Sometime during the 1960s, the mirror breaks for Spanish narrative. Such works as Luis Martín Santos's Tiempo de silencio (Time of Silence, 1962), Juan Goytisolo's Señas de identidad (Marks of Identity, 1966), Miguel Delibes's Cinco horas con Mario ('Five Hours with Mario', 1966), José María Guelbenzu's El mercurio ('Mercury', 1968), Camilo José Cela's Vísperas, festividad y octava de San Camilo del año 1936 en Madrid (San Camilo in 1936: The Eve, Feast, and Octave of St. Camillus of the Year 1936 in Madrid, 1969) and, most radically, Juan Benet's Volverás a Región (Return to Region, 1967) wreak havoc on the reality, idea, and ideal of realism. To different degrees, and from often considerably different ideological positions, each of these works twists, blurs, stretches, smashes, or scoffs at mimetic representation, communicability, and referentiality. Language, turned into its own object, becomes opaque, restive, polyvalent, and at times even purposeless. The trend is solidified in the early 1970s with the publication of Goytisolo’s Reivindicación del conde don Julián (Count Julián, 1970), Benet’s Una meditación (A Meditation, 1970) and Un viaje de invierno (‘A Winter’s Journey’, 1972), Gonzalo Torrente Ballester’s La saga/fuga de J. B. (‘The Saga/Fugue of J. B.’, 1972), Juan Marsé’s Si te dicen que caí (The Fallen, 1973), Luis Goytisolo’s Recuento (‘Recount’, 1973), and Juan Goytisolo’s Juan sin tierra (Juan the Landless, 1975).

When we look back at Spanish modern literary historiography it soon becomes evident that Spain's literary corpus as a whole was often and overly conceptualized as “different” in relation to the Western European canon. Inversely, when reviewing Spain's current literary critique on Spanish postmodern production – that is, from 1975 onwards – it is also strikingly evident that what is usually expressed is its “normalcy.”

Spain’s formerly assigned non-modern literary “difference” as well as its current post-modern “normalcy” cannot be understood as an isolated cultural phenomenon but, rather, as part of a broader constellation. Although profoundly cultural, the process-formation of “Spanish difference” or “Spanish normalcy,” as conceptual designators for the non-modern and the post-modern respectively, widely surpasseses the literary. It ultimately relates to Spain’s intervention vis à vis the history of capital development – Spain’s initial and increasing estrangement from modernity starting with the shift in imperial economic power in the late seventeenth century from the Spanish via the Netherlands to the English and ultimately, to Anglo-America, and its final plunge into the new contemporary post-modern world economy after 1975.

Introduction

In 1948, the philosopher and rising star of Parisian existentialism, Jean- Paul Sartre, recast a series of essays into book form as Qu'est-ce que la littérature? (What is Literature?) The question Sartre raised in the title introduced a set of concerns he deemed central to the programme of committed writing (litte rature engagée) he and his colleagues sought to implement through the literary monthly, Les Temps modernes, they had launched in October 1945. Sartre's postwar ambitions for philosophy and literature were pragmatic and activist. Above all, he sought to mobilise the writer into an historical agent, a 'bad conscience' who spoke out in public - as often in speech as in writing - on the social and political issues of the moment. But while Qu'est-ce que la littérature? was a manifesto for littérature engagée, Sartre also saw the need to ground his programme in terms that addressed the nature of literature and of literary activity: what literature was, so to speak, aswell as what he wanted it to do. It was, then, no small irony that much as Sartre sought to mobilise the writer of prose within a broad public sphere represented by mass media such as the daily press, theatre, film, the foundational questions he addressed in the opening chapters of Qu'est-ce que la litté rature? - what is writing? why write? for whom does one write? - drew openly on a philosophical tradition whose origins in Greek antiquity included Aristotle's Poetics and Plato's Republic.

In 1989 France celebrated the Bicentennial of the Revolution which overthrew the ancien régime and established the First Republic. Culminating in a spectacular display on the Place de la Concorde on 14 July, the celebrations were an affirmation of France's revolutionary origins and its republican tradition, a tradition which, through the first two thirds of the nineteenth century, were eclipsed by Bonapartism but which, with the hiatus of the Occupation, had run uninterrupted from 1871. The events in Paris on 14 July 1989 were important as a statement about France's political and social identity at the end of the twentieth century, but they also adopted a cultural format of extreme theatricality in which high cultural and popular cultural traditions merged: the evening's climax consisted of the American soprano Jessye Norman singing the Marseillaise whilst circling the obelisk at the centre of the Placede la Concorde entwined in a huge tricolore flag. Not for the first time did France choose to celebrate its historical origins with a cultural event of high theatricality which also adopted the format of the carnival. At the same time, the Bicentennial celebrations were by no means the result of spontaneous or piecemeal enthusiasm. On the contrary, they were the culmination of years of planning at the highest levels of the State, overseen and orchestrated by the Minister of Culture, Jack Lang. As such, they were confirmation of the central role of the State in the operation of late twentieth-century, as early twentieth-century, France, and of the importance it accords to culture as a means of affirming national identity.

