The Moderns: Time, Space and Subjectivity in Contemporary Spanish Culture (review)

Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 283 Madrid y Barcelona como en sus respecrivas áreas de influencia, una nueva figura, la del intelectual a la manera del Zola de/ 'accusé., y un nuevo tipo de arrista, el desclasado o bohemio y, con ellos, un conjunto de glandes escritores, artistas y arquitectos que introdujeron las inquietudes más vivas del Fin du siech. Todos ellos, intelectuales y artistas, ptotagonistas del espÃ-titu de una época, han sido hasta hoy punto obligado de referencia a través de una serie de lecturas, rupturas y recuperaciones. A los cien años, el desasrre de 1898 y los hombres que lo sufrieron no sólo resultaban vivos para los cÃ-rculos académicos, sino también para los artÃ-sticos y literarios. AsÃ-, 1998 parecÃ-a un momento oportuno para ayudar a replantearlo académicamente retomando las iniciativas ya realizadas en este sentido y poniendo, pr¡mero, en relación a las dos grandes tradiciones histoiiogiáficas de Madrid y Barcelona y, segundo, los disrinros campos de creación. Todos los trabajos recogidos en estos dos volúmenes ofrecen una valiosa información a todas las personas que deseen acercarse a esre periodo de fin de siglo que trajo consigo sus luchas y sus dudas ante un inevitable cambio polÃ-tico, cultuial y social que tuvo lugar enrre una crisis de idenridad y la modernización. Nuria Morgado The University of Arizona another; and Chapters 3, 6 and 9 as yet another. As can be appreciated in the chart (see next page), the components of each of those units ate structured and titled with rigorous parallelism. Each of the chapters on an intellectual highlights a different concept drawn from Pierre Bourdieu. Chaptei 1 explores Umbral's newspaper chronicles from 1982 to 1992 in relation to Bourdieu's notion of "distinction," arguing that Umbial's column constitutes a chronicle of disrincrion in a double sense; it both marks out those figures worthy of a reader's attention (a painter, a politician, a supermodel); and confers value on itself [... by flaunting] the writeis intimacy with those same figures. (10) Chapter 4 seeks to chart Fernando Savater s coordinates on contemporary Spain's "intellectual field," claiming that: Savater comes to occupy the finely balanced position of what Bourdieu calls the consecrated heietic oi hetesiarch [...] too intellectual to be boutgeois and too boutgeois to be intellectual . (79) The Moderns: Time, Space and Subjectivity in Contemporary Spanish Culture Oxford University Press, 2000 By Paul Julian Smith Paul Julian Smith's latest tour-de-force is organized in an intricate and intriguing way. The book features three sections—Time, Space and Subjectivity—and each section is made up of three chapters—one on an inrellecrual, one on a filmmaker and one on a topic. Though this organization does make for some srriking and provocative juxtapositions among the successive chapteis, I find it easier ro discuss the book discursively by making a "crosscut" of my own, reading Chapters 1, 4 and 7 as one unir; Chapters 2, 5 and 8 as Chapter 8 explores not a consecrated hetetic, like Umbral and Savater, but a heretic tout court. Smith argues that Alberto CandÃ-n "created and embodied an anomalous and unpiecedented figure in the Spanish critical field"—che homosexual intellectual —whose practices were tendered "invisible and silent" because they could not even be registered by che "habitus" of post-Fianco Spain: "the self-iegulating discutsive consensus which at once precedes and ieconfiims die words and actions of empirical subjects" (136). The three chaprers devoted to film-makers are united by a concern with treating film-making as a grounded, material and local practice. Remarkably absent from these chapters are explicit references to "theory;" indeed, Smith seems wary here of rhe unreflexive use of theory in film studies, as he attempts to "rehistoticize," "locate" and "ground" 284 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies the films of Eiice (Elesplritu de h colmena), Bigas Luna (La teta i h lluna) and Medem ( Tierra). He does this, in the case of Erice, by aiguing that, just as abstraction is thematized in El espÃ-ritu, so too can abstiaction—oi "movie magic" oi the tension between "history...