This course focuses on specific works of twentieth-century Spanish literature and what they reveal about the history and culture of Spain. The turn of the century was a time of significant political, economic and social change. Technological advances changed the ways in which people lived, communicated and conceived of themselves and the world. Some of these changes were seen as improvements and others as an undesirable break with traditions and cultures of the past. The very term avant-garde (la vanguardia in Spanish) indicates both the battle to change critical approaches to art and France's significant role in the development of new forms of artistic expression. Yet artists of many countries embraced and developed avant-garde aesthetics. For example, two of its better-known proponents were the Spanish painters Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí. The effects of la vanguardia on Spanish literature in the twentieth century have been lasting, resulting in stylistic changes in every genre, subtle in some cases and dramatic in others. This course proposes to define the nature of the Spanish vanguardia, explore its manifestation in the poetry of the Generation of '27 (primarily Federico García Lorca, Padro Salinas and Jorge Guillén) and to trace its effects on post-Civil War literary production.

As a consequence of reading and discussing specific literary texts, in both an aesthetic and historical context, students will be able to do the following by the end of this course.

a) Define the avant-garde both historically and technically (as a fin de siecle movement and as a stylistic approach to artistic production).

b) Understand and explain many of the basic symbols and themes evident in early twentieth-century Spanish avant-garde poetry and theater.

c) Identify the effects of the avant-garde on narrative and theater in Spain’s post-Civil War period

d) Declaim, appropriately and effectively, an example of Spanish avant-garde poetry.

e) Demonstrate good control of spoken Spanish through active participation in class discussions

f) Express sophisticated ideas through formal oral presentations in the Spanish language.

g) Write critical essays in formal Spanish that analyzes the structure and the meaning of a work of literature.

h) Conduct research on a specific literary topic in order to produce appropriate bibliographic support for a formal research paper.