Aspectos cognitivos en torno a la novela y el cine de la memoria histórica: "La voz dormida" de Dulce Chacón y su adaptación fílmica

Culture, history, and biology are inseparable. Cultural manifestations are necessarily immersed in a context, originate in the embodied minds that create them, and are directed to the embodied minds that receive them and recreate them within their contexts (individual and collective). The novel and the film of historical memory in Spain aim to connect their audiences with a problem that has not been solved, as the Civil War, the postwar, and the pact of forgetfulness left a wide sector of the Spanish society voiceless. During the last few years, a series of initiatives coming from the arts, as well as other realms such as the legal, have sought to reexamine the unhealed wound that still haunts Spanish subjects. La voz dormida [The Sleeping Voice] is one of those initiatives. It begins as testimony, develops into a hybrid and intertextual novel, and later becomes a film. It constitutes an inclusive project, one of offering an alternative version to the “official history”, while incorporating the marginal voices of women that had been left out of the memory of the war and the dictatorship. Objective and Results By examining both the literary and the cinematic versions of Chacón’s work I aimed to evidence the connections that exist between the artistic portrayal of the postwar repression (particularly how it affects women) and the current movement of recovery of historical memory in Spain. Specifically, I was interested in showing how both the novel and the film employ a series of narrative strategies that emphasize the body and intentionality, with the purpose of creating in readers and spectators an empathetic response that may lead to prosocial behavior. In order to carry out this interdisciplinary study, which relates fiction, mind, and socio-historical context, I draw on cognitive theories of literature and film, as well as theories from social and developmental psychology, such as the Richard Gerrig’s theory of narrative experience, Keith Oatley’s psychology of fiction, Suzanne Keen’s theory of narrative empathy, and the empathy-altruism hypothesis, derived form the ideas of Jean Decety, among others...

El teatro cómico de Enrique García Álvarez

Enrique García Álvarez (Madrid, 1883-1931) belonged to the group of writers who stood out in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth in what was known as “género chico”, label used to oppose this kind of theater to the dramaturgy considered serious. It was composed of brief and comic works whose intention was to generate a fun time for the spectators. Our author was one of the leading representatives and his numerous creations appeared profusely in the posters of the theaters per hour. In the twentieth century, he adapted to the new forms imposed on the scene. Despite his enormous fame at the time, nowadays Enrique García Álvarez remains completely unknown, not only in the eyes of the general public but also to the more knowledgeable circles of our literature. Studies of his dramatic work are almost nonexistent and basically limited to their collaborations with other authors who had more luck as Arniches or Muñoz Seca. The purpose of this thesis is, therefore, to complete a thorough study of the figure and production of Enrique García Álvarez, as well as its impact on the literature. The opening chapter is a reconstruction of the life and work of the author. In the following chapters, we proceeded to the analysis of structural features such as theme, time, space, and characters of his dramatic world. At the end of these pages, we have included a photographic appendix that illustrates some moments of his personal and professional career. We have also developed appendices to classify his librettos chronologically, by collaborator and by genre...

From ‘Bad’ to ‘Mad’: Labelling and Behaviour in Peter Shaffer’s Equus

The process of ‘labelling’ (whereby labels are socially imposed on a given behaviour by a given person) is an extensive and recurrent one in our society, as proved by the labelling of behaviours and people even into the literary text. In our analysis, we will try to show how applying one of two most different labels (psychopathic or psychotic) greatly influences our understanding of the existence of ‘evil’ or moral responsibility in the deeds of a person. To such end, we will use Peter Shaffer’s play Equus (1973), which requires both the characters in the play and the spectators to decide whether Alan Strang’s terrible crime is a result of evil or of insane behaviour: whether he is ‘mad’ or simply ‘bad’. We will try to evince the current social and cultural confusion between madness and evil, and how processes of medicalization or criminalization affect our understanding of those around us and those living in the books we read.