Notes, summaries, assignments, exams, and problems for Latin

Federico Garcia Lorca

Federico Garcia Lorca was an excellent poet and playwright. His works often explore the topics of love, frustration, and tragic destiny, featuring many marginalized people doomed to pain, loneliness, and death. His style is personal and bright, with plastic images, and his poetry is suggestive and dramatic. His work, in both senses of the word, is theatrical and tragic: theatrical because it is expressed through characters, and tragic because it reflects fatalism, presenting humans in a fight against an adverse fate. Along with tragic fate appear frustration and impossible desire. Notable works include Poet in New York and Gypsy Ballads. His theater is poetry that presents a stylized reality, posing a single theme: the... Continue reading "Spanish Poets: Lorca, Alberti, Salinas, and Diego" »

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Narrative

Narrative is the genre that best adapted to cultural changes, while poetry and drama became genres for a minority audience. The novel, as a subgenre, became more commercial.

Characteristics of the Contemporary Novel

• Confluence of several generations of authors: Postwar novelists, authors of the Generation of '68, writers of the Generation of '80.
• Diversity of trends: Addresses all kinds of issues and adopts different styles and narrative techniques. Novelists often return to historical narrative.
• Publishing Market: The main types of novels have grown without one dominating the others. They conform to publishing criteria and public taste. The novel becomes both a cultural product and a consumer product.
• Latin American Influences:

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer: Romanticism's Voice

Life and Literary Journey

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, born in Seville and later working in Madrid, contributed to various publications. He engaged with the poetry of Heinrich Heine and published works such as Cartas a una mujer (Letters to a Woman). He married Casta Esteban and served as a censor of novels under the conservative government of González Bravo. During a period of temporary exile, he likely worked on the manuscript of his renowned Rimas. He died in Madrid.

The Rimas (Rhymes): Poetic Innovation

Bécquer's poetic renewal is characterized by the creation of intimate, concise poetry, marked by apparent simplicity and a lack of artifice. This approach distinguishes his work from the more elaborate... Continue reading "Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer: Spanish Romanticism's Legacy" »

Chivalric Literature: From Medieval Tales to Tirant lo Blanc

Books of Chivalry: At the center of these stories was the figure of a knight-errant, who was involved in a string of daring missions, following an ethical code. These missions of the knights took on a purely anecdotal and adventurous nuance, including courtly love, and religious or symbolic elements. The stories were always wrapped in a good dose of fantasy, magic, and wonderful items. Dissemination from the European area of Britain was early in our land, and over the fourteenth century: Blandín of Cornwall or The Fable. But our literature made the genre evolve into what is called the chivalric novel, more credible and realistic, reflecting the changes.

The New Chivalric Novels

Novell... Continue reading "Chivalric Literature in Valencia: From Medieval Tales to Tirant lo Blanc" »

Generation of '27

A Poetic Fusion in Spain

The Generation of '27 wasn't strictly a generation, but rather a close-knit group of poets within a larger historical generation. This larger generation included other poets (like Miguel Hernández), playwrights (like Alejandro Casona), novelists (like Francisco Ayala), and even artists from other cultural movements (like Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí, and Manuel de Falla). The poets of '27 were united by a fusion of ideas:

• Noucentisme (pure art, intellectual rigor, and careful style)
• Tenets of the avant-garde (especially Surrealism and Creationism)
• Deep respect for Spanish lyrical tradition (influenced by authors like Antonio Machado and Juan Ramón Jiménez)
• Secular ideology from their shared educational

Spanish Post-Civil War Novel: Literary Evolution

The 1940s Literary Landscape

The Spanish novel of the 1940s was profoundly marked by exile, harsh censorship, and the promotion of idealistic novels that extolled the values of the Francoist regime.

Idealistic Novel

During the initial years of Franco's rule, propaganda-driven novels were published that glorified the war, the regime, and its values. Notable works include La fiel infantería by Rafael García Serrano and Javier Mariño by Gonzalo Torrente Ballester. There was also another idealistic narrative that sought to forget the war.

Existential Novel

This type of novel attempts to reflect everyday life. Its recurring themes include loneliness, the frustration of hopes, the uprooting of characters... Continue reading "Spanish Post-Civil War Novel: Literary Evolution and Key Authors" »

Roman Architecture

The Romans adopted Greek architectural elements, but these elements merged with those of the Etruscans and the Near East (Mesopotamia, Persia, etc.).

In addition to the three Greek orders, they used two others:

• The Tuscan: This order comes from Etruscan art and resembles the Doric, but the shaft is smooth without edges and placed on a pedestal or podium.
• The Composite: The most characteristic feature is that it mixes the Ionian spiral scrolls with the acanthus leaves of the Corinthian in the capital. The shaft can be smooth and sharp and is usually also placed on a podium.

Roman buildings used other elements such as the arch, or semicircular arch, and the vault. These two elements allowed for a more even distribution of weight... Continue reading "Roman Architecture, Painting, and Mosaics: Key Features" »

Nobel Prize winner in 1956, the poetry of Juan Ramón Jiménez is, in the poet's words, a poem in sequence, a work in progress. The need to provide a sample of the status of his work led the poet to several anthologies: Selected Poems (1917), Second Anthology of Poetry (1922), and Third Anthology of Poetry (1957). The poet himself stated in his later years three stages in his production: Sensitive Time, Intellectual Era (since 1916), and True or Enough Time (since 1936).

Sensitive Time (Up to 1916)

• Intimate Step

  Poetry 'pure' in the sense of simple, intimate, and symbolist modernism. We note the influence of Bécquer and the French Symbolists. Nature, solitude, the passage of time, death, or unsatisfied love are the themes that are enveloped by

The Metric, Language, and Style of the Poem of the Cid

Over 3,000 verses in the Poem of the Cid are grouped into assonant monorhyme stanzas of varying lengths, ranging from 2 to 90 lines. The lines are irregular and divided into two hemistiches by a strong caesura, often represented graphically by a separation. The most common hemistiches have 6, 7, or 8 syllables.

The poem's language emphasizes clarity, specificity, and simplicity of expression. Minstrel features include frequent invocations of listeners, exclamatory expressions suggesting an audience, and a steady narrative pace. The oral tradition also explains the free use of verb forms and the use of epic epithets and appositions, which magnify the heroes, especially the Cid. Parallels to... Continue reading "Poem of the Cid: A Literary and Historical Analysis" »

The Poetic Worldview of Miguel Hernández

If anything characterizes the poetry of Miguel Hernández, it is vitalism. In his poems are his life, blood, passion, war, and love.

He introduces the reader to all its unbridled intensity. The worldview of Miguel Hernández does not separate life from death, but rather sees death as just another name for the poetic world he inhabits. The world of Miguel Hernández can be specified in this formula of elements in mutual correspondence:

All of his lyrical work revolves around the mysteries of life, generation, and death. There is a process in his poetry by which life moves from being a mere excuse for elaborate poetry to becoming the central issue, almost eliminating literary development. In Cancionero y