Boletín 106 - El duende de Lorca, un modelo a seguir y sus últimos días en Granada.
Lorca gave a reading of his latest work La casa de Bernarda Alba to some friends on July 15th. The next day he returned to Granada intuiting that his country was on the cusp of war. There he stayed with his friend and fellow poet Luis Rosales whose brother Pepe was the leader of the local Falange faction. One month later Lorca was arrested and taken to Víznar.
Bienvenid@ de nuevo,
In this week’s newsletter:
Edition 106 of Boletín (grammar search and tier 2/3 vocabulary).
The La casa de Bernarda Alba Facebook discussion group.
Teacher tips to candidates (this will be updated periodically).
A teach meet (in person!) in London.
Lorca takeaways from previous Boletín editions.
Resources to teach La casa de Bernarda Alba.
A student friendly PDF print out of this newsletter.
Before I start a big thank you to my paid subscribers for your ongoing support!
Edition 106.
Edit: I had no idea you could embed files within Substack. At the bottom of this newsletter there’s a downloadable, student friendly version of this newsletter to use in class.
As is customary now, this is my annual Lorca edition. I hope it ties in well with the other Lorca editions (44 and 74).
A lot of Lorca has already been covered in Boletín (see below for the takeaways). In this edition the texts will be about the days leading up to Lorca’s death, his childhood home and what makes Lorca somebody that young people today can look up to (this last text was written by Blanca and is recycled from a resource I’ve had on TES for years).
I would have loved to have included extracts from a newspaper which covered all the finer details of Lorca’s return to Granada from Madrid and his subsequent arrest and murder from the Virtual Spanish Civil War Museum but I didn’t get round to it so I’ll leave the link here to come back to at a later date.
Grammar to find this week:
An example of “leísmo” (using the indirect object pronoun “le” instead of the direct object pronoun “lo” is known as leísmo. This is extremely common.
The past perfect tense (había + past participle).
The present perfect (he + past participle).
The present tense.
The imperfect tense (aba/ía)
The preterite tense.
The imperfect and preterite used together where the preterite interrupts an ongoing action in the past.
The passive voice (ser in any tense + past participle).
Tier 2/3 vocabulary this week:
Las injusticias sociales - social injustices.
La derecha - the political right.
Temas - themes/topics.
Estar al borde de - to be on the verge/cusp of.
Dar un paseo - to go for a stroll or euphemistic of mudering/killing somebody.
El alcalde - the mayor.
Poner en marcha - to launch, implement or start up.
Asequible - accessible.
Denunciar - to denounce.
The La casa de Bernarda Alba discussion group.
La casa de Bernarda Alba remains the most popular text to study in Wales according to the WJEC Summer Report and judging by the number of teachers in the LCDBA Discussion Group on Facebook it still reigns supreme in England too.
Feeling overwhelmed at the prospect of teaching literature having not had the opportunity to do so on my PGCE I created the discussion group as a place to share ideas and more importantly resources. I didn’t envision it growing to 1,200 members.
The files section is now full of teacher created resources and members chip in with answers to LCDBA community questions such as:
If society was so traditional back then, how was Bernarda allowed to marry for a second time? I feel that she would have been forced to remain a widow for the rest of her days? Thoughts?
or
Technical question - if an A2 essay asks about “recursos estilísticos” how broad do you think it is? Should students cover all of language, stage/set directions, symbolism or just some of it?
There are lots of other discussion groups based on the set texts and films, here are a few I could find:
The Volver Spanish AQA sharing group.
El Laberinto Del Fauno - Discussion Group.
Como Agua para Chocolate A Level Spanish group.
Please note that these groups are in all likelihood intended for teachers and not learners.
Teacher tips to candidates.
I recently asked the La casa de Bernarda Alba discussion group three questions which I will share below along with some of the answers I got back.
1. What do you consider essential socio-historical context to be aware of in relation to La casa de Bernarda Alba?
i. Lorca's childhood, the influence women had on him and where he grew up. A generic knowledge of what Spain was like just before the civil war and the causes of the war. (Diana)
ii. The Spaniards' obsession with 'el qué dirán' it's quintessentially Hispanic. Mantener la fachada a como de lugar! Perhaps the equivalent of British stoicism depicted in films and series. The role of women of the time as well as the social conventions. And Lorca. What motivated him, why the recurrent themes in his obras. (Sol)
