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Noël Valis. The Culture of Cursileria: Bad Taste, Kitsch, and Class in Modern Spain. Durham & London: Duke UP, 2002.
Professor Valis argues that cursileria and, in more recent times, kitsch, and camp, is characteristic of Spain's middle class from the third decade or so of the nineteenth century to the present. She aims to demonstrate that careful consideration of the attitudes, practices, texts, and artifacts these related terms describe may lead to significant insights into how the Spanish middle class has responded to modernity. The author meticulously traces the several possible origins of the word cursi and concludes that just as it is difficult to pin down its origins, it is also difficult to define its manifestations through the years in question. Early on in her study she writes that "Lo cursi, is more than anything else, particularly lower middle class, reflecting the need to keep up appearances and the inability to do so in a satisfactory way" (11). As the author deepens her inquiry the term takes on added meanings. Valis's purpose (14-15) is to study cursileria's, marginal, "disempowered desire" as expressed in social pretensions and cultural shallowness on an individual level and then to reveal how cursileria parallels a collective identity crisis on the national level. The author borrows her working definition of modernism from Marshall Berman: it is "the struggle to make ourselves at home in a constantly changing world" (23). "Modernity, then" writes Valis, "is shaped by the way a society adapts to unceasing flux and evolution. It is this continual adaptation to change" (23). The dynamic that cursileria embodies is crucial to an understanding of Valis's thesis. Cursilería feeds on nostalgia for the past but its "disempowered desire" projects it into the future. Thus its relation to modernity is not merely that of a static, nostalgically disconsolate condition, but rather that of an agitated, striving, affective process. Raymond Williams's concept of "structure of feeling" (a kind of practical consciousness, "what is actually being lived") serves Valis's argument by indicating how change may be shown in process. She also notes that Anthony Cohen's concept of culture as a "body of symbolic form" (rather than as a "body of substantive fact") governs the conception of her book. Valis concedes that middle...