Introduction: towards a definition

The object of study that is both configured and analysed in this chapter is usually split into four categories: French literature (written in France), 'Francophone' or 'non-Hexagonal' productions (written in French outside of hexagon-shaped France) and within each field, a further separation occurs between canonical and popular literature. Because critical studies are often restricted to high culture, and have long treated France as the unquestioned centre of French studies, Francophone countries and popular literature are the vulnerable variables of the equation. In this chapter, we propose to redraw the disciplinary borders that have surrounded traditional fields ('popular culture', 'Francophone' and 'French' literatures) and focus on narrative fiction of French expression.

We do not pretend that France can arbitrarily be treated as just one Francophone area among others or that the distinction between high culture and low culture can be instantly abolished. The Hexagon has always had specific characteristics, notably a self-perception as the centre and point of origin. Even if we keep in mind regional cultures (Occitany, Brittany), France is a monolingual country whereas all other nations mentioned in this chapter will have French as one of their languages. In formerly colonised areas (North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, Vietnam, the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean) French has been associated with conquest and cultural domination. In yet other countries, French is a vulnerable cultural capital threatened by other expanding linguistic forces (English in Quebec for example).

This chapter is concerned with two aspects of Don Quijote and the picaresque: how the novels were intended and received in their historical context, and what posterity made of them. Though modern criticism has tended to treat the Quijote and the picaresque novel as virtually opposed fictional worlds, they are much more closely related. Indeed, in some ways, Don Quijote grows out of Alemán's picaresque classic Guzmán de Alfarache (1599). Thus we should consider first the picaresque before Cervantes.

The genre was born in 1554 with the publication of the anonymousLazarillo de Tormes. Five years later, Lazarillo was blacklisted on the firstSpanish Index because of its irreverence towards the church, but was allowedto recirculate in expurgated form from 1573. The Inquisition’s disapprovalchecked the development of the picaresque for the next forty years; but thisgenre, and comic/satiric writing in general, revived spectacularly with thepublication in 1599 of the first part of Alemán’s novel and its wildfire editorialsuccess. A spate of robustly comic fiction followed in the immediate wakeof Guzmán de Alfarache, including Don Quijote, Part I (1605), togetherwith several picaresque sequels or successors to Guzmán, like Quevedo’s ElBuscón (written about 1605).

When Charles Baudelaire, at the dawn of the French modernist period, wrote that music sometimes overwhelmed him like an ocean, he was heralding what would happen in France throughout the twentieth century. A musical map of France at the beginning of the period would have shown all sorts of geographical divisions and class hierarchies, with high art music the purview of a happy and wealthy urban few, regional musics retracting into provincial backwaters, and 'popular' forms of musical expression subject to the vagaries of the growing commercialisation of the music-halls. By the century's end, democratisation and technological advances had led to the breaking of all barriers. With the advent of radio, recording, cinema, television and the Internet, music of all kinds is simultaneously everywhere, giving individuals exponentially increasing choice in what they want to hear and when. For music-makers, too, the parameters have been infinitely extended: conventions of composition and harmony have dissolved; the potentials of sound production have been multiplied by the possibilities of electronic synthesis as well as by the recovery of ancient instruments; the spaces in which music can occur have become unlimited. France has not, of course, been alone in experiencing this revolution, and what it means in the French context is one measure - a significantly sensitive one - of the great changes that have swept the world in the modernist era.

It can be no surprise that Jonathan Swift wrote throughout his life on matters relating to the Anglican church, religion, worship, and discipline. He lived in a kingdom the overwhelming majority of whose inhabitants were believing, observing Christians. In England, much the greater part were baptized and practicing members of the Anglican church, the church established by law (the case in Ireland, as we shall see, was both demographically and politically rather different). Works of theology, divinity, and biblical commentary constituted, in the seventeenth century and through most of the eighteenth century, the most numerous of any class of writings published in Britain. And Swift of course, for virtually all his adult life, was an ordained member of the Anglican priesthood, engaged in its daily duties and its high political interests, and for three decades Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin.

