...characters stories of eighteenth-century Spain. After all, French and British Enlightenment texts have been blessed by decades of cinematic narratives inviting audiences to imagine the eighteenth-century in motion: well-distributed films such as Toro Jones, Ridicule, Dangerous Liaisons, of The Madness of King George have created a pop-culture legacy of imagery promoting the excitements of Britain and France during the period, in part due to the sexing-up factor built into any costume drama. (Those amazing lace ruffles! Those cool male ponytails! Those bosoms heaving above corseted waists!) Of course, one might argue that Goya's Maja desnuda (an undeniably large, colorful, and provocative canvas) has helped serve a similar function with regard to the spread of an image of eighteenth-century Spain. But the question that concerns me here is not the relative absence of Spanish Ilustrados (or courtesans) from films with large production budgets. Rather, what convinced me that the period in question needs some medium of stimulating the desire born of looking, was an exchange I had some years ago with several students in an undergraduate seminar on late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Spanish literature. These were bright students, friendly to the material; yet they did not seem to thrill to texts such as Cadalso's Noches Lúgubres, or Espronceda's Estudiante de Salamanca. When I asked them what it was that did not rouse their passions, they said "we wish there were some way you could make them seem like a movie." A movie! Which got me started on thinking about how to make the texts move in students' minds, and how to make students move inside--be with--the worlds and characters opened by the texts.

A friend of mine, a veteran college English professor, has taken in recent years to watching reality television and subscribing to magazines such as Rolling Stone. When trying to get students excited about Walt Whitman, or passionate about crafting a sentence, he draws on cultural references to the latest pop music, shows such as Survivor, or Hollywood offerings to make the material more accessible: "When Shakespeare talks about [X], it's like Jay-Z rapping about [Y]." Certainly such comparisons serve the purpose of clarification. I have found similar analogies useful in teaching the Spanish Eighteenth Century. For example, it's helped to point out that the petimetras criticized in satires and comedias (such as Moraún's La Petimetra) are very much living the spirit of Cindy Lauper's pop song "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun." Or that the panoramic entertainments of the 1780s and 1790s...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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