Old Madrid/Old Hollywood: Where Miguel de Cervantes, Lope de Vega, & El Greco Meet Ava Gardner, Ernest Hemingway, & Salvador Dali

In WL 300, students explore the literary, artistic, and political culture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Madrid. In these years of desengaño (disillusion), Cervantes, Quevedo, and Vega wrote some of Spain's most important works: Don Quijote de la Mancha, Fuenteovejuna, etc. In art, Velazquez and El Greco painted the images of the decadence of kings and nobility, while Murillo portrayed the people of the streets. On the outskirts, the architect Herrera designed the Monasterio de El Escorial, a palace and tomb for the royals. In the meantime, marginalized communities, like the Roma people or the formerly enslaved, developed their own artistic expressions, like flamenco.  

American actor Ava Gardner's relationship with Spain was an intensely personal one. While it was the setting, inspiration, and filming locale of some of her most successful and career-building films, like Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, The Barefoot Contessa, and The Sun Also Rises, Spain also was the place where Gardner fled from Hollywood's prudish and sexist constraints. And Spain, not inconsequentially for an under-educated girl from rural North Carolina, was also where she would befriend Hemingway, Graves, and Dali, while feuding with her neighbor, ousted Argentinian dictator Juan Peron. Through a series of readings and screenings of the best of her "Spanish" films and a 2018 Spanish television series, students in ENG 217 explore how these artists use Spain to (mis)understand Ava, and Ava to (mis)understand Spain.