Aesthetics and Politics: International Intellectuals and the Spanish Civil War

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 6
• Convenor: Mari Paz Balibrea Enriquez
• Assessment: a two-hour in-class examination (40%) and a 3500-word essay (60%)

The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) was the defining, most determining event of the country’s twentieth century. It was of major importance, not only at a national level, but at an international, geopolitical and cultural one too. The 1930s was a period of global political polarisation triggered by the emergence of the communist USSR as a world power on the one hand and by the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy on the other, both playing a major part in the development of events in Spain. In addition, the Spanish war was able to capture the imagination of an entire generation of artists and intellectuals, who saw in 'The Good Fight' an opportunity to intervene in changing the course of history.

Focusing mainly, but not exclusively, on those non-Spanish intellectuals and artists who took sides with the Republic, our module will explore: first, the international political, historical and cultural climate that explains this phenomenon; second, the way that the Spanish Civil war shaped the cultural production of each of the artists under study; and finally, how the experience of this war anticipated, in the work of some of these intellectuals, a geopolitical and geocultural context that only a decade after would become hegemonic: the Cold War.

Indicative module syllabus

• Historical introduction to the Spanish Civil War
• The Spanish Civil War as a global event; the International Brigades
• Intellectuals and political commitment: the aesthetic and politics debates of the 1930s
• Wyndham Lewis, The Revenge for Love (1937) and Count your Dead: they are Alive! or A New War in the Making (1937)
• André Malraux, L’Espoir (1937)
• Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) and The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War (2002) [1938]
• Blockade (1938) Dir. William Dieterle
• Bertolt Brecht, Señora Carrar’s Rifles (1937)
• George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (1938)
• Arthur Koestler, Spanish Testament (1937) [excerpts]
• Langston Hugues, Writings on Spain (1937-1939)
• César Vallejo, España, aparta de mí este cáliz (1937)
• Robert Capa’s photographs of the Spanish Civil War

By the end of this module you will:

• demonstrate in-depth knowledge of the international dimension of the Spanish Civil War, particularly relating to themes of history, culture and politics pertaining to the intervention of international intellectuals in the war
• be familiar with current debates and approaches to the subject of the Spanish Civil War as a European war
• be able to analyse and critically assess some of the dominant themes, salient authors and cultural artefacts dealing with the intersection of aesthetics and politics as applied to the Spanish Civil War
• be able to contrast and compare the aesthetic positions of the different authors, and how they relate to their political thinking with respect to the Spanish Civil War and global politics of the 1930s period
• be able to observe, identify and analyse works of visual and textual culture
• have a critical awareness of the functions of such works within the social and cultural contexts of their production and reception
• understand complex audiovisual material produced in the target language.