Dr R Prout - MA PhD
Overview
Position:
Lecturer
Email:
ProutR@cardiff.ac.ukTelephone: +44(0)29 2087 6258
Fax: +44(0)29 2087 4946
Extension: 76258
Location: Room 2.03, 65-68 Park Place
My research interests centre on film and writing from Latin America and from post-transitional democratic Spain. I am particularly interested in digital cultures and in exploring through film and literary narrative the signs of Spain’s re-emergence as a crucible of diverse cultures. My work on Juan Goytisolo focused on the representation of childhood and gender across the span of his oeuvre, from his juvenilia to his most celebrated avant-garde texts.
More recently, my research has focussed on aspects of popular culture and has studied, for example, the semantics of Spanish advertising icons, the significance of religious sects in Spanish society, and the meanings of dissidence in film and writing from and about Cuba. I have also studied the portrayal of minorities in Spanish narrative and in writing from Mexico. I welcome interest from prospective postgraduate students interested in researching any aspect of writing or film from the Spanish speaking world.
Selected Publications
I have written on a variety of themes including Minority Voices, Questions of Belief, Medicine and Narrative, Spanish Film, Women’s Writing, Queer Identities, and Migration and Exile.
Research Unit
Publications
Medicine and Narrative
Fear and Gendering: Pedophobia, Effeminophobia and Hypermasculine Desire in the Work of Juan Goytisolo
Peter Lang: New York, 2001
[Examines metaphors of pestilence, epidemic, and contagion in Reivindicación del conde don Julián, Makbara, and Virtudes del pájaro solitario]
Jail-house Rock: Cuba, Aids, and the Incorporation of Dissent in Bengt Norborg’s Socialism or Death
Bulletin of Latin American Research 18: 4(1999) 423-436
[During Cuba’s special period a group of young musicians opted in to AIDS. Why?]
Greenery Blues: Synaesthesia and Lorca’s Lassitude in Vermont
Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 77 (2000), pp. 393-411
[Was Lorca a synaesthete? This article offers a completely new reading of the jumble of sensations in Poeta en Nueva York]
Minority Voices
Criptic triptych: (Re)Reading Disability in Spanish film 1960-2003: El cochecito, El jardín de las delicias, and Planta 4a
Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 12 (2008), pp. 165-187.
[How do recent representations of disability in Spanish cinema measure up against film from the 60s and 70s? Does newer always mean better?]
Cradling the nation: Asha Miró’s Autoethnographies, discourses of international adoption, and the construction of Spanishness
Forthcoming in Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 2009.
[A Spanish passport, a Catalan personality, and an Indian birth certificate: Reading Asha Miró’s work asks questions about contemporary Spanishness]
Migration and Exile
Integrated Systems of External Vigilance: Fortress Europe in Recent Spanish Film
Third Text 20: 6 (2006), pp. 723-731.
[Examines El traje, Español para extranjeros, as well as Eloy de la Iglesias’s last film, Los novios búlgaros]
Straitened Circumstances: Spanishness, Psychogeography, and the Borderline Personality
In Spanishness in the Spanish Novel and Cinema of the 20th and 21st Century, ed. by Cristina Sanchez Conejereo (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007).
[Marta Ferrusola lays it on the line for some of Spain’s newest citizens. But where do Spaniards see immigrants crossing that line?]
Inmenso Estrecho: Obstacles to: Achieving Post-immigration Identity Change in Spanish Short Fiction
Tejuelo 1:2 (2008) pp. 66-77.
[How far do Spain’s politically engaged short story writers reflect the difficulties faced by immigrants to Spain in achieving identity change?]
Queer Identities
‘Speaking Up / Coming Out: Regions of Authenticity in Juan Pinzás’s Gay Galician Dogma Trilogy’ Galicia 21, Issue B, (2010), pp. 68-91[Can a gay man come out and still speak Gallego or will he go back into the linguistic closet?]
