Title: Seeing the World Upside Down: Visual Culture and Ekphrasis in Carmen Martín Gaite's<i>El cuarto de atrás</i>
Abstract:Criticism on Carmen Martín Gaite's El cuarto de atrás (1978) consistently has produced studies on the intertextual relationships the novel establishes with cultural artifacts from the Franco period, i...Criticism on Carmen Martín Gaite's El cuarto de atrás (1978) consistently has produced studies on the intertextual relationships the novel establishes with cultural artifacts from the Franco period, including popular songs and novelas rosas. Curiously absent from that criticism is a discussion of the narrative uses of ekphrasis that also describe popular visual ‘texts’. This article will demonstrate that, like the literary or musical intertexts, the visual images C. describes reveal her position with regard to national history and life after Franco, seen through a subjectively-mediated lens. While she uses the images derived from Francoist visual culture to demythify the regime's notion of femininity and to dismantle their discourse, in her home she utilizes art to propose a counter-discourse based on disorder and the problematics of subjectivity. These opposed sets of images never descend into Manichean polarity and help to highlight the ambivalent nature of the Transition in Spain and its effects on the children of the Franco era.Read More
Publication Year: 2015
Publication Date: 2015-01-07
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 1
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