Collapse, Catastrophe and Rediscovery: Spain’s Cultural Panorama in the Twenty-First Century

After nearly forty years of dictatorship and an abrupt transition to democracy in the twentieth century, Spain is now in a moment of great rediscovery. The Peninsular country's precarious past, paired with its current situation of economic crisis (currently Spain has one of the highest unemployment rates in the Eurozone) and movements to recover languages, literatures and cultures other than Spanish, creates a country where artists, authors and directors are exploring existential and social issues in new and revitalized ways.The chapters included in Collapse, Catastrophe, and Rediscovery: Spain's Cultural Panorama in the Twenty First Century explore filmic, literary and cultural representations of modern-day Spain, and the contributing authors offer insight into how the past has affected the country's artistic and literary production of today and how film and literature dialogue with the social and economic situation of Spain in the late-twentieth and twenty first centuries. Anchored to current cultural and social trends, this collection presents a variety of perspectives and a wide range of analyses of some of the most pertinent contemporary Spanish texts and films with the goal of expanding conceptualizations of the cultural panorama of Spain today.

Jennifer Brady (PhD, Colorado) is Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth, and the Managing Editor of Hispania. Her research examines representations of masculinities, distortions and modifications of corporeal and written texts, and manifestations of desire in contemporary Spanish fiction. Phenomenological and feminist theories, namely works by Merleau-Ponty and Kristeva, frame her scholarship. She is currently working on a book project titled Men and Masculinities in Flux: Representations in Contemporary Spain, and will publish a chapter in the forthcoming Ventura Pons: Una mirada excepcional desde el cine catalan.Ibon Izurieta (PhD, Iowa) is Assistant Professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver. His research interests center on the concept of identity and how a new performative version of identity can be harnessed in progressive activism. His areas of research include the concept of identity in post-Franco Basque and Peninsular narrative and film. He has published articles on those topics, and is currently working on a manuscript on Miguel de Unamuno.Ana-Maria Medina (PhD, Houston) is an independent researcher. Her investigation delves into the pressing questions of cultural conflict and assimilation, union and disunion, historical memory, feminine space, and transcultural and multilingual artistic production in the Peninsula. She teaches beginner and intermediate language classes, heritage language courses, and twentieth and twenty-first century Peninsular literature, film and culture courses. She has published in various mediums, including scholarly journals, collections and magazines, and has presented at numerous national and international conferences.