‘Exploding Anonymity: The Romance and Risk of Derailment’, forthcoming in Short Film Studies, 1:2 (2011).[Does a film from the 90s about a chance encounter on the metro look different now that the spectre of terror haunts public space?]
Fear and Gendering: Pedophobia, Effeminophobia and Hypermasculine Desire in the Work of Juan Goytisolo
Peter Lang: New York, 2001
[This book reads Goytisolo’s previously unstudied juvenilia. It also offers a Žižekian reading of the writer’s Sarajevo war diary]
El Diputado/The Congressman
In 24 Frames; The Cinema of Spain and Portugal, ed. by Alberto Mira (London: Wallflower Press, 2005), pp. 158-167.
[This study of Eloy de la Iglesias’s groundbreaking gay political thriller reads the film alongside Germaine Greer’s study of the aestheticisation of the boy]
Femme Foetal: The Triple Terror of the Young Basque Woman in Daniel Calparsoro’s Pasajes
In Contemporary Spanish Cultural Studies, ed Barry Jordan and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas (London: Edward Arnold, 2000), pp. 283-294.
[Mark Kurlansky’s Cod. An alcoholic cleaning lady. A pair of shoes. A lesbian love affair]
A Load of Bull: Cultural Patrimony, Machismo and Merchandise
In ¡Cultura Popular!, ed. by Anne White and Shelley Godsland (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2002), pp. 113-128.
[What is special about the Osborne Bull that watches over Spain’s landscape? How has it been modified to reflect different versions of Spanish identity?]
An Interview with Edmund White
Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review 1: 4 (1994), pp. 5-8.
[The pioneering gay writer discusses The Burning Library]
Women's Writing
Golden Bears, Amulets, and Old Wives’ Tales? Review of La teta asustada
Documenta: Entrevista con Rosamaría Roffiel
Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 10:1 (2004), pp. 85-97.
[Rosamaría Roffiel discusses her novel, Amora, one of the first works of fiction to portray lesbian experience in Mexico]
Cosmic Weddings and a Funeral: Sexuality, Techno Science, and the National Romance in Laura Esquivel’s La Ley del Amor
Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 6:1 (2000), 43-55.
[Como agua para chocolate, was a runaway success. Critics and readers were less happy with La ley del amor? Why? Is it really so bad? And why shouldn’t transgendered Mexicans travel in space?]
Spanish Film
Cria Cuervos/Raise Ravens
In 24 Frames; The Cinema of Spain and Portugal, ed. by Alberto Mira, (London: Wallflower Press, 2005), pp. 148-156.
[Focuses on the role played by children in Carlos Saura’s dramatisation of the dying days of the Franco regime]
All about Spain: transplant and identity in La flor de mi secreto and Todo sobre mi madre
Studies in Hispanic Cinema 1:1 (2004), pp. 43-62.
[Spain’s transplant success rate is among the world’s highest. Why? This article is the first to read Almodóvar’s transplant films from the perspective of the bioethics of organ reassignment]
Questions of Belief
Marcelino Pan y vino/ The Miracle of Marcelino
In 24 Frames; The Cinema of Spain and Portugal, ed. by Alberto Mira, (London: Wallflower Press, 2005), pp. 70-77.
[A Catholic film from the 50s which doesn’t enjoy catholic appeal. Why?]
Sects and Secularity: Another Cinema, Another Spain
In Contemporary Spanish Cultural Studies, ed Barry Jordan and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas (London: Edward Arnold, 2000), pp. 123-133.
[Benedict XVI isn’t the only Pope. Peter II has headquarters in southern Spain. During the transición filmmakers turned to the so-called Palmarian Catholic Church in titles that are scarcely known beyond Spain]
Kicking the Habit: Cinema, Gender, and the Ethics of Care in Almodóvar’s Entre tinieblas
Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 76: 1 (1999), pp. 53-66.
[Almodóvar considered entering the priesthood. Is there more to his engagement with Catholicism than a laugh riot?]
