CONSTRUCTING AND RESISTING MODERNITY: MADRID 1900-1936

One of geography’s main concerns is the study of places, but questions dealing with a sense of place are also central to the inquiries of other disciplines. When one takes a step back and looks at representations of place and urban space in particular, one often finds that they play a reciprocal role in the creation of the urban environment itself. The experience of living in the urban environment, in turn, becomes the content for much of modern culture, which portrays the city in a myriad of ways, some critical, some utopian, but always with a sense of the power it has in shaping people’s lives. Constructing and Resisting Modernity takes a geographic approach to urban literary narrative written in Madrid between 1900 and 1936. It considers the different discourses of modernity in circulation during the time by looking at the city’s urban planning and architectural initiatives and contrasting critiques of this modernization process which was wreaking havoc on the lives of those caught in the middle of this dynamic and violent time. Focusing on the fiction of authors such as Carmen de Burgos, José Díaz Fernández and Andrés Carranque de Ríos, this study analyzes the cartographic imaginaries of each work with the purpose of understanding how each author tries to humanize the experience of modernity.