Portfolios due! Espana, Fiction, and Surrealism

Espana:

Hola! 1st period prepare your portfolios. If you finish early, please read the fiction handouts in the packet and read this blog, and take notes (see homework sheet).

Today we will cross the great straight of Gibraltar to Europe's main continent. Let's start with a little literature, and then move to some information and cultural research.

Spain has an incredibly old history. From cave paintings found at Altamira to our contemporary period. The Romans and Carthaginians fought over Spain in the 3rd century B.C. Part of the Roman Empire Hispania rises and falls at the same time, being overrun by the Vandals in 409 A.D. (later repelled by the Visigoths who rule until the 8th century, followed by the Arabs). During 711-1492, Christians begin to reclaim the area at first slowly, until the Umayyad loss of power in 1031. You probably know what happens leading up to 1492 with the marriage of Isabella and Ferdinand in 1469.

Curious about Spain & Spanish Customs? Watch this and this (although this is clearly a child's report...)

Spain suffered a vicious civil war between 1936-1939. The Spanish Civil War divided the country as tens of thousands of civilians were killed for their political or religious views. Those associated with the losing Republicans were persecuted by the victorious conservative Nationalists after the war. Some Leftist Spaniards fled to refugee camps in Southern France. The overthrow of the democratic government allowed dictator General Francisco Franco to rule the regime. During his reign, during the White Terror and the Red Terror, an attempt to genetically cleanse Leftists, including Catholic Priests and school teachers, anywhere between 200,000-350,000 people died, although this number is debated. You can learn more about the Spanish Civil War here. Parts II and III can be found here as well. (This is a high school student's work...something to strive for...)

Our first stop will be with Spanish Civil War poets Juan Ramón Jiménez & Miguel Hernandéz.
Juan Ramon Jimenez won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1956.

Surrealism (developed in the 20th-century as a literary and artistic movement) gained its popularity in Europe between World Wars I and II. Surrealism grew principally out of the earlier Dada movement, which before World War I produced works of anti-art that deliberately defied reason; but Surrealism emphasis supposedly was not on negation but on positive expression.

"The movement represented a reaction against what its members saw as the destruction wrought by the "rationalism" that had guided European culture and politics in the past and had culminated in the horrors of World War I."

The French poet André Breton published "The Surrealist Manifesto" in 1924 and states that Surrealism "was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely, that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in "an absolute reality, a surreality."

Drawing heavily on Freud, Breton saw the unconscious as the inspiration for imagination. He says it could be attained by all artists, even creative writing majors. This movement continues to rear its head in various forms even today.

• Salvador Dali
• Here's a few of his paintings & photographs of the artist.
• Luis Bunuel

The father of cinematic Surrealism and the father of surrealist film, Luis Buñuel was given a strict Jesuit education (which sowed the seeds of his obsession with both religion and subversive behavior), and subsequently moved to Madrid to study at the university there, where his close friends included Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca.

Next class we will screen Bunuel & Dali's surrealist film: Un Chien Andalou

HOMEWORK: Please read the fiction packet for Spanish writers and answer the questions appropriately. Due next class.