This article aims to help instructors tackle a perennial challenge in teaching one of the classic works of Spanish literature: Miguel de Cervantes's "Don Quixote." Many instructors teaching the novel for the first time may feel overwhelmed at the prospect of helping students appreciate the numerous ways in which Cervantes references the…

Carmen Martín Gaite's "Caperucita en Manhattan" is a Young Adult novel ahead of its time. If this category had existed in Spain when it was published, it is likely that it would have earned the critical recognition it deserves. The novel's exciting plot, captivating prose, wise cultural commentary, factual content, sense of humor, and…

This paper focuses on an advanced Spanish literature seminar I taught at Kansas State University dedicated entirely to Cervantes's "Don Quijote de la Mancha." In an effort to appeal to twenty-first-century students in rural Kansas, I designed my seminar to explore traditional questions of authorship, translation and reading, metafiction,…

Salvadoran writer Horacio Castellanos Moya offers a provocative example of postwar cynicism in his 1997 novel "El asco: Thomas Bernhard en San Salvador." By telling the story of Edgardo Vega, an emigrant who returns to El Salvador in the mid-1990s after living in Canada for eighteen years, "El asco" represents the mass exodus…

The Spanish author Carmen Laforet is recognized almost exclusively for her first and seminal novel "Nada" published in 1945. However, her posthumous "Al volver la esquina" (2004), the last of her five novels, is an indispensable example of the author's achievement as a psychological novelist. Yet ten years following its…

In Marcela del Río's science fiction novel "Proceso a Faubritten," utopia comes in the form of eternal life for all of humanity, thanks to Dr. Alexander Faubritten's "Bomba L." This polyphonic work includes diaries by Faubritten and his Mexican lover, María Corona. In my analysis of these two diaries, I will show how…

Cervantes's "novela" creates a complex protagonist due in part to the involvement of the slaves' destructive and creative energies: a linguistic and erotic paradox. Linguistically the female slave foregrounds the historical dichotomy between "ladinos" and "bozales" and the related problematic of conversion,…

This essay reappropriates the segmentary form of the three works of Agustin Fernandez Mallo's "Nocilla" project ("Nocilla Dream" [2006]; "Nocilla Experience" [2008]; "Nocilla Lab" [2009]) en route to an urban reading of its fragmentary structure. The project's interdisciplinary push, overwhelming incorporation of both scientific and…

"Atlas de Geografía Humana" constitutes a critique of the much vaunted notion of a progressive Spain that has rectified the gender inequalities of the Francoist era, as one of the highly educated and successful protagonists, Fran, unwittingly adopts her mother's alignment with patriarchal norms. This novel elucidates the incompatibility…

The article analyzes the portrayal of the male perpetrator of heterosexual domestic violence in a selection of contemporary Spanish texts (novel, drama, and autobiography) that form part of a clearly discernible cultural response to the issue of intimate partner violence in Spain today. It reads the figure of the abuser in conjunction with a range…

This article argues that Eduardo Lopez Bago's "La prostituta" evidences a deprivileging of a "visual" approach to narration and of the sensorial predominance of sight. Rather, Lopez Bago harnesses odors and deploys them as an important structuring device and a central generator of meaning, permitting his novel to be judged on its ability to evoke…

The historical content of "La voz dormida" by Dulce Chacon gives us unique insight into the formation of male subjectivities during the ideological and physical struggle that followed the establishment of Franco's regime. The second part of the novel which centers around the figure of the "maquis," allows us to investigate the construction of a…

This article analyzes twelve English translations of the Biscayan squire's speech ("Don Quijote de la Mancha", Chapter Eight) published between 1612 and 2000. The solutions found fall into three categories, namely (a) using standard English and risking misrepresenting the style of the original and omitting relevant cultural connotations, (b) using…

By means of his association with the short-lived newspaper "Arte Joven", Unamuno had unique access to a series of sexually charged drawings by the young Pablo Picasso. While he initally objected to the explicit nature of one of these drawings, he seems ultimately to have taken inspiration from both it and others in its group on the way to…

"Los misterios de Madrid" (1992) provides a burlesque novelistic portrayal of the changing capital city and its inhabitants in the early 1990s. Spanish writer Antonio Munoz Molina creates vignettes of Madrid's people and places while showing the capital as a destination for both foreign-born immigrants and provincial Spaniards alike. In…