Critical tradition holds that in Spain, the eighteenth century is one “without novels”in the sense of those produced by realist and naturalist authors; eighteenth-century novels have been characterized as didactic works lacking the stylistic interest and psychological depth of later narrative achievements, or as simply scarce presences in a century which in Europe saw the flourishing of the form. Yet recent scholarship has developed a more nuanced picture of the novel during the eighteenth century in Spain, a century that may no longer be accused of dearth in terms of either production or quality. In scores of original and translated or adapted works, eighteenth-century novelists gave readers access to “what was 'asked' of literature: observation of people, a realistic description of their lives, and a knowledge of their souls based on experience and their relation to society.”

Enlightenment fiction was the vehicle not only for moral instruction andlessons concerning virtue, but also for the observation of life and reality.Readers wanted fiction to represent experience as though it were happeningbefore their eyes, and turned to novels for realist elements such as theportrayal of consciousness and the depiction of intense emotions, a key componentof the most characteristic of Enlightenment fictional genres: the narrativeof sensibility. Authors of fiction experimented with the possibilities ofthe form in many aspects, such as dialogical modalities and the narration ofhuman experience in time.

When placing works of prose fiction within the framework of modernity, critics find that diverse styles and trends tend to conform to a basic structure, which Nil Santiáñez-Tió has termed a “spectrum of possibilities”:

In 1983 I proposed that a similar polarity existed between the testimonialnovel, on the one hand, and the poetic novel, on the other. But whether onespeaks of “realist” as opposed to “modernist” prose or of the testimonial asopposed to the poetic novel, it is certainly the case that the idea of literarypolarity derives from what we consider “modern” literature. Both poles maybe present at the same time, in the same writer, and even in the same work.These poles may exist in a relatively pure state or as subtle variations thatcombine the magnetic attraction of one to the other.

Levi ben Gershom (Gersonides, 1288-1344), philosopher, scientist, and rabbinical authority,1 has often been portrayed in the scholarly literature as a faithful follower of Aristotle and an unorthodox, even radical, theologian: “The boldest of all Jewish philosophers”Gersonides “may be the truest disciple of Aristotle whom medieval Jewish philosophy produced” and hence is “essentially alien to those biblical doctrines which in his formulation he seemed to approach.” In Gersonides' system “mosaic dogma [gives] way to the requirements of Aristotelianism” since his intellectual worldview is “Islamic peripateticism in all its purety.” One scholar considers his theory of the world's creation to be “almost in the spirit of modern deism” because it “[limits] the direct activity of God to the act of the creation of the world.” Another deems his theory of divine knowledge “a theological monstrosity”; still another claims that it “radically destroys the whole of history as told in the Bible.”

When the Franco dictatorship ended in 1975, the time was ripe for the revitalization of women's literature in Spain. Spain's transition to democracy led to a so-called boom in women's narrative, with the emergence of a new group of women writers who began to publish at that time: among them are Rosa Montero, Lourdes Ortiz, Soledad Púertolas, Marina Mayoral, Cristina Fernández Cubas, Carme Riera, and Esther Tusquets. Still others such as Carmen Martín Gaite, Ana María Moix, and Montserrat Roig, who had already published during Francoism, started to write more self-consciously experimental works in the late 1970s, thus departing from the predominantly neorealist aesthetic of their own and other women's works in the earlier decades of the post-war period. Without attributing homogeneous characteristics to this group of women based on strictly chronological or historical criteria, it would not be inaccurate to claim that the literary techniques and preoccupations of post-Franco women writers generally constitute a break from the previous generation of writers.

A brief overview of women’s social, political, and cultural history shouldserve to contextualize twentieth-century Spanish women’s literature and literaryhistory. In Spain, the women’s movement not only arrived late, incomparison to other Western societies, but was also slow to develop withinstrictly women-centered, feminist organizations.

Medieval Jewish philosophy is in large measure an interpretation in philosophical terms of beliefs, concepts, and texts bequeathed to medieval Jews by the Bible and by rabbinic literature. Thus, much of the agenda of medieval Jewish philosophy is set by ideas featured in the Bible, Talmud, and midrash: God, creation, prophecy, providence, miracles, commandments, and more. For this reason, although there is a need here to present the biblical and rabbinic background to medieval Jewish philosophy, the discussion will largely be an exposition of one aspect of medieval Jewish philosophy itself: namely, its ambition to provide an exegesis of biblical and rabbinic texts, along with explications of their concepts, that would demonstrate the value of philosophy in earlier Judaism and would unearth rigorous philosophical propositions contained in the ancient works.

