The Culture of Cursileria

by Valis, Noel Maureen

• ISBN13: 9780822330004
• ISBN10: 0822330008
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-01-01
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

The Spanish terms cursi and cursilería are not easily translated, but they refer to a cultural phenomenon widely prevalent in Spanish society since the nineteenth century. Like "kitsch," cursi evokes bad taste, but it also suggests one who has pretensions of refinement and elegance without possessing them. In The Culture of Cursilería Noël Valis examines the social meanings of cursi, viewing it as a window into modern Spanish history and particularly into the development of middle-class culture.Valis finds evidence in literature, cultural objects, and popular customs toargue that cursilería has its roots in a sense of cultural inadequacy felt by the lower middle classes in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Spain. The Spain of this era, popularly viewed as the European power most resistant to economic and social modernization, is characterized by Valis as suffering nostalgia for a bygone, romanticized society that structured itself on strict class delineations. With the development of an economic middle class during the latter half of the nineteenth century, these designations began to break down and individuals across all levels of the middle class began to exaggerate their own social status in an attempt to protect their cultural capital. While the resulting occurrences of cursilería were often provincial, indeed backward, the concept was--and still is--closely associated with a sense of "home." Ultimately, Valis shows how cursilería embodied the disparity between old ways and new, and how in its awkward manners, airs of pretension, and graceless anxieties it represents Spain's uneasy surrender to the forces of modernity.The Culture of Cursilería will interest students and scholars of Latin America, cultural studies, Spanish literature, and modernity.

Author Biography

Noel Valis is Professor of Spanish at Yale University.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	ix
Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction	1	(30)
On Origins	31	(46)
Adorning the Feminine, or the Language of Fans	77	(41)
Salon Poets, the Becquer Craze, and Romanticism	118	(21)
Textual Economies: The Embellishment of Credit	139	(40)
Fabricating History	179	(23)
The Dream of Negation	202	(22)
The Margins of Home: Modernist Cursileria	224	(20)
The Culture of Nostalgia, or the Language of Flowers	244	(33)
Coda: The Metaphor of Culture in Post-Franco Spain	277	(26)
Appendix	303	(2)
Notes	305	(48)
Bibliography	353	(40)
Index	393