Dru Dougherty: Research Areas
Dru Dougherty (Ph.D. Harvard University, 1972), Professor
My most abiding research interest is the Galician writer Ramón del Valle-Inclán, the subject of my Ph.D. dissertation, numerous articles and four books. His works constitute beautifully crafted esthetic microcosms that, while self-absorbed, also engage major themes in Spain’s political and cultural life during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. At once traditionalist and avant-garde, Valle-Inclán’s works defy strictly delimited categories, joining the lyrical with the grotesque, estheticism with violent satire.
Exploring the many dualities in Valle-Inclán poetics, public presence and in masterpieces like Luces de bohemia and Tirano Banderas has led me to other research projects, two of which are worth mentioning here. For the past twenty-five years, I have co-directed a research endeavor that is unearthing the stage history of Madrid's theater from 1918 to 1936. Two volumes have already appeared, dealing with the years 1918-1931, and a third, covering the years of Spain's Second Republic (1931-1936), is due out in 2008. The project seeks to shift attention from the textual history of the period's theater to its production, reception and interplay with Spain’s social, political and intellectual systems.
Currently my attention is centered on the impact of modernity on Spanish poetry and theater from the turn of the twentieth century to 1936. I’m especially interested in how Spain’s avant-garde poets dismantled the symbolist paradigm after 1918 (the ultraísta revolution), and how the members of the Generation of 1927 subsequently fashioned a variety of poetics in a new climate of sincretismo cultural, during the 1920s and 1930s.
Teaching
I regularly teach courses on Spanish literature of the “Silver Age” —the years between 1898 and the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936— concentrating on poetry and theater. Of late I have offered courses on:
- Spanish Poetics
- The Poetry of Federico García Lorca
- The Theater of Jacinto Benavente, Ramón del Valle-Inclán and Lorca
- Modernity and Spanish Culture
- Spanish Avant-garde Literature
- Introduction to Literary Theory.
Topics of current and recently completed dissertations I have been involved in directing include:
- Valle-Inclán’s farces
- Copyright and Spanish 19th-century theater
- Spanish and Latin American “New Theater”
- The early novels of Montserrat Roig
- The reception of Soviet narrative by “Nuevo Romanticismo” writers in the 1920s and 30s
- García Lorca’s poetry and theater as sources of theological inquiry
- Valle-Inclán, Shakespeare and the renewal of Spanish theater
- A linguistic analysis of humor in the Género Chico
- Pure poetry in Valéry, Guillén and Montale
- The crisis of the modern subject in Larra, Valle-Inclán and Unamuno
- Barbarism and the primitive in the Hispanic avant-garde
- Staging the nation in 20th-century Spain
- Science and the Spanish avant-garde
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