Examples abound. Saadya Gaon (882–942), head of the academy in Babylonia and the father of medieval Jewish philosophy, and Levi ben Gershom (Gersonides) (1288–1344), an eminent philosopher, logician, and scientist, authored biblical commentaries – Gersonides’ cover a very substantial part of the Bible – that are controlled by a view of the book as shot through with philosophical truth and as standing in agreement with the conclusions of human reason. While the less illustrious rationalist Joseph ibn Kaspi (1279–1340) authored a commentary on the Bible that is controlled not by the assumption of an underlying philosophical truth, but instead by a historicist view, he is an exception among medieval rationalists.

Readers gain a rare and privileged glimpse into the extended, yet implicit, dialogue that all texts possess when writing becomes the object of description, commentary, or meditation in a novel or essay. While commentary by critics and self-reflexive allusions to writing, embedded in the fiction itself, often aspire to the authority of scientific assertions, such reflections form part of complex cultural debates in which good taste, common sense, truth, verisimilitude, and originality are affirmed rather than questioned. As literature evolves, we can easily recognize that the periods of Romanticism and Realism are different; criticism also evolves, reflecting changing cultural perspectives and styles. When Juan Goytisolo writes in Reivindicación del Conde don Julián (Count Julian, 1970) that “erudition deceives,” he alludes to scientific imperturbability and detachment, a view held by certain critics. Criticism’s desire for Olympian stability, demonstrated by Menéndez y Pelayo in the nineteenth century and José Montesinos in the twentieth – each convinced of the propriety of his own values – was seen as opposed to the flux of the novel. In recent decades, concepts steeped in relativity recognize that the vantage point from which we are observing is also in motion and fully engaged with its own time. A close look at how books are represented within novels as well as at the opinions expressed about writing in novels and essays during the modern period will explore this deep commonality between creation and criticism.

The historical foundations of French design

France entered the twentieth century with one of its greatest assets, a rich national culture, in full vigour. More than any other European country, French society set cultural standards which most creative people observed and the population respected. Since its origins under Henri IV (1589-1610) and Louis XIV (1643-1715), this comprehensive culture had been associated with national unity and power, formal training, and the dominance of Paris within French society.

Most French design was inspired from the late sixteenth century by an aesthetic derived from the Italian Renaissance, and given a clear national form from the seventeenth century by architects such as Mansart, Lemercier and Blondel. In this chapter the term 'classical' will be used to describe this aesthetic. It was a system of harmonious proportions, enhanced by details associated with the ancient world. It often made use of the classical orders but many features, such as turrets and steep roofs covered in slate, finials, filigree work, and massive fire surrounds, were medieval French. These traditional features had faded, however, by the late seventeenth century except in small towns and the countryside where tradition still dictated design. In the eighteenth century, symmetry, repetition, archaeological study of ancient remains, the classical orders, and precisely shaped masonry blocks, marked most new public buildings and the homes of the royalty and aristocracy.

The first half of the twentieth century was crucial in creating the identity of modern France, yet that process appears on the surface to be highly paradoxical. On the one hand, it was one of the most dramatic periods in modern French history, encompassing the four years of blood-letting of the First World War, political and economic volatility in the interwar years, culminating in the Depression of the mid-1930s, the catastrophic defeat in June 1940, followed by four years of German Occupation, and, finally, the Liberation of France, which also took the form of a near-civil war and vicious purges.

These dramatic events were accompanied by, and in some cases the product of, deep divisions in French society inherited from the nineteenth century: the fierce antagonism between republicans and anti-republicans, although mitigated after 1900, which would lie dormant for years, only to reappear at moments of crisis, like the Depression or the defeat of 1940; the battle of the Republic against the Catholic Church in the early years of the century which rumbled on right into the period of the Occupation; important social divisions between the urban working class, the peasantry and the bourgeoisie; inequalities between men and women, not least in the areas of electoral suffrage and legal status; and, finally, conflicts real or potential which were the product of ethnic divisions. Throughout the first half of the century, France was amajor colonial power, second only to the United Kingdom, and its relationship to its colonised peoples, in North and West Africa, in South-East Asia and in the Pacific, was crucial in the forging of a national identity based upon a stereotype of the white Frenchman.

Literature and film have established an interdependent relationship since the beginning of the film industry at the turn of the twentieth century. From the first silent films, which the brothers Lumière and Georges Méliès made and which followed theatre's spatial laws and dramatic structure, to the innovations introduced by David Griffith, which turned cinema into a narrative language structured according to the models of the nineteenth-century novel, cinema invariably appears as a mechanical form of reproducing a story.

Cinema flirted with poetry for a short, intense period of time. The artistic avant-garde discovered film’s potential to break with the old order and “dehumanize art,” as well as its power to express political ideologies. Cinema could summon and mobilize an essentially popular audience through a new medium of mass communication. Cinema also articulated in images the ruptures produced in aesthetics or ideology in the first third of the century, and while continuing to be linked intrinsically to literature, it emerged, as Peña-Ardid writes, as a necessary life raft if one were to “abandon rancid realism.” Thus cinema became a powerful instrument “for expressing the imaginary, the unreal, or the dreamed.”

