Shed Some Light on the Subject: Teaching Ramón del Valle-Inclán's "Luces de bohemia"

This essay seeks to provide parallel and interchangeable approaches to teaching Ramón del Valle-Inclán's challenging play Luces de bohemia. A greater understanding of the cultural and mental frameworks of the early twentieth-century Spanish spectator will permit students to penetrate the dense intertextuality that characterizes Valle's best-known work. To this end, I outline two approaches that can be used separately or in tandem: 1) a study of the Spanish commercial stage at the dawn of the twentieth century and the revista genre; 2) an investigation of the rise of Spanish journalism in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. These thematic studies give students the proper insight to understand the episodic structure, endless parade of characters, and countless historical and political allusions in Luces de bohemia as an attempt to reconstruct the frenetic public life of early twentieth-century Spain.