Unit 6: Teatro y poesía del siglo XX

Aesthetic rupture

A 20th-century impulse to break with traditional realism and inherited expectations (linear plot, “pretty” language), using experimentation to question how language represents reality.

Historical and social urgency

A 20th-century impulse to address oppression, injustice, trauma, and the individual’s relationship to society (belonging, alienation, responsibility), often as a form of resistance or denunciation.

Form (in 20th-century poetry and theater)

The way a text is constructed—rhythm, images, symbols, silence, space, repetitions, tone—where meaning depends heavily on technique, not just “what happens.”

Close reading (detective reading)

An approach that focuses on how a text is built and what effects its choices create, rather than only summarizing events.

Unreliable narration/voice

A common break from 19th-century realism in which the speaking voice or perspective cannot be taken as fully trustworthy or straightforward.

Avant-gardes (vanguard movements)

Experimental artistic movements that reject conventional forms to create new ways of expressing modern reality and its contradictions.

Surrealism

A movement that uses dreamlike, illogical, or unexpected imagery to access emotion, the unconscious, and symbolic truth rather than rational realism.

Modernismo (Hispanic literary movement)

A movement emphasizing stylistic innovation and aesthetic refinement; in this unit, it appears as part of the broader modern drive to renew language and form.

Existentialism

A philosophical and artistic perspective focused on alienation, meaninglessness, responsibility, and the crisis of the modern subject.

Lyric “I” (yo lírico)

The speaking voice of a poem; it is a constructed persona and should not be automatically equated with the real author.

Stage directions (acotaciones)

Non-dialogue theatrical text describing space, movement, light, and sound; crucial evidence because theater communicates through what is seen and heard.

Symbolic staging

The use of objects, light, doors, walls, and confined spaces to represent power, repression, or psychological states in theater.

Central conflict

The core struggle of a text (internal and external), often framed in 20th-century works as individual vs. system (family, state, economy, gender norms, racism).

Motif / recurring symbol

A repeated image, color, object, sound, or space whose repetition signals meaning beyond decoration and helps organize interpretation.

Tone

The text’s emotional posture (irony, despair, rage, tenderness, denunciation), which guides how to interpret images and events.

Form–theme connection

The idea that technique enacts meaning (e.g., fragmentation can embody crisis; confinement on stage can critique social imprisonment).

Alienation (modern)

A feeling of separation from one’s life and self, often depicted through mechanical routines, oppressive objects, urban saturation, and bodily exhaustion.

Enumeration (as a poetic device)

A listing technique that can create a sense of accumulation and pressure, often used to convey saturation, oppression, or chaos.

Hyperbole (as symptom)

Exaggeration used not for literal realism but to externalize psychological limits and intensify a critique of dehumanizing conditions.

Ritual repetition

Repetition that resembles a chant or litany, creating a ceremonial tone and building intensity (key in Vallejo’s “Masa”).

Collective voice (“we”)

A speaking position that constructs a community (“nosotros”) and frames humanity as a shared practice rather than an individual trait.

Ethical allegory

A symbolic narrative that argues an ethical idea (e.g., organized compassion challenging fatality in Vallejo’s “Masa”), rather than depicting literal realism.

Defamiliarization (extrañamiento)

A technique that makes the familiar feel strange to disrupt comfort and force the reader to see reality with new eyes.

Semantic field (campo semántico)

A cluster of related images/words (city, body, machines, death, color) whose repetition reveals obsession or thematic structure.

Dualities (tensions)

Oppositions that organize meaning (life/death, freedom/confinement, self/other, purity/contamination) and help frame analysis.

Romance (traditional ballad form)

A popular, narrative verse form with musicality and repetition; Lorca uses it to blend storytelling with dense lyric symbolism.

Lorca’s modern romance

Lorca’s adaptation of the romance that combines tradition with vanguard symbolism to create fatalism, desire, and violence through form.