No single person had as great an impact on Jewish thought as did Moses Maimonides (1138-1204). In addition to his tremendous accomplishments in the fields of philosophy and law, Maimonides was thoroughly versed in the sciences of his day, and the sciences were fully integrated into his view of Judaism; indeed, Maimonides' outlook was guided in large part by the scientific opinion of his day. His philosophy asserts the unity of all truth, that the deity, in keeping with Arabic usage, is in fact The Truth (al-haqq), and that the religious imperative to know God is essentially the same as the philosophical imperative to determine the truth. Many statements issuing from the different branches of knowledge claim to be true. However, Maimonides affirms, the strongest and securest claims to truth are made by the sciences, most especially the mathematical sciences, whose statements are demonstrated with logical rigor. Moreover, of all the components of the cosmos, it is the heavenly bodies, with their regular motion and subtle physics, that disclose something approaching the nature of the divine. Furthermore, the human body is marvelously constructed, and its study is also useful for the religious quest. The science of medicine, which conducts this investigation, is also important as a guide for the conduct of a healthy life – a life as free as possible from the physical and emotional disturbances that interfere with the religious quest.

In an oft-quoted dictum the twelfth-century Spanish polymath Abraham ibn Ezra describes Saadya as “first and foremost among speakers everywhere.” This seemingly simple sentence praises Saadya on more than one level, playing as it does on the multivalence of the word “speakers” (medabberim). The context of Ibn Ezra's phrase (in his book on Hebrew grammar) suggests that this word refers here primarily to linguists; yet it can also mean “spokesmen” in a general way, and it is also a literal translation of the Arabic mutakallimun, that is, practitioners of dialectic theology. In all likelihood, Ibn Ezra intended all these meanings together. Indeed, Saadya's towering figure dominates the emergence of medieval Jewish scholarship in all fields: linguistics and poetics, philosophy and exegesis, polemics and law, and he is also generally considered to be the most prominent representative of Jewish kalam. An inquiry into Saadya's thought, his background, and his influence can thus serve as a convenient introduction to Jewish kalam.

Kalam (literally “speech”) is a generic name for Islamic dialectical theology. Common to all kalam schools is the formulation of a system based on the dual basis of rationality and Scripture, and on the assumption that the two complement, rather than contradict, each other. Also typical of all kalam schools is the specific discourse that uses dialectical techniques for the analysis of religious and philosophic problems. Whether it is presented as a strictly theological compendium or in a different kind of literary composition (exegetical, polemical, or a monograph on a specific theological question), a kalam work is often recognizable as such even before a thorough acquaintance with its content. Structure and style characterize kalam works no less than contents.

INTRODUCTION

Upon catching sight today in the synagogues of Safed or Jerusalem of the white-clad, bearded kabbalists, engrossed in their meditations, one is unavoidably struck by the similarity in appearance with the swaying, white-capped Sufis performing the dhikr ritual. In point of fact, the similarity is not only external; of all forms of mysticism, perhaps an unsuspected and yet remarkable parallelism exists between Islamic and Jewish mysticism. Though the two tendencies appear to have developed quite independently, there have been significant points of intersection between them. Within the wider framework of the influence of Islamic thought and spirituality, the study of the interaction between Israel and Ishmael in the domain of mysticism is one of the most fascinating chapters of comparative religion. Even in the broad lines of their respective historical evolutions, Jewish and Islamic esotericism betray a remarkable resemblance. Both went through formative periods characterized by ecstatic experiences and followed by periods of consolidation in which mystical tendencies were tempered by legalism and philosophy. Both underwent profound transformations and were entirely renewed in the late Middle Ages by novel cosmological and speculative systems, sometimes imbued with “prophetic” aspirations, and both finally developed into institutionalized brotherhoods.

Introduction

In 1873, the French National Assembly voted to build a church on Montmartre hill, looking over Paris, as a better way of dealing with social unrest than the alternative proposal of an army barracks. This Church of the Sacred Heart (Sacré-Coeur) is now a national symbol and tourist attraction. But it was originally designed as a gesture of national contrition, seeking divine forgiveness for a military defeat, in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), and for a Socialist revolution, in the Paris Commune (1871), the short-lived people's government which refused to surrender and tried to introduce a new social order in the besieged city. In many ways, this moment sets the scene for the complex and passionate relationship between religion and politics in twentieth-century France, and for the deep and long-running conflicts they have embodied. It also provides a benchmark against which to measure the changes that have taken place over the past century or more.

This episode raises three enduring issues, which continue to preoccupy French society today. The first is the relationship between religion and the State. The builders of the Sacre-Coeur were staunch advocates of an inseparable link between the Catholic Church and the French State, but that link was decisively broken thirty years later. In the ensuing century since then, France has groped towards new ways of addressing the place of religious beliefs in the life of the nation, and managing the surges of passion that the question arouses. The second issue is the relationship between religion and politics.