| This doctoral thesis offers an original and valuable contribution to the study of the genealogy of the literary canon between 1939 and 1968. During Francisco Franco´s dictatorship, Spanish Universities underwent a series of important changes in its academic and management configuration and in the way Spanish elites envisioned Higher Education inside the regime. This research focuses in the role that Spanish scholars, inside Hispanic and Modern Language Departments, played in this renegotiation of a new and crucial sociopolitical mission for College Education. By focusing on the period between 1939 and 1968, a moment of sociopolitical instability and conservative literary and philosophical production, we aim to contribute to the ongoing debate about the role that Humanities, within Higher Education, played and can play helping the young to carry out their roles as responsible and responsive citizens. This thesis try to provide first, a reasoned explanation of the historical appearance of the Hispanic Languages departments inside the Spanish University; second, a sociological and historical analysis of the most relevant scholars in these departments, taking care of their position, their tensions and contradictions within the academic field; and third, a critical analysis of literary and philosophical theories (Stylistics, Intuitionism and Neoscholasticism) that the academic and university elites used to understand and teach the poetry of Romanticism and Spanish Baroque: San Juan de la Cruz, Francisco de Quevedo, Lope Vega and Gustavo Adolfo Becquer. The aim of this dissertation is to analyze how the philosophical and literary discourses taught by these scholars could affect the development of a critical and reflective thinking among their students, and perhaps ours. |
