Everyday Practices In Castile

Resumen del Libro

Las practicas cotidianas castellanas: hacia el imaginario cartografico de Miguel Delibes offers a reevaluation of the image of Castilla that informs much of Miguel Delibess novelistic work. Numerous scholars have examined the fundamental role the authors native region has in developing the thematics of his extensive narrative corpus. What has been missing in these studies is a broadly interdisciplinary optic through which to study the formation and evolution of Delibess cartographic imaginary—to borrow a term from David Harvey. Applying the ground-breaking work of critical geographers including Harvey, Henry Lefevbre, Michel de Certeau and Sallie Marston to an analysis of the Spanish novelists production allows for a calibration of his novelistic evolution against the mediating factors of the extensive and fundamental real spatial transformations that Castilla undergoes from the time Delibes started to write in the 1940s to the present. The key element in making this connection is a study of how the practices of everyday life take form in his imaginary. Employing de Certeaus explanation of the ways in which these practices coalesce into tactics and strategies is especially useful in charting the evolution of the authors cartographic imaginary and how it documents, confronts and resists fundamental alterations in the nature of Castillian spaces, both rural and urban. Chapter one of my study lays out the methodology for defining the cartographic imaginary, especially its portrayal of the practices of everyday life, and considers how to connect the study of real spaces and their conceptual articulation by cultural creators. Chapters two and three discuss, in turn, the portrayal of urban and rural spaces in Delibess fiction, most importantly in Mi idolatrado hijo Sisi, Cinco horas con Mario, Diario de un jubilado, El camino, Las ratas, and Viejas historias de Castilla la Vieja. My final chapter (four) examines those texts in which Delibes plays rural against …