Film Festival Reports
Festival Report:Dok-Leipzig 2009\Oct 26-Nov 1 (2009)
Cardiff Iris Prize Festival 2008 (interview with German director Till Kleinert)
[Online version]
Banja Luka International Film Festival, 2008
Film International, 6:5 (2008) 93-97
Cardiff Iris Prize Festival, 2007
Film International 6:1 (2008) 84-87
[Online version]
London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival 2006, Film International 4: 3 (2006) 123-127
As Contributor/ Collaborator
Spanish Culture and Society: The Essential Glossary, ed. Barry Jordan (London: Hodder Arnold, 2002)
Sound on Vision: Studies on Spanish Cinema, ed. Robin Fiddian and Ian Michael (London: Routledge, 1999)
Para entendernos: Diccionario de cultura homosexual, gay y lésbica (Barcelona: Ediciones de la Temepstad, 1999)
Who’s Who in Gay and Lesbian Culture: 1945 to Today (London: Routledge, 2000)
St James Guide to Biography (Chicago: St James, 1991)
Reviews
I have reviewed books on literature and music as well as films and festivals from Europe, the Americas, and Asia for journals and periodicals including the Times Literary Supplement, Worldwide Gay and Lesbian Review, the Bulletin of Spanish Studies, the Modern Language Review, the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies and Film International.
Postgraduate Students
Ryan is currently supervising Silvia Grassi, a full time research student working towards a PhD. Silvia’s research focuses on minority storylines in Catalan and Spanish soap opera, and on the re-ordering of narrative hierarchies by fans and sub-cultural communities who shift programmes to digital platforms.
Past Research Students:
Mark Taylor: MA dissertation on Eco-philosophy in Julio Medem’s films. Mark is now pursuing a DPhil at Oxford University.
Michael Giner: MA dissertation on fact and fiction in Javier Cercas’s novels and journalism.
Biography
Teaching profile
I teach on the following modules:
Undergraduate level
EU5325 Landmark Films from Spain and Latin America
EU5323 ¿Patria o muerte? Post-Revolutionary Film and Writing From and About Cuba
EU5332 Surrealist Film and Art from Spain and Mexico
EU5108/09 Spanish Texts: Introduction to Film and Literary Studies
EU5230 Spanish Cultural Studies
EU7227 Eurocine: Borders and Identities in Post-War European Cinema
EU5205 Spanish Language Year 2 Ex-Advanced
EU5206 Spanish Language Year 2 Ex-Beginners
EU5901/02 Intercalcary Year Abroad Project
Postgraduate level
EUT201 European Literary Movements: Literary Theorists as Intellectuals
EUT204 Memories of the Second World War in European Autobiographical Writing
Career Profile
I began studying Spanish at evening classes at Lyndhurst community centre and pursued the subject at Totton Sixth Form College. I was an undergraduate at St Andrews University where I read for my MA. I studied at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, for a PhD and was a Research Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford. Whilst studying at Cambridge I also taught for Emmanuel College, Jesus College Robinson College, Trinity Hall, and Trinity College and lectured for the Modern and Medieval Languages Faculty.
As a research fellow at Oxford, I taught for Magdalen College, St Edmund Hall, St John’s College, and for a number of US universities with exchange programmes. I also lectured for the Taylor Institution and the Sub-Faculty of Spanish. I have been teaching small groups since 1993 and lecturing since 1995. I took up my current post as Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at Cardiff in 2002. As an undergraduate I attended Bordeaux University, Barcelona University, and the Menendez Pelayo International University as a visiting student.
Memberships / External Activities
I am a past member of the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland, the Modern Language Association, and the Popular Culture Association. I was one of the judges for the 2006 Frank Capra prize for undergraduate writing on film. I have been a member of the University’s Sexual Orientation Working Group.
I have been a member of EUROS’s Benchmarking Committee and also of its Uniweb working group. I was a participant in the University’s implementation of the HERA project and as admissions officer am involved in the widening access programme.
Through the Erasmus teaching mobility scheme I have been a visiting lecturer at the Universities of Extremadura (Cáceres) and Lerida in Spain.