Refrain (estribillo)

A repeated line or phrase that creates musicality and obsession; in “Romance sonámbulo,” it produces a hypnotic circular effect.

Ambiguous symbol

A symbol whose meaning shifts by context and association (e.g., Lorca’s green), resisting fixed “translations.”

Liminal space

A threshold setting (night, shadow, balcony, well) where boundaries blur (life/death, real/dream), intensifying uncertainty.

Fragmented narration

A structure built from scenes/images rather than a clear linear plot, producing dreamlike or unstable meaning (not “confusion” but effect).

Authority as destiny (in Lorca)

The idea that institutions (e.g., Guardia Civil) function as emblems of repression whose presence reshapes tone and makes tragedy feel inevitable.

Modern urban malaise

A 20th-century poetic focus on the city as oppressive routine and excess materiality, often linked to loss of individuality (e.g., Neruda).

“Walking Around” (Pablo Neruda)

A poem that dramatizes alienation through urban imagery, bodily disgust, and enumerations, pushing readers to question modern “normality.”

“Masa” (César Vallejo)

A poem that uses ritual repetition and growing collectivity to present solidarity as an ethical force capable of transforming the impossible.

“Balada de los dos abuelos” (Nicolás Guillén)

A poem about Afro-Caribbean identity through two ancestral heritages (Spanish and African), using contrast, musicality, and memory without erasing colonial violence.

“Mujer negra” (Nancy Morejón)

A poem that connects personal voice and collective history to affirm Black womanhood, resilience, and cultural contribution while remembering structures of oppression.

“A Julia de Burgos” (Julia de Burgos)

A poem of self-splitting that confronts the social mask (“you”) versus authentic self (“I”), asserting freedom and critiquing imposed norms.

“Peso ancestral” (Alfonsina Storni)

A poem critiquing patriarchal emotional mandates by treating “ancestral weight” as cultural inheritance and the tear as a powerful symbol of suppressed pain.

“Borges y yo” (Jorge Luis Borges)

A metafictional reflection on identity divided between private self and public literary persona, ending in ambiguity about who truly speaks.

Metafiction

Writing that draws attention to its own constructed nature; it can show how narrative and fame fabricate identity (central to “Borges y yo”).

Paradox (in identity poems)

A contradiction that reveals complexity—e.g., needing the public persona to exist as writer while resenting it.

Claustrophobic setting

A confined space that generates pressure, surveillance, and conflict; in theater it often functions as a metaphor for social control.

“La casa de Bernarda Alba” (Federico García Lorca)

A play where Bernarda imposes strict control and mourning on her five daughters inside a closed house, exposing patriarchal repression, desire, and social surveillance.

Mourning (luto) as discipline

In Lorca’s play, mourning functions as a social technology that controls women’s bodies and behavior, not merely a private emotional state.

Silence as action (in theater)

The idea that what is not said—and who is forced to be quiet—creates dramatic power and reveals authority structures.

Pepe el Romano (presence-absence)

In “La casa de Bernarda Alba,” the desired man barely appears but structurally dominates the plot, intensifying rivalry and tragedy through absence.

Bastón (staff) as authority

A stage object that materializes Bernarda’s power; challenging or breaking it symbolizes threatening the entire social order.

“El tragaluz” (Antonio Buero Vallejo)

A postwar Spanish play where memory, guilt, and the ethical act of “seeing the truth” shape present conflict; the past actively determines the family’s life.

Tragaluz (symbol)

A skylight suggesting limited/partial vision, a perspective from “below,” and the need for light within confinement—hope that is constrained and dramatized by limits.

“El hombre que se convirtió en perro” (Osvaldo Dragún)

A short satirical play in which César becomes a “dog” to get work, using absurdity to denounce capitalist dehumanization and loss of dignity.

Theater of the absurd (as used here)

A mode where exaggerated, grotesque premises expose the violence of normalized social logic (bureaucracy, unemployment, exploitation) by pushing it to extremes.