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2015 (2014–15 academic year)

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2013 (2012–13 academic year)

Almodóvar's The Skin I Live In (2011) (9 May)

Stitches in Time
Sponsored by Spanish Studies

This lecture begins by placing Almodóvar's 18th feature in the context of the audiovisual scene in Spain on its release, calling attention to Almodóvar's exceptionalism in his own country. It goes on to offer a close formal analysis of the film and to identify its connections with the rest of the director's corpus. These echoes persist in spite of the fact The Skin I Live In is new for the director in its overt identification with the horror genre and in its status as adaptation of a preexisting novel. Finally, the talk suggests that The Skin I Live In constitutes a series of metaphors for the filmmaking process, not the least of which are the sewing of fabric and the suturing of skin, analogous to the editing of the celluloid that Almodóvar employs here for the last time.

Paul Julian Smith is Distinguished Professor of Spanish at The Graduate Center, CUNY. He is an internationally recognized critic in Hispanic cultural studies. Author of Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar (Verso, 1994 and 2000) and Laws of Desire: Questions of Homosexuality in Spanish Writing and Film 1960–1990 (Oxford University Press, 1992). Smith's research also focuses on Mexico, including a book on the groundbreaking film Amores Perros (BFI, 2003). He was a juror at the Morelia Film Festival in Mexico in 2009, and is a regular contributor to Film Quarterly and Sight and Sound. 

Patricia López-Gay
Sponsored by the Dean of the College

Rewriting the Lives of Spain’s “Stolen Children”: The Biographical Impulse and Social Media 

Only in the past few years has it become widely known that one of the largest networks of child trafficking in contemporary Europe was created in Francoist Spain and remained operative until the late '90s. This talk will analyze the biographical and autobiographical narratives that take shape in Facebook groups created by the victims, archival spaces where individuals share information and seek to complete and rewrite their life stories. The new technology changes not simply the archiving process, but what is archivable in a narrative form. Through the formation of collective digital archives, families and individuals become their own archivists—they create and add content in many different forms and media, such as written official documents, oral testimony, familial and personal records, photographs, and audiovisual recordings. Is there a distinctive cultural role for such web-based archives in witnessing history and memorializing our lives, both individually and collectively, in contemporary Spain?

Autobiographical narratives are generally constructed upon the impression of an individual’s past life experiences in the present time: what “might” or “will have been.” As part of a permanently updatable intertext of narratives, the life stories of the stolen children are also marked by the shared loss of what “could have been (and will never be).” From such absence there arises a collective desire to rewrite the lives of entire generations of people. Could we maybe speak of a collective “biographical impulse” that would surpass and frame the autobiographical in the collective archives created for, and by, the “stolen children”?

Òscar O. Santos-Sopena
Sponsored by Dean of the College

Literary Dreamers: A Visual Journey from Bernat Metge to Francisco de Quevedo

My research study analyzes the work of several Catalan and Castilian authors, who use the motif of the dream as a specific humanist perspective, a literary genre, and a philosophical classical discourse. Thus, this presentation explores the intersection of culture, religion, and literary theory in the work of two Iberian Peninsular authors: Lo somni (1399) by the Catalan writer Bernat Metge (1350–1413) and Los sueños (1627) by the Castilian Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas (1580–1645). Both works represent excellent examples of the use of dreams as a cultural and historical narrative of two epochs: Catalan Humanism and Castilian-Spanish Baroque. I suggest that both texts should be explored in relation to the notion of Christian Humanism, where the use of the dream emerges as a literary genre and artistic philosophical device. I argue that this cross-pollination of humanisms from the Mediterranean world served as a bridge between the different civilizations and cultures. Moreover, as my multidisciplinary research indicates, I include exhaustive visual representations of dreams from the Medieval to Contemporary periods. Through this visual journey, I demonstrate that the introduction of dreams in these narratives is instrumental in separating reality and fiction.

Francisca Gonzales-Flores
Sponsored by Dean of the College

Spain and America in Antonio Machado's Early Prose

Traditionally, the work of Spanish poet Antonio Machado (Sevilla, 1875 – Collioure, 1939) has been seen as an evolutionary process, from his more introspective first texts to his socially and politically engaged later works. However, Machado’s social and political concerns can already be found in his very first publications, that is, in the articles that appeared in the newspaper “La Caricatura” (The Caricature) in 1893. These rich, but rarely studied, satirical articles will be the subject of my presentation, which will focus on the author’s reflection on the development of Spain as a modern nation and its relationship to the American colonies in the aftermath of the celebrations of the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the Americas.