5AASB068 After Franco: Films and Texts of the Transition
Credit value: 15 credits
Module tutor: Dr Federico Bonaddio
Assessment: One 2000 word tutorial essay (40%); One 2000 word final essay (60%). Students must attend all classes and film screenings, and submit assessed work by the agreed deadline.
Teaching arrangements: Two hours per week, plus film screenings
Module description
This course introduces students to a variety of cultural responses to Spain’s transition from dictatorship to democracy in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Using as case studies examples from literature, film and popular culture (including music), the course will make students aware of the fact that perspectives on the Transition were not uniform. On the one hand, there may have been joy and optimism (exemplified by the hedonism of youth culture in Madrid in the early 1980s), but there was also, on the other, a degree of scepticism and anxiety in face of political and social disillusionment and uncertainty.
Key Concepts
Themes to be discussed will include political commitment and indifference, women’s liberation, sexual freedom, nostalgia, and the rise of individualism. Lectures will introduce the texts, set them in their context and outline principal themes. Seminars will be used to study these themes in greater depth via the close-reading and discussion of set texts.
Set texts
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Luis Riaza, El desván de los machos y el sótano de las hembras (Cátedra)
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Rosa Montero, Crónica del desamor (Plaza & Janes)
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Montserrat Roig, La hora violeta (Plaza & Janes or Editorial Castalia)
Additional information is available to download (doc, 32KB)