Swift's relationships with women have been subject to comment since his own day, and have evoked speculation and (sometimes) derision among his critics since the days of Lord Orrery. Swift's connections with women are sufficiently complex, and women were his associates in some of the most important ventures of his career.

Comparative in scope, this volume in the Cambridge Companion series presents the development of the modern Spanish novel from the seventeenth century to the present. Drawing on the legacies of Don Quijote and the traditions of the picaresque novel, the collected essays focus on the questions of invention and experiment, of what constitutes the singular features, formal and cultural, theoretical and philosophical, of the novel in Spain, and how the emergence of new fictional forms articulates the relationships between history and fiction, high and popular culture, art and ideology, gender and society, literature and film.

Three major concepts have guided the theme and structure of the volume: the role played by historical events and cultural contexts in the elaboration of the novel; the development of a reflexive, and at times parodic, stance toward writing and literary tradition; and the conviction, either expressed or implied, that ambiguity and the lived experience of time, filtered through memory, have defined human lives in transition, as scene and setting, characters and events become recreated through the diverse, dialogical modalities of the Spanish novel.

In the Preface to A Tale of a Tub (1704), Swift finds a classic way to define the kind of writing that is not classic and the kind of reading that should properly accompany it. Shadowing this passage is Cicero's declaration in De Re Publica (The Republic) of the unchanging and everlasting law of right reason. In place of law, Swift gives us modern wit which, we are told, does not travel well. Even “the smallest Transposal or Misapplication” can annihilate it (PW i: 26). Some jests are only comprehensible at Covent-Garden, some at Hyde-Park Corner. All the universal truths about modernity are sourced in its provinciality.

Introduction

France's contribution to the visual arts is arguably her outstanding achievement in the twentieth century. Paris became the world centre of modernism: the greatest non-French artists such as Pablo Picasso from Spain and Piet Mondrian from Holland would make Paris their home before the Second World War. The far-reaching impact of Cubism on architecture, from Le Corbusier onwards, changed the face of cities across the world. The Ecole de Paris saw artists from Russia, subsequently the Soviet Union, such as Chaim Soutine or Jacques Lipchitz come to live or stay for long periods in Paris, together with artists from Poland and Eastern Europe such as Jules Pascin, from Italy (Amadeo Modigliani), from Switzerland (Meret Oppenheim, Alberto Giacometti, Jean Tinguely), from Denmark (Asger Jorn) and of course from America, from the Synchronist painters before the First World War to photographers such as Man Ray and Lee Miller in the 1920s or William Klein in the 1960s.

Paris, meanwhile, reciprocated, not only as a place of freedom, bohemian lifestyles, purpose-built artists' accommodation, and the café conversation that was so essential a complement to long hours in the studio, but with a structure of annual and varied Salons, a growing, professional and internationally orientated dealer system and, in terms of both spectacle and artistic information, the great exhibitions that marked the first half of the century: the Exposition Universelle of 1900, the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs in 1925, the Exposition Coloniale in 1931, and the Exposition Internationale des Arts et des Techniques de la Vie Moderne in 1937.

A critical approach to the nineteenth-century folletín must begin with an examination of this widely used term and with a revision of some of the prevalent ideas that frame our understanding of the literary and cultural nature of this novelistic production. The term folletín is not without problems. Based upon well-established critical notions, it has become a kind of critical steamroller that, while stressing some generally defined common traits, effectively cancels out all aesthetic differentiation among the texts included in this category. As we will see, some of these deep-rooted critical notions have to do with the poetics of the novel; others, with the Romantic understanding of literature as the highest expression of a nation's unique identity. Finally, the problematic nature of the term folletín is directly related to the highly influential distinction between High and Low forms of culture.

Folletín refers first of all to the form of publication of a novel. It describesthe market-induced fragmentation a novel underwent when published in thefolletín section of a newspaper. This section used to occupy the bottom partof one or more pages, or the last one, of a newspaper or journal, and was generallyused to publish a miscellany of social news and recreational items. Thepractice was first introduced in France in 1836 by the editors of the newspapersLa Presse and Le Siècle as a means to increase sales and, due to its greatsuccess, it was immediately adopted by most major newspapers and journalsall around Europe and America: in Spain it was already a well-establishedpractice in the 1840s.

