From ‘teatro irrepresentable’ to ‘poemas representables’ and ‘novelas cinematográficas,’ this course examines experimental intervention in theater, poetry, and the novel in the first decades of the twentieth century as it relates to early cinema. Centering on Spanish modernist and avant-garde literature, this course spotlights literary-cinematographic texts that test the parameters and limits of the literary as a set of ideological and material as well as sensory and conceptual conventions. Confronting cinema’s formal challenge to the literary writer by introducing temporal-spatial plasticity to the arts and advancing an entirely new visual language, the writers of these hybrid texts, including Valle-Inclán, Baroja, Lorca, Alberti, and Espina, negotiated with the new technology of motion pictures as a modernist form defined by visuality, fragmentation, montage, and movement.
No prerequisite required. Primary texts will be read in tandem with early film theory and some film screenings. Taught in Spanish & English.*
*Individual accommodations will be arranged for non-S&P students for written & oral assignments and discussion participation. Reading knowledge of Spanish, however, is required.
Time: W 3:00-5:50 pm, location TBD. CRN: 45962
Prof. Anna Torres-Cacoullos (ait5095@illinois.edu)