2. What's the most niche La casa de Bernarda Alba insight you have which you consider overlooked?
i. The hints of possible sexual abuse, that go unsaid: the late husband with the maid and with his stepdaughter Angustias, the victim blaming of Paca la Roseta who may have been gang raped. (Tim)
ii. That Librada’s daughter (La hija de la Librada) was victim-blamed for a stillbirth/ neo-natal birth from having concealed her pregnancy, received no medical care, before giving birth unattended. I think that one of Poncia’s functions is to make us look critically at our own engagement with gossip: when we accept the stories about Paca, and Librada’s daughter, we’re being no better than the village gossips themselves. It’s to stop us looking smugly at the Casa, I think…
The biggest clue to Poncia’s embellishment/ spin on stories is Paca. Once we’ve read it, I always ask my students to consider how many women would consensually have sex, in a public place, with more than one man at a time. Oh, and be carried, naked, through the village by them. (Anna)
iii. I find Bernarda's call to put carbón ardiente “en el lugar de su pecado” especially revealing, not just of her sadism, but also of the fact that she considers the real sin to be the sex, not the abandonment of the baby. (Tim)
iv. The character of Bernarda was based on one of Lorca’s neighbours growing up called Frasquita Alba "una viuda de muchos años que ejercía un inexorable y tiránica vigilancia sobre sus hijas solteras". There was a well (with no water) on the patio which Lorca would go down to in order to spy on them. (Ollie)
3. What's your main advice to candidates when it comes to the essay?
i. Answer the question!! Underline key words, make sure you refer back to the question and link every point you are making to it. As you are writing your essay keep asking yourself: am I answering the title/question of the essay? (Diana)
ii. Choose your question carefully, write a plan, even if only brief, to help keep you on track, don’t write a long introduction where you are just repeating the question as it’s a waste of words, answer the question with clear, well referenced points and don’t introduce new material in the conclusion. Quotes are not required and if not used properly, can detract from the answer. (Sam)
iii. Plan your essay to make sure that everything you write is relevant to the title. If you don’t plan, you might waffle, then panic. Remember to link back to the title. (Rosie)
If you’re reading this as a teacher of La casa de Bernarda Alba feel free to leave a comment below with your answers and/or advice!
A cara a cara teach meet (finally!)
It took me by great surprise last week to receive a message from the Spanish Education Ministry’s London office inviting me to deliver a workshop for them in June in London alongside lots of other practitioners. It will be the 2023 version of an event ran last year which you can see here.
My workshop will be about teaching the text and film. Not to undersell myself here but I’m not going to be delivering anything revolutionary but rather talk about my process when it comes to film/text from the pre-read/watch phase, to building plot/character/thematical/socio-historical knowledge to finally planning and writing the essay.
I’ll share more details in time on Twitter and via the newsletter for those that may be interested. It would be really nice to meet some people after years of webinars.
Lorca takeaways from editions 44 and 74.
The poor. Federico García Lorca grew up in an agrarian and illiterate Spain, where his father owned land and his mother taught hundreds of peasants how to read; his early writings were dedicated to the suffering of laborers, which ignited his empathy for the poor and his social sensitivity.
Frasquita Alba. The poet confessed to the then Chilean ambassador that growing up he would spy on a mysterious family, including an elderly widow who tyrannically monitored her unmarried daughters.
Social awareness. In La Casa de Bernarda Alba Lorca criticized traditionalism, patriarchal violence, hierarchy, Catholic fanaticism, and authoritarianism in a "documentary-style photographic" depiction of the intolerant and repressive mentality shared by many landowners in Granada.
Multi-generational households. The anthropologist J.A. Pitt-Rivers studied the social structure and way of life of pueblo in the Alpujarras in his book People of the Sierra, which examines topics such as community, courtship, and gender roles. In the village he observed that elderly parents who can no longer care for themselves usually live with their daughters but are seldom happy. The author explains that parents who did not raise their children properly face old age with shameless children who often abandon them.
Andalusian death rituals. In his thesis on Andalusian death rituals, Salvador explained that the mourning period could last up to five years in extreme cases, with conventional rules dictating that the family remain at home for at least three days after a funeral, with women praying the rosary, wearing black clothing, and limiting their behaviour. Lorca claimed that what people claimed in his work were his own inventions were in fact authentic details he had observed.
La casa de Bernarda Alba resources.
🆓La casa de Bernarda Alba parallel reader with index.
🆓Avoiding the passive voice with La casa de Bernarda Alba.
🆓Public opinion of Lorca (reading comprehension).
🆓A student booklet about Lorca.
🆓Cosas lorquianas vocabulary builder.
That’s it for another week. I could have gone on and on but I will leave it there and now enjoy what remains of my half-term battling my garden enemy - bindweed.
Download edition 106 here.
Print out a student friendly version of this newsletter below.
Ollie
❤️
A reminder that Boletín extras are available. The most useful of which is an updated index of topics from 1-100 including an index of exam style questions for targeted interventions based on mocks.
¡Hola Ollie! Muchas gracias por el boletín, nos encanta.
Mira a ver la ortografía en el link de los materiales "opinión pública" 😬