Postwar Spanish Literature: Theater and Narrative Evolution

Spanish Theater During the Postwar Crisis

Spanish theater lived through a strong postwar crisis. There was censorship of authors and irony, which resulted in a reduced flow of spectacular fun. In addition to cinema, one should fight against the early postwar years, where only high bourgeois comedy works were seen on Spanish stages.

In the 1950s, there was a theater committed to human problems. From the 1960s onwards, this line of more traditional theater based on dialogue continued.

Rhetorical and Persuasive Resources

Phonic Resources

• Recording: Alliteration, paronomasia, onomatopoeia, and rhyme.

Persuasion and Motivation

• Persuasion: Use of question marks and exclamations. This is related to the appellate function and causes reflections on the product purchase.
• Motivation: In written announcements, this includes different spellings and intentional misspellings.

Morphosyntactic Resources

• Persuasion: Using articles and pronouns that are linked to the article, the use of superlatives, and substantive value-weighted comparatives to exclude competition.
• Personalization: Use of the 1st and 2nd person or imperative, so that consumers can identify with the product and recipients feel exclusive.
• Slogans: Preposition suppression or abnormal use.
• Striking Constructions: Use of nominal constructions, an abundance of noun phrases without verbs, ellipsis, or short phrases.
• Repetitions: Repetition of words within the message for better recall.

Lexical-Semantic Resources

Words are chosen with prestige, positive values, and social status. These involve technical terms, neologisms, and acronyms (such as ADSL or SMS), and the use of foreign words. The message is matched by creating stylistic figures and rhetorical resources like synesthesia, paradoxes, metaphors, hyperbole, and comparison. Connotation is used to delimit the specific audience being addressed.

Evolution of the Postwar Spanish Narrative

The postwar Spanish narrative follows a path very similar to lyric poetry:

• The 1940s: Focuses on individual stories of extreme cruelty in what is called tremendismo (alarmist realism). It emphasizes the more unpleasant aspects of society while avoiding collisions with censorship.
• The 1950s: We witness the flowering of the social novel. A shift occurs from the "self" to the "us"; novels focus on a set of characters with collective ownership. Social conflicts are the central focus, and the style becomes very colloquial.
• The 1960s: There is an overcoming of realism. A new form of narrative starts, much more concerned with formal elements. This implies a total transformation, where techniques are altered by adopting new boundaries that blur genres. This line is also called experimental narrative.
• Since 1975: There is a return to the fundamental pillars of narrative: solid stories with plots and characters in conflict. From then to the present time, the possibilities are enormous. The author focuses on telling a well-constructed story, and the reader seeks the pleasure of being carried away by a suggestive story. It is difficult to define a single trend, though the "narraluces" stand out.