Jared White

Background

About Jared White

My major academic focus is Spanish Theater, stemming from the Golden Age comedia through contemporary forms. In the past, I have both acted in and written about Spanish comedias (see my Academic Experience), including El caballero de Olmedo, Las cortes de la muerte, El narciso en su opinión, and El retrato vivo. Focusing on Lope de Vega and Calderón de la Barca during my undergraduate years, I shifted to Antonio Buero Vallejo and Alfonso Sastre during my Master’s program and wrote extensively on Ramón del Valle-Inclán as a doctoral student. I am presently studying the connections between the Medieval and Early Modern periods, specifically through the moralistic influence Juan Manuel had on Juan Ruíz de Alarcón's La verdad sospechosa. My doctoral dissertation, Death and Decay: The Religious, Aesthetical, and Philosophical Underpinnings of Ramón del Valle-Inclán’s esperpentos, considers the irascible bohemian journalist, novelist, poet, and playwright from Galicia, and contextualizes his works at various levels: religiously, aesthetically, philosophically, and theatrically. I demonstrate, over the course of the dissertation, how Valle-Inclán’s final dramatic form, the esperpento, not only represents the ultimate evolutionary phase of his destructive aesthetic technique, but also embodies the culmination of crucial historical, cultural, and artistic experiences that shape Spanish life at the turn of the twentieth century. Valle-Inclán’s plan for the future, scattered throughout essays and hidden in the marrow of the esperpentos themselves, reveals both an inner longing for things as they were, an admittedly impossible realization, and the possibility for metamorphosis–evidence that life can improve, that his circunstancia can be overcome and transformed into something worth preserving. Specialties: Spanish theater, the Spanish Golden Age (1492-1681), the Spanish comedia, the Generation of '98