Ku czytelnikowi zaangażowanemu: hiszpański teatr i komiks w procesie kształtowania krytycznego odbiorcy kultury
Towards an Engaged Reader: The Spanish Theatre and Comic in the Process of Educating Critical Cultural Observers

Summary/Abstract: Political, social and historical engagement has always been one of the preferred ways of being for writers and intellectuals. Over the past few decades, we have been able to observe how social engagement of artists and writers seems to express itself through two forms that stay at the frontier of literature: theatre and comic. Although the Spanish theatre was conscious of the importance of its social commitment back in the mid-70s of the last century, it wasn’t until several decades later when the comic book for adults engaged in the moral task of acknowledging and dealing with the collective trauma of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco’s regime. Both have then become, in fact, testimony genres. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate the richness of learning experience that can be generated from bringing these two genres into the Spanish literature classrooms. The Author analyses the themes and functions of both: comic and theatre, understood here as a dramatic text as well as dramatic performance, and suggests that they share a number of similarities when it comes to their subjects and poetics. By resorting to the visual code, theatre and comic are able to provoke an immediate affective reaction, thus simultaneously opening a space for commentary and reception. Consequently, the confluent impact of image and representation can contribute to the creation of a conscious reader capable of engaging in deft social criticism, especially in the case of an alien cultural environment.

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