literary factors, including the triumph of the revolution in Cuba, the development of the Spanish publishing industry, and the attempt to retrieve the Hispanic market that existed before the war. In these years, a group of novelists emerged who would star in an authentic literary and publishing phenomenon known as the ‘boom’ of Hispanic American literature.
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 of telling stories. 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, the flight of characters, and deepening in the mythical.
Authors:
- José Lezama Lima
- Alejo Carpentier
- Augusto Roa Bastos
In recent decades, established artists of the 20th century have continued to publish, although many of these writers were forced into exile. In Spain, where readers are less demanding, there are several novels about the figure of the dictator and other subjective and intimate themes.
The Spanish of America
Spanish is spoken in a large territory and has many varieties. Spanish American, with the logical variations of a language spoken in such a vast territory and with such different linguistic substrates, presents several common characteristics:
Characteristics:
1. Phonetics
- The lisp
- The aspiration of ‘s’ (sapato for zapato)
- The implosive position of ‘j’ (cajtáña for castaña)
- Yeísmo (pronouncing ‘ll’ as ‘y’)
- Yave for llave (key)
These are the main phonetic features of this variety of Spanish, all common to the speech of southern Spain.
2. Morphosyntactic
- Voseo (the replacement of the pronoun tú for vos)
- The use of a monophthong form of the second person plural: sentís for sentáis (sit down), an archaism preserved in Argentina and Uruguay.
- Different use of derivation by diminutive and augmentative
3. Semantic 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 such a vast area, Spanish is characterized by its linguistic unity.
Formation of Words
- Etymology: Educated words, prefixes, and suffixes from Classical languages like Greek or Latin.
- Evolution of Latin:
- Learned words (little evolution)
- Common words (much evolution). Some words are doublets, meaning they have two evolutions.
- Loanwords (foreign or xenisms):
- Gallic (e.g., heretic)
- Galician (e.g., caramel)
- Catalan (e.g., orange)
- Arabic (e.g., oil)
- German (e.g., spy, war)
- Pre-Romanesque (e.g., Varro)
- Turkish (e.g., brown)
- Acronyms and Initialisms:
- Acronyms (e.g., USA)
- Initialisms (e.g., AIDS)
- Other Processes:
- Derivation (e.g., shoe–shoes)
- Composition (union of words: e.g., sunflower)
- Parasynthesis (prefix + suffix = lexeme: e.g., en-land)
- Diversity: Colonizers-colonies
Bilingualism
Bilingualism can apply to a person, region, country, or community where two languages are used equally.
Diglossia
Diglossia occurs when a group of people in a region use two or more languages but not equally (not in terms of percentages) and depending on the context. In communities with several co-official languages, all speakers (native) of that area are obligated to know (have studied) the languages in question and have the right to use whichever they want.
Scientific Text
: use of jargon cryptic value (see pa q is understood), source: acronomia (radar, laser), composicion.Monosemia (ls have a scientific word simply means, pa facilitate significacion.Ls technicalities s not translate, but adapt to lg.Ausencia s d connotations and words polisemanticas.Predominio d nominalization (ls interested names, eg x ls specified adj.) vb Ls have less value and appear in this d indicativo.Presente gnomic: universal.L timeless and functional syntax has a good understanding and pa clarity, also used l s impersonation (passive reflex). Func representative (information). Essay: it is a treaty issue d d cualq humanities cn intellectual character and expresses an opinion argumentada.Pueden present a structure: a) deductive (theory and then ls arguments = convince) b) inductive (arguments and then view = princ idea vertebra to the text) c) circular (thesis + arg + = s argument, returning again l thesis). Principle D authority (more power to use d conviction pers essays are hybrids d prestigiosos.Ls science and literature.Character: The record is half-cult (high) q requires a certain degree d knowledge and is aimed at a select group d pers ie minorista.La struct is very open and subordination and subjuntivo.Pronombres dl variada.Predominio 1st pers (dl opinion writer); repl recurencia abstract language to fig literarias.F dl: appeals, emotional, metalinguistic, phatic