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- I am the Betty Blades Lofton Distinguished Professor of Spanish at Butler University (USA), holding a Ph.D. from UCLA... moreI am the Betty Blades Lofton Distinguished Professor of Spanish at Butler University (USA), holding a Ph.D. from UCLA with a specialization in nineteenth-century Spanish literature and a secondary focus on Spanish film. I have served the Asociación Internacional de Galdosistas as President (2018-2020), Secretary-treasurer (2007-2016), and on its executive committee (2002-2005 and 2021-2023), as well as being a current member of the advisory board of Anales Galdosianos. I have been named a Galdosiana de Honor by the Casa-Museo Pérez Galdós and have been elected as an Académica correspondiente of ANLE (Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española) and an Académica de la Academia de las Artes Escénicas de España. My publications include two authored books, four edited books, and over forty articles. I also have presented numerous papers and lectures both nationally and internationally.edit
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Research Interests: Art and Springer Ebooks
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Research Interests: Sociology, Rhetoric, Art, Literature, Narrative, and 4 moreLinguistics, Literary studies, Narration, and Hispania
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What is the relation between faith and fiction, between belief and the novel? In exploring this intriguing question Noël Valis has created a remarkable book that challenges the prevailing view of religion as a spent force that has... more
What is the relation between faith and fiction, between belief and the novel? In exploring this intriguing question Noël Valis has created a remarkable book that challenges the prevailing view of religion as a spent force that has withered away in the age of modernity and the secular novel. In lieu of the split between religion and secularized modernity, she posits the concept of secular realism as an intertwining of the two within novels written by Spanish liberal writers during three historical periods of change and crisis: the late eighteenth-century through the 1840’s; the Bourbon Restoration; and the Second Republic through the Civil War. Lamenting the “dismal impact of Michel Foucault” and other posthumanist and poststructuralist approaches, which have fostered “the academy’s own contemporary prejudices” toward religion as primarily a repressive instrument of power, Valis calls for a “fuller understanding” of Spanish literature that acknowledges novelistic expressions of “religiously infused, humanitarian sensibility” (5-6). Both spiritual belief and fictional belief depend on the ability to imagine the intangible, and Valis shows how sacred realism incorporates structures of religious imagination—resurrection, communion, confession, and martyrdom—into secular narratives. She begins with the crisis in religion brought on by Enlightenment ideas. Rather than viewing faith and reason in opposition, Valis sees them working together in texts such as El evangelio en triunfo by Pablo de Olavide and Noches lúgubres by José Cadalso to create a “new embryonic psychological-social realism, which serves to project spiritual feeling onto the page but also to shape it through humanitarian purposefulness” (242). She traces how the moral and ethical concern for others that informed early Christianity found new expression in the social reforms of the Enlightenment, with the poor and marginalized lower social orders becoming “resurrected” from the “symbolic death” to which they had been relegated into the “social realm of existence” where they were made visible not only within society, but also “as a new subject of novelistic inquiry” (61). This renewed regard for the welfare of the underprivileged further developed and became institutionalized in the nineteenth-century through religious and secular organizations. By the 1840’s Ayguals de Izco’s María, la hija de un jornalero emerged to explore how both the Church and society could better address the problems of urban poverty and social inequality by reestablishing the “social-spiritual contract” of “communitas” among all classes (97). The novel advocates “socially responsible religious feeling” and interconnectedness between the many levels of society as a new urbanized and class-conscious variation of clientelism’s personal and “paternalistic reciprocity between the privileged and the lower orders of society that had obtained for centuries throughout Europe” (104, 117). Valis sees this concept of communitas finding its supreme fictional representation in Benito Pérez Galdós’s Fortunata y Jacinta, which is “a fully realized world of complex relations that bridges but does not erase the vast divide between rich and poor” through a RESEÑAS
Research Interests: Philosophy, Aesthetics, Narrative, Modernity, Secularization, and 4 moreFaith, Realism, Secularism, and Sensibility
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Research Interests: Art History, Humanities, Art, Adaptation, Viola, and 4 moreLiterary studies, Nightmare, Monster, and Alley
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The homage to Dickens contained in the ‘Nuevos viajes’ essay of Memorias de un desmemoriado includes Galdos’ famous quotation declaring the English writer to be his ‘maestro mas amado’.1 Galdos further acknowledges in this essay that... more
The homage to Dickens contained in the ‘Nuevos viajes’ essay of Memorias de un desmemoriado includes Galdos’ famous quotation declaring the English writer to be his ‘maestro mas amado’.1 Galdos further acknowledges in this essay that during his ‘aprendizaje literario’ he not only was an avid reader of Dickens’ work, but also was the anonymous translator of the serialized Pickwick Papers which began publication in La Nacion in 1868. During this early stage of Galdos’ career (around 1872), he also wrote and abandoned the manuscript of a novel which only recently has come to light. A portion of this early endeavour was found by Walter Pattison and published as a preliminary version of Gloria.2 Alan Smith later discovered additional fragments and reconstructed the manuscript nearly in its entirety.3 In the absence of a title page, Smith named the novel Rosalia after its heroine who, like the female protagonist of Gloria, falls in love with a foreigner of a different religious faith who comes into her life due...
