Teaching Representations of the Spanish Civil War

by Valis, Noel Maureen

• ISBN13: 9780873528245
• ISBN10: 0873528247
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-10-01
• Publisher: Modern Language Assn of Amer

Summary

The Spanish Civil War (1936-39), a national conflict with international significance, inspired strong responses from artists and writers on both sides of the Atlantic. The bombing of the Basque town Guernica, the assassination of the poet Federico García Lorca, and the defense of Madrid are just some of the events represented in painting, film, fiction, memoir, and history produced during the war years and since.Courses dealing with the Spanish Civil War are given regularly in literature, foreign language, and history departments, in English and in Spanish. This volume in the MLA series Options for Teaching helps instructors plan courses that exploit the interdisciplinary, multigeneric opportunities present in the period's aesthetic output. In thirty-five essays, contributors negotiate the complex relation between art and history in depictions of the war and its aftermath, exploring how memory is shaped. Key representations of the war, like Picasso's Guernica, Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, Rodoreda's La plaça del Diamant, Sender's Réquiem por un campesino español, and Capa's Falling Militiaman, find a place in this wide-ranging volume. In addition, coverage extends to less frequently taught works by Catalan, German, Irish, and Latin American novelists, poets, and visual artists. The volume concludes with a section of resources for further study and classroom use, including films, music, photography, Web sites, and course syllabi and commentaries.

Table of Contents

Spain and the Spanish Civil War : timeline of events	p. 1
Navigating the historical labyrinth of the Spanish Civil War	p. 23
The Spanish Civil War as a national conflict	p. 33
Representations of the Civil War in historiography	p. 44
The Spanish Civil War as a religious conflict	p. 54
At peace with the past : explaining the Spanish Civil War in the Basque Country, Catalonia, and Alicia	p. 63
Advocacy and undecidability : the pedagogy of the Spanish Civil War	p. 75
Doctrine and politics in nationalist Spain	p. 88
Between documentary and propaganda : teaching the Spanish earth	p. 99
The question of race in the Spanish Civil War	p. 108
War, postwar, and the fascist fabrication of identity	p. 117
Class and gender representation in post-Civil War Spanish narrative	p. 130
Seeing the Spanish Civil War through foreign eyes	p. 147
The Abraham Lincoln brigade volunteers : historical contexts and writings	p. 160
Teaching allegory and concealment : covert dissent front within the Franco camp	p. 172
War and the work of poetry : issues in teaching Spanish poetry of the Civil War	p. 184
"Committed" (?) writing in the Spanish Civil War	p. 196
"Your country does not matter" : British and Irish writers on the Spanish Civil War	p. 206
The French literary response to the war : Malraux and others	p. 220
German literary responses to the war	p. 237
Teaching the literature of the Spanish Civil War in Spanish-to-English translation	p. 248
Hemingway's war	p. 258
The Spanish Civil War in films from the Franco period	p. 269
Representations of the Civil War in post-Franco cinema	p. 281
Iconography of the nationalist cause	p. 289
The documentary dilemma and the Spanish Civil War	p. 305
Photography and the Spanish Civil War	p. 317
Learning from Guernica	p. 328
The exile's dilemma : writing the Civil War from elsewhere	p. 341
Refugee camp warriors : voices of resistance from the battleground of exile	p. 352
Personal narrative : a bridge in time	p. 365
Teaching the memory texts of Spanish women during the Civil War	p. 373
The witness in the classroom : survivor oral histories of the Spanish Civil War	p. 385
Fighting the long battle of memory : autobiographical writing about the Spanish Civil War	p. 398
Window of opportunity : the television documentary as "after-image" of the war	p. 406
Civil War ghosts entombed : lessons of the valley of the fallen	p. 425
Teaching history through memory work : issues of memorialization in representations of the Spanish Civil War	p. 436
Introduction	p. 451
Cinematography
Documentaries	p. 451
Feature films	p. 457
Music	p. 462
Photography	p. 463
Posters	p. 464
Poetry	p. 464
Prose
Novels, short stories, plays, and dialogues	p. 470
Biography, memoirs, and testimonies	p. 479
Secondary sources
History	p. 481
Literature and the arts	p. 485
Web sites	p. 488
Memory, history, representation : the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath	p. 493
To the barricades : Civil War, cultural production, and gender in Spain	p. 500
Representations of, and reactions to, the Spanish Civil War	p. 506
The Spanish Civil War : a cultural history	p. 513
The Spanish Civil War : literature, history, and culture	p. 517
A clear-cut case : the imaginings of the Spanish Civil War	p. 523
The Spanish Civil War : words and images	p. 527
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