Visualizing an Aesthetics of Resistance: The Role of Sight in 19th and 20th Century (Neo)Realism on the Iberian Peninsula.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the ways that realism and later, neo-realism, functioned as a means of aesthetic resistance on the Iberian Peninsula by questioning the role sight played in organizing and controlling perception. In order to address this, I concentrate on two specific moments: the Napoleonic invasion of 1807-8 and the contemporaneous rise of realist aesthetics, and the lengthy twentieth century dictatorships of Spain’s Francisco Franco and Portugal’s Antonio de Oliveira Salazar (and the Estado Novo). I contend that realism became the dominant method of aesthetic resistance because it was linked to a historical moment of resistance, that of the Spanish uprising against the Napoleonic invasion. It was, thus, uniquely capable of exposing and destabilizing the tension between sight as a means of oppressing society through organization and control and as a means of resisting that control by making it visible. In my first chapter, I explore the way Goya and Galdós depicted the events of the 2nd of May Spanish uprising against the Napoleonic invasion in such a way as to question how reliable observation could be in building a national consciousness. In my second chapter, I examine the rise of the corrida as a metaphor for Spanish legitimacy under the regime of Francisco Franco. Through readings of Iganacio Aldecoa’s short stories “Los pozos” and “Caballo de pica” alongside Carlos Saura’s film, Los golfos, I argue that sight becomes the way of undoing this same discourse. Finally, in my third chapter, I look at the way optics functioned as a means of resistance against the Portuguese Estado Novo in the texts of Alves Redol (Gaibeus) and Carlos de Oliveira/Fernando Lopes’s versions of Uma Abelha na Chuva.