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La incognita holds a unique position within Gald6s's literary production: it is the only novel which deliberately is left incomplete and requires a companion text, Realidad, to bring it to resolution. As Stephen Miller has pointed... more
La incognita holds a unique position within Gald6s's literary production: it is the only novel which deliberately is left incomplete and requires a companion text, Realidad, to bring it to resolution. As Stephen Miller has pointed out, other interrelated Galdosian texts such as Tormento and La de Bringas or Nazarin and Halma are self-contained novels, while La incognita has no life apart from Realidad. I The complementary relationship between the two texts is stated explicitly in the penultimate chapter of La incognita where that text's narrator, Manolo Infante, speaks of his work as only half of a creation-the body to which Realidad provides the soul. Whereas La incognita is "la cara exterior," "la superficie," "la verdad aparente;" Realidad is "la cara interna," "la descripci6n interior del asunto," "la verdad profunda." This narrative declaration has prompted considerable critical discussion concerning the nature of reality as expressed in these novels and the interplay of the subjective and objective viewpoints provided by the epistolary and dialogue formats.2 Surprisingly, however, in these discussions the fundamental question has not been raised as to why Realidad is presented as a magical transformation of La incognita rather than simply being offered as Equis's written response to Infante's text? Perhaps the answer lies in the metafictional dimension added to La incognita through this narrative premise. Not only does this miraculous violation of verisimilitude call attention to the fictionality of the text, but more importantly, the generation of Realidad out of La incognita serves as a metaphor for the creativity inherent in the act of reading. In her book, Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox, Linda Hutcheon speaks of the acts of writing and reading as mirror images-the same creative process but occurring in reverse. Although this reciprocal procedure is in operation within any fictional work, literary conventions traditionally have sought to conceal it. Metafictional texts, however, ex-
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Thrust into the international spotlight in 1966 when The Hunt, his critique of the Franco regime, won the Silver Bear at Berlin, Spanish filmmaker Carlos Saura (1932-2023) remained an abiding presence and frequent victor at worldwide... more
Thrust into the international spotlight in 1966 when The Hunt, his critique of the Franco regime, won the Silver Bear at Berlin, Spanish filmmaker Carlos Saura (1932-2023) remained an abiding presence and frequent victor at worldwide cinema competitions throughout his lifetime.
Best known in the United States for his Flamenco trilogy―Blood Wedding, Carmen, and A Love Bewitched―he also received Oscar nominations for Mama Turns a Hundred, Carmen, and Tango. Saura's movies are frequently ambiguous, sometimes controversial, and always narratively complex. In many of his films, such as Cría Cuervos and Goya in Bordeaux, he creates sophisticated expressions of time and space by fusing reality with fantasy, past with present, and memory with hallucination.
Carlos Saura: Interviews collects interviews the filmmaker has given in Spain, France, Germany, and Canada. All of the conversations appear here in English for the first time, and, as such, they represent a treasure trove of comments by Saura on his own work.
Best known in the United States for his Flamenco trilogy―Blood Wedding, Carmen, and A Love Bewitched―he also received Oscar nominations for Mama Turns a Hundred, Carmen, and Tango. Saura's movies are frequently ambiguous, sometimes controversial, and always narratively complex. In many of his films, such as Cría Cuervos and Goya in Bordeaux, he creates sophisticated expressions of time and space by fusing reality with fantasy, past with present, and memory with hallucination.
Carlos Saura: Interviews collects interviews the filmmaker has given in Spain, France, Germany, and Canada. All of the conversations appear here in English for the first time, and, as such, they represent a treasure trove of comments by Saura on his own work.
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The twenty-first-century's turn away from fidelity-based adaptations toward more innovative approaches has allowed adapters from Spain, Argentina, and the United States to draw upon Spain's rich body of nineteenth-century classics to... more
The twenty-first-century's turn away from fidelity-based adaptations toward more innovative approaches has allowed adapters from Spain, Argentina, and the United States to draw upon Spain's rich body of nineteenth-century classics to address contemporary concerns about gender, sexuality, race, class, disability, celebrity, immigration, identity, social justice, and domestic violence. This book provides a snapshot of visual adaptations in the first two decades of the new millennium, examining how novelistic material from the past has been remediated for today's viewers through film, television, theater, opera, and the graphic novel. Its theoretical approach refines the binary view of adapters as either honoring or opposing their source texts by positing three adaptation strategies: salvaging (which preserves old stories by giving them renewed life for modern audiences), utilizing (which draws upon a preexisting text for an alternative purpose, building upon the story and creating a shift in emphasis without devaluing the source material), and appropriation (which involves a critique of the source text, often with an attempt to dismantle its authority). Special attention is given to how adapters address audiences that are familiar with the source texts, and those that are not. This examination of the vibrant afterlife of classic literature will be of interest to scholars and educators in the fields of adaptation, media, Spanish literature, cultural studies, performance, and the graphic arts.