Historia de la dirección escénica en España: Miguel Narros

The year 2013 saw the passing of Miguel Narros, one of the most outstanding men of theatre of recent decades, and a creator to whom we remain in debt today. His extensive legacy deserves a special place in our memory and stands as a subject of study of the keenest interest, in view of the increasing amount of research being done on the discipline of stage direction. The objective of the thesis being presented is to provide an overview of Narros’ work, so as to draw conclusions related to the situation of theatre in Spain throughout the second half of the twentieth century and in the early twenty-first century and to elucidate the director’s poetic conception and a theory of his stage practice. The thesis has focused on the director’s biography —in which work and personal life are closely intertwined—, the artistic and technical credits and dates of his stage productions, the compiling and summarising of a number of reviews in the press, the classification and discussion of the different historical and literary periods dealt with by the director, as well as the poetics of his theatre (his points of reference, his conception as stage director —form and content— and his position on the elements that make up a stage production). Also attached is a selection of photographs of more than half of his stagings (in addition to some of the director himself) which are testimony to his creation and a reflection of a number of the characteristics of his theatre. The study —based on information from the written press, public and private archives (which provided everything from photographs to handbills) and a number of personal interviews, among other sources— reveals a professional whose work transformed, enriched and consolidated the Spanish stage. Indeed, Spanish theatre simply cannot be understood without taking into account Miguel Narros. Narros worked as an actor and immersed himself in the teachings of the figures that populated the theatre world of the mid-twentieth century, such as Jardiel Poncela, Elvira Noriega, José María Rodero, Carmen Seco and, above all, Luis Escobar...

Escritura entre rejas: literatura carcelaria cubana del siglo XX

The present dissertation examines literary perspectives, as well as textual and extra textual mechanisms of the Cuban Prison Literature of the twentieth century. By the term “Prison Literature” I refer to the literary works that have been developed inside the prison space –physically inside of it– and to those that take as a focal point jail itself. In other words, literary works about imprisonment created in order to reminisce about a prison experience or to recreate it, and imagine it from the outside. Likewise, I discuss the political, social and cultural context of each of the different periods where the works presented are framed, as well as the metaphorical projection of the concept of “prison” in various significant levels (the island, the city, the body and the language). Our corpus consists of a myriad Cuban intellectual works from the XXth century that we consider to be representative of the Cuban prison literary tradition, which dates back to the nineteenth century –mainly through the figure of José Martí and his poetic testimony El presidio politico en Cuba (1871)– the same continues during the twenty-first century with writers as María Elena Cruz Varela, Roberto Jesús Quiñones, Raúl Rivero, Ángel Santiesteban and Agnieska Hernández...