Unamuno's Theory of the Novel

Unamuno's Theory of the Novel
Author: C. A. Longhurst
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 1351538217

Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) is widely regarded as Spain's greatest and most controversial writer of the first half of the twentieth century. Professor of Greek, and later Rector, at the University of Salamanca, and a figure with a noted public profile in his day, he wrote a large number of philosophical, political and philological essays, as well as poems, plays and short stories, but it is his highly idiosyncratic novels, for which he coined the word nivola, that have attracted the greatest critical attention. Niebla (Mist, 1914) has become one of the most studied works of Spanish literature, such is the enduring fascination which it has provoked. In this study, C. A. Longhurst, a distinguished Unamuno scholar, sets out to show that behind Unamuno's fictional experiments there lies a coherent and quasi-philosophical concept of the novelesque genre and indeed of writing itself. Ideas about freedom, identity, finality, mutuality and community are closely intertwined with ideas on writing and reading and give rise to a new and highly personal way of conceiving fiction.

Unamuno and Kierkegaard

Unamuno and Kierkegaard
Author: Jan E. Evans
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 148
Release: 2005
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780739110799

Miguel de Unamuno was profoundly influenced by S ren Kierkegaard's pseudonymous works at a time when Kierkegaard was virtually unknown in Southern Europe. This book explores the scope and character of that influence, clarifies misconceptions in the relationship between the authors, and offers an original, Kierkegaardian reading of three of Unamuno's best known novels: Niebla, San Manuel Bueno, m rtir, and Abel S nchez. Both authors hold a "self as achievement" view in which the authentic self is seen as the result of the choices one makes over a lifetime. For Kierkegaard, the spheres of existence-the esthetic, the ethical, and the religious-are "stages on life's way" to becoming an authentic self before God. Unamuno, however, holds that the same spheres of existence offer equally valid modes of authentic existence as long as one chooses them freely and passionately. This book will be of great interest to scholars of existentialism, Unamuno, and Kierkegaard.

Mist Niebla

Mist Niebla
Author: Miguel de Unamuno
Publisher:
Total Pages: 352
Release: 1929
Genre: English fiction
ISBN:

Dispensing with the conventions of action, time and place, and analysis of character, Mist proceeds entirely on the strength of dialog that reveals the struggles of what Unamuno called his 'agonists.' These include Augusto Perez, the pampered son of a recently deceased mother; the deceitful, scheming Eugenia, whom Augusto obsessively loves and idealizes; and Augusto's dog Orfeo, who gives a funeral oration upon his master's death. Augusto is to be married to Eugenia who leaves and causes him to contemplate suicide. Before he does that, however, he consults the book's author Unamuno, who informs him he cannot kill himself because he is a fictional character. Mist even includes a chapter that explains Unamuno's theory of the antinovel. Anticipating later writers such as Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, Unamuno exploited fiction as a vehicle for the exploration of philosophical themes. First published in 1914, Mist exemplified a new kind of novel with which Unamuno aimed to shatter fiction's conventional illusions of reality. It is an antinovel that treats its fictionality ironically.

Approaches to Teaching the Works of Miguel de Unamuno

Approaches to Teaching the Works of Miguel de Unamuno
Author: Luis Álvarez-Castro
Publisher: Modern Language Association
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2020-04-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1603294430

A central figure of Spanish culture and an author in many genres, Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) is less well known outside Spain. He was a surprising writer and thinker: a professor of Greek who embraced metafiction and modernist methods, a proponent of Castilian Spanish although born in the Basque Country and influenced by many international writers, and an early existentialist who was yet religious. He found himself in opposition to both King Alfonso XIII and the military dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera and then became involved in the political upheaval that led to the Spanish Civil War. Part 1 of this volume, "Materials," gives information on different editions and translations of Unamuno's works, on scholarly and critical secondary sources, and on Web resources. The essays in part 2, "Approaches," offer suggestions for introducing students to the range of his works--novels, essays, poetry, and drama--in Spanish language and literature, comparative literature, religion, and philosophy classrooms.

Miguel de Unamuno

Miguel de Unamuno
Author: C. A. Longhurst
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 187
Release: 2016-01-31
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1800345194

First anthology dedicated solely to Unamuno’s poetry in 25 years, with commentary on each poem

A Companion to Miguel de Unamuno

A Companion to Miguel de Unamuno
Author: Julia Biggane
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2016
Genre: Spanish literature
ISBN: 1855663007

Surveys the thought and literary work of a towering figure in twentieth-century Spanish cultural and political life.

Forms of Modernity

Forms of Modernity
Author: Rachel Lynn Schmidt
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2011-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1442642513

It's a critical cliché that Cervantes' Don Quixote is the first modern novel, but this distinction raises two fundamental questions. First, how does one define a novel? And second, what is the relationship between this genre and understandings of modernity? In Forms of Modernity, Rachel Schmidt examines how seminal theorists and philosophers have wrestled with the status of Cervantes' masterpiece as an 'exemplary novel', in turn contributing to the emergence of key concepts within genre theory. Schmidt's discussion covers the views of well-known thinkers such as Friedrich Schlegel, José Ortega y Gasset, and Mikhail Bakhtin, but also the pivotal contributions of philosophers such as Hermann Cohen and Miguel de Unamuno. These theorists' examinations of Cervantes's fictional knight errant character point to an ever-shifting boundary between the real and the virtual. Drawing from both intellectual and literary history, Forms of Modernity richly explores the development of the categories and theories that we use today to analyze and understand novels.

Narrative and Self-Understanding

Narrative and Self-Understanding
Author: Garry L. Hagberg
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2019-11-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3030282899

This exciting new edited collection bridges the gap between narrative and self-understanding. The problem of self-knowledge is of universal interest; the nature or character of its achievement has been one continuing thread in our philosophical tradition for millennia. Likewise the nature of storytelling, the assembly of individual parts of a potential story into a coherent narrative structure, has been central to the study of literature. But how do we gain knowledge from an artform that is by definition fictional, by definition not a matter of ascertained fact, as this applies to the understanding of our lives? When we see ourselves in the mimetic mirror of literature, what we see may not just be a matter of identifying with a single protagonist, but also a matter of recognizing long-form structures, long-arc narrative shapes that give a place to – and thus make sense of – the individual bits of experience that we place into those structures. But of course at precisely this juncture a question arises: do we make that sense, or do we discover it? The twelve chapters brought together here lucidly and steadily reveal how the matters at hand are far more intricate and interesting than any such dichotomy could accommodate. This is a book that investigates the ways in which life and literature speak to each other.

Self-reflection in Literature

Self-reflection in Literature
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2019-12-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004407111

Self-reflection is fundamental for human thinking on many levels. Philosophy has described the mind's capacity to observe itself as a core element of human existence. Political and social sciences have shown how modern democracies depend on society's ability to critically reflect on their own values and practices. And literature of all ages has proven self-reflexivity to be a crucial trait of cultural production. This volume provides the first diachronic panorama of genres, forms, and functions of literary self-reflection and their connections with social, political and philosophical discourses from the 17th century to the present. Far beyond the usual focus on postmodernist opacity, these contributions present a rich tradition of critical transparency: Literary texts that show us what is behind and beyond them.