Miguel De Unamuno The Contrary Self

Miguel de Unamuno was profoundly influenced by S ren Kierkegaard's pseudonymous works at a time when Kierkegaard was virtually unknown in Southern Europe. This book explores the scope and character of that influence, clarifies misconceptions in the relationship between the authors, and offers an original, Kierkegaardian reading of three of Unamuno's best known novels: Niebla, San Manuel Bueno, m rtir, and Abel S nchez. Both authors hold a "self as achievement" view in which the authentic self is seen as the result of the choices one makes over a lifetime. For Kierkegaard, the spheres of existence-the esthetic, the ethical, and the religious-are "stages on life's way" to becoming an authentic self before God. Unamuno, however, holds that the same spheres of existence offer equally valid modes of authentic existence as long as one chooses them freely and passionately. This book will be of great interest to scholars of existentialism, Unamuno, and Kierkegaard.

A central figure of Spanish culture and an author in many genres, Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) is less well known outside Spain. He was a surprising writer and thinker: a professor of Greek who embraced metafiction and modernist methods, a proponent of Castilian Spanish although born in the Basque Country and influenced by many international writers, and an early existentialist who was yet religious. He found himself in opposition to both King Alfonso XIII and the military dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera and then became involved in the political upheaval that led to the Spanish Civil War. Part 1 of this volume, "Materials," gives information on different editions and translations of Unamuno's works, on scholarly and critical secondary sources, and on Web resources. The essays in part 2, "Approaches," offer suggestions for introducing students to the range of his works--novels, essays, poetry, and drama--in Spanish language and literature, comparative literature, religion, and philosophy classrooms.

Mist (Niebla), published in 1914, is one of Miguel de Unamuno's key works; a truly Modernist work of Europe-wide significance which aims to shatter the conventions of fiction, using the novel as a vehicle for exploration of philosophical themes.

This collection provides an excellent introduction to three of the most important names in twentieth-century Spanish philosophy: Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936), José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955), and José Ferrater Mora (1912–1991). The thought-provoking work of these great contemporary philosophers offers a rich and penetrating insight into human existence. Originally written by Ferrater Mora in the middle of the last century, his interpretations of Unamuno and Ortega are considered classics, and the chapter on his own thought reflects his mature thinking about being and death. Each essay is introduced by noted Ferrater Mora scholar J. M. Terricabras and contains updated biographical and bibliographic information.

Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) is widely regarded as Spain's greatest and most controversial writer of the first half of the twentieth century. Professor of Greek, and later Rector, at the University of Salamanca, and a figure with a noted public profile in his day, he wrote a large number of philosophical, political and philological essays, as well as poems, plays and short stories, but it is his highly idiosyncratic novels, for which he coined the word nivola, that have attracted the greatest critical attention. Niebla (Mist, 1914) has become one of the most studied works of Spanish literature, such is the enduring fascination which it has provoked. In this study, C. A. Longhurst, a distinguished Unamuno scholar, sets out to show that behind Unamuno's fictional experiments there lies a coherent and quasi-philosophical concept of the novelesque genre and indeed of writing itself. Ideas about freedom, identity, finality, mutuality and community are closely intertwined with ideas on writing and reading and give rise to a new and highly personal way of conceiving fiction.

Aunt Tula (La tia Tula), published in 1921, is one of the few novels written by Miguel de Unamuno to centre on a female protagonist. It is a vivid, nuanced portrait of the intelligent, wilful and yet vulnerable Tula.

In The Great Chiasmus, Paul R. Olson explores the use of the chiasmus in the work of Miguel de Unamuno. The chiasmus, a reversal in the order of words or parts of speech in parallel phrases, appears on a variety of levels, from brief microstructures (blanca como la nieve y como la nieve fria), to the narrative structures of entire novel. Olson even suggests the chiasmus encompasses the stages in Unamuno's novelistic work, forming a chiasmus that can be schematized as ABC: CBA. As a phenomenon of enclosure, the chiasmus is related to other enclosing phenomena such as the image of Chinese boxes and the mise en abyme. These structures, three-dimensional version of the chiasmus, are also frequent in Unamuno's texts. The chiasmus is also found on the conceptual level, in which Unamuno regards apparent contraries as freely reversible and thus identical. From early adulthood he was fascinated by the Hegelian idea of the identity of pure Being and pure Nothingness, and that concept provides the structure underlying a wide variety of his paradoxes and verbal conceits. In this connection, Unamuno explores concepts usually considered opposites, such as mind and body or spirit and matter. Olson's close readings of the texts in terms of this structure lead to observations on Spanish history, events in Unamuno's life, the psychological dimensions of his characters, and the authorial self that is found within his texts.

Existentialism was one of the most important influences on twentieth-century thought, especially in the period between the 1920s and early 1960s. Best known in its atheistic representatives such as Sartre, it also numbered many significant religious thinkers. Anxious Angels is a critical introduction to these religious existentialists, who are treated as a coherent group in their own right and not merely derivative of secular existentialism. The book argues that they constitute a distinctive religious voice that continues to merit attention in an era of postmodernity.

Surveys the thought and literary work of a towering figure in twentieth-century Spanish cultural and political life.