What is it about?
This article explores recent research into how the reading of literary texts impacts upon the individual reader. It explores the question of bodily responses to reading and considers 'Los girasoles ciegos' by Alberto Méndez in relation to the characters' reactions to the destruction of the body in war and the role of writing in promoting responses to such events.
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Why is it important?
Although literary texts have an impact, in the first instance, on the individual reader, we often assume while discussing and analyzing them that they have, or can have, some social impact. However, the mechanisms by which this might happen have often been ignored. Recent research in the cognitive sciences on reading and affect is beginning to provide some evidence to substantiate our assumptions making it possible to begin to develop new ideas about how readers' responses involve both affective and cognitive mechanisms.
Perspectives
My starting point was an interest in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, how it is remembered and what it means for Spain's democracy in the 21st century as reflected in the number of novels about the war, Republican exile and the Franco dictatorship which have been published in recent years. All of this raises the question (not a new one) of the relationship between literary texts and society. How do literary texts impact, or have the potential to impact on, readers and, more widely society. This lead me to recent research in the cognitive sciences and I try to apply some of these ideas to Alberto Méndez's 'Los girasoles ciegos' as a way of understanding how representations of the war, in particular writing about the destruction of the human body, can be read differently in different ideological contexts.
Emeritus Professor Francis Lough
University of Birmingham
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Ideology, Affect and the Body in Alberto Méndez’s Los girasoles ciegos, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, September 2017, Liverpool University Press,
DOI: 10.3828/bhs.2017.52.
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