Fifteenth-century Hispanic Jewish philosophy has been condemned as lacking originality and creativity. According to many, the last century of Jewish philosophical activity on Iberian soil represents the swan song of the rich and illustrious history of Spanish Jewish philosophy. Scholars generally attribute this supposed intellectual sterility to the persecution that Jews suffered during this period. Speaking for many, Julius Guttmann argues, “The frightful pressure under which Spanish Jewry, the foremost bearers of Jewish philosophy, lived during the fifteenth century precluded any productive or original philosophical work.”

Although this criticism of fifteenth-century Hispanic Jewish philosophy does capture an element of its intellectual orientation, in other respects Jewish philosophy in Spain flourished in the final century before the expulsion. Relatively few philosophical works were written by Spanish Jews in the thirteenth century and the first half of the fourteenth century. By contrast, Hispanic Jewish thinkers in the following century composed a host of philosophical commentaries on scriptural and rabbinic texts, commentaries on Islamic and Jewish philosophers, philosophical sermons, and independent philosophical and theological treatises.

Moshe ben Maimon, better known in the West as Maimonides, falls temporally at the midpoint of the six-hundred-year history of medieval Jewish philosophy. But from the vantage point of the present he is a central figure in a much more significant way. Maimonides is a Janus-faced figure, looking both forward and backward. He is the culmination of the Judeo-Arabic philosophical tradition, which includes Saadya, Solomon ibn Gabirol, and Judah Halevi. But Maimonides also establishes the Jewish philosophical agenda in Christian lands from the thirteenth century on with the (posthumous) translation of his controversial Guide of the Perplexed into Hebrew. His influence in fact extends beyond Jewish philosophy, for his effect upon Christian thinkers such as Aquinas and Meister Eckhart is palpable. Even beyond the medieval period Maimonides is a pivotal figure, who provides a starting point for philosophical speculation. Spinoza has Maimonides in mind throughout his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, published anonymously in 1670. And it is Maimonides to whom Hermann Cohen in the twentieth century turned in developing his own conception of Judaism as ethical monotheism. More than any other Jewish thinker before or after, Maimonides, known among his own people by the acronym Rambam, can reasonably lay claim to a place on any short list of great philosophers. This chapter will attempt to ground this bald claim.

Introduction

Cultural history has little regard for landmarks suggested by the calendar, and, though the twentieth century was an active and highly distinctive epoch in French theatre, it did not begin neatly in 1900. Traditionally, French theatre performances were heralded by 'les trois coups' (three strokes of a broomstick against the boards behind the curtain). Likewise, twentieth-century theatre was heralded by three late nineteenth-century events: the opening of the experimental 'Théâtre libre' by André Antoine in the Passage de l'Elysée-Montmartre in 1887; the first public projection of moving pictures from a strip of celluloid in the Grand Cafe, Boulevard des Capucines, in 1895; and the opening - possibly just the opening line, 'Merdre!' - of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi (King Ubu) in Lugné-Poë's Nouveau Théâtre in the rue Blanche in 1896.

Several features of these events are worthy of note. First, they took place in, or just across the road from a single Paris arrondissement (the 10th) within an 800-metre radius of the corner of the Rue Montmartre and the Boulevard Poissonnière, a circle that also encompassed, at the time, a large proportion of Parisian theatres and private schools of art.

THE FIRST HEBREW TRANSLATIONS OF SCIENTIFIC WORKS

The translation into Hebrew of Arabic scientific and philosophic works in the thirteenth century and the first third of the fourteenth century made possible the flowering of science and philosophy among Jews in Western Europe in the late Middle Ages. The first scientific work to be translated from Arabic into Hebrew was an Arabic version of Aristotle's Meteorology. Samuel ibn Tibbon, the translator of Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed, translated this work in 1210. This translation would be one of only three works of Aristotle to be translated into Hebrew directly from the Arabic translations, but it did not get the translation movement of scientific texts off to a running start. Ibn Tibbon himself, whose son Moses would become one of the most prolific and proficient of the Arabicto- Hebrew translators of scientific texts, showed surprisingly little interest in the translation of scientific texts. In fact, he claimed that he consented to translate the Meteorology only after the persistent entreaties of a learned scholar and dear friend, who had originally asked him to translate all Aristotle’s physical works, and when Ibn Tibbon refused, begged him to translate at least the Meteorology. But this was a poor choice. Unlike many of the Arabic translations of Aristotle’s works of the time, which could be found in fine copies of competent or even impressive translations, this text was available in seemingly corrupt copies of a poor Arabic paraphrase. To make sense of it Ibn Tibbon had to translate creatively, constantly comparing and relying on testimonia such as the commentaries of Alexander of Aphrodisias and Averroes.