Towards an urban cultural geography: Madrid, 1925-1936

Abstract

This article presents the main lines of research from Susan Larson's book Constructing and Resisting Modernity, Madrid 1900-1936, based on a paper delivered at the V International Conference on Art and the City (Madrid, 2012). The author proposes an urban cultural geography of Madrid in the 1920s and 1930s that integrates the humanities and social sciences through an interdisciplinary approach. Starting from a dissatisfaction with canonical literary criticism, which has ignored subcultures and marginalized voices, the text examines how Madrid's modernity was represented in the literary, cinematic, and journalistic texts of the period. Drawing on Fritz Lang's film Metropolis, the thought of Ortega y Gasset and José Díaz Fernández, and the theoretical concepts of Henri Lefebvre (social space) and Franco Moretti (literary maps), the author analyzes the different experiences of urban space according to social class and gender. The analysis of Díaz Fernández's novel La Venus mecánica (1929) serves to explore the differential experience of the Gran Vía by men and women, showing how the official discourses of modernity coexisted with alternative, silenced representations of Madrid during the period.