A new cycle of the Spanish Reading Club begins
Interwar American Literature.
The interwar period (1918-1939) is one of the most turbulent periods in the history of the Western world, due to the rise of fascism and communism, the Wall Street crash that led to the Great Depression, and the civil war Spanish, which had important international resonances. But it is also one of the richest periods of Western art, thanks to the rise of the avant-garde movements and Anglo-Saxon Modernism, which set out to break with all the conventions of previous art. American literature is no exception to this cultural boil. The Lost Generation, whose name reflects the prevailing confusion and disorientation among young people after the First World War, converge in this period; the Harlem Renaissance, which represents the first vindictive cultural movement of the Afro-American population; Modernism, which overlaps in some cases with the previous two; and the beginnings of the hard-boiled crime novel. In this cycle we will read ten novels belonging to these currents.
The cycle is run by Jacqueline Cruz. Jacqueline has a Ph.D. in Hispanic Language and Literatures from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). She is the author of the book Marginality and subversion: Emeterio Gutiérrez Albelo and the Canarian avant-garde and some thirty academic articles on literary, cinematographic and cultural criticism, with special emphasis on cultural and gender studies. He has co-edited, along with Barbara Zecchi, the volume Women in Spain today: Evolution or involution? and has translated several books for Cátedra's “Feminisms” collection. She is currently a professor of Spanish and Latin American literature at New York University in Madrid, and between 2006 and 2011 she taught the course "Gender, cinema and society", sponsored by the Feminist Research Institute of the Complutense University.
Provisional titles and dates:
September 25: Nella Larsen, Chiaroscuro (1929), 200 pp.
October 30: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night (1934), 472 pp.
November 27th: John Steinbeck, To an Unknown God (1933), 272 pp.
December 18: Gertrude Stein, Ida (1941), 168 pp.
January 29: John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer (1925), 576 pp.
26 February: Langston Hughes, Writings on Spain (Pierre Ionoff edition, 2011), 272 pp.
Winners will be announced in March: Anaïs Nin, Henry, his wife and I (Henry and June) (1931-32), 312 pp.
30 April: William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929), 392 pp.
May 28: Ernest Hemingway, Fiesta (1926), 288 pp.
25 June: Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep (1939), 240 pp.
additional titles (in case any of the above is not available):
Dashiell Hammett, The slender man (1934), 240 pp.
Juna Barnes, Ryder (1928), 250 pp.
Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (1934), 384 pp.
