Federico García Lorca is the most famous Spanish modernist, as well as the most famous Spanish writer besides Cervantes. Although he has been both mythologized as martyr of the Second Spanish Republic and dismissed as folkloric, he is also a major European modernist and a serious poetic thinker. His work addresses multiple social and artistic issues, and invites a broad range of commentary and creative response. His writing has also generated creative projects in music and the other arts.

This course is an introduction to Lorca’s complete works, including experimental plays like Así que pasen cinco años and El Público, and the erotic writing suppressed until well after the poet’s death. Research funding from the University, supplemented by the Friends of the Humanities, will support a book budget for each student as well as library acquisitions for the course. There will be two major speakers, Jonathan Mayhew (University of Kansas) and Elena Castro (Louisiana State University).

The course will emphasize the multifaceted, experimental, and performative nature of Lorca’s work, and the multidisciplinary responses to it. We will undertake a publication project on the lectures and manifestos in which Lorca developed his theories on writing and Spain.