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Abstract
The purpose of this bilingual, collaborative, many-voiced essay is to distill the dynamic, insightful and at times polemical exchange of ideas that took place during the “Modernity and the Avant-Garde in Spain: A Debate from the Perspectives of the United States and Spain” symposium organized by Susan Larson and Juan Herrero-Senés on July 17 and 18, 2019 in the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid. The gathering brought together 14 scholars (seven based in Spain and the rest in the United States and Great Britain) whose research stems from a wide variety of methodologies and intellectual traditions. This encounter was a unique opportunity to engage directly with each other’s work, to answer key questions about promising theoretical approaches and to share strategies to collectively solve some of the most pressing problems that are commonly faced by researchers and students in this rapidly-changing field. After the co-authors consider some of the most important ideas that came out of the encounter, this essay ends with the brief interventions of the participants in the dialogues: Andrew A. Anderson, Nuria Capdevila-Argüelles, Nicolás Fernández-Medina, Leslie J. Harkema, Juan Herrero-Senés, Juli Highfill, Susan Larson, Abelardo Linares, José-Carlos Mainer, Domingo Ródenas de Moya, Nil Santiáñez, Renée M. Silverman, and Andrés Soria Olmedo.
Toward an adequate theory of the avant-garde
Andrew A. Anderson
Over the course of two days of conversation and debate, a remarkable number of topics and issues emerged that still command our attention. The lack of specificity involved in using the broad term “Edad de Plata” to refer to Spanish literature between 1900 and 1936 is both an advantage and a disadvantage. However, all other labels are problematic, some more than others. Discussion continues over the suitability of the concept of Modernism as applied to Spain, the kind of distinctions that can or need to be made between Modernism and modernismo, and how to differentiate between Modernism and the avant-garde. Furthermore, it is clear that neither label suffices to characterize all writers publishing in Spain over the first third of the twentieth century, which then leaves open the question of how to refer to these others. Likewise, if one seeks to avoid the notion of Modernism because of its Anglophone origins and imported nature, describing those years just as avant-garde involves even more of a distortion. Here as elsewhere, the shortcomings of critical vocabulary and historical terminology are apparent.
Even within the range of what many might agree as constituting the Spanish avant-garde, there are several problems. Critics working on narrative and those working on poetry often operate in something of a vacuum, while avant-garde theater is understudied. The canon of Spanish avant-garde writers as it is normally conceived is highly deficient, and the work of recuperation and reintegration needs to continue while at the same time not over-exaggerating the number or significance of overlooked or forgotten figures. Allied with these issues is that of the place of the Spanish avant-garde on the European stage, where it is next to invisible. We need to explore the causes of this state of affairs, and consider whether we as critics and historians of Spanish literature need to try to remedy it, and if so, how. Ultimately, it is clear that there is as yet no truly adequate theory of the avant-garde on a European scale, and so significant differences of opinion will inevitably continue there too.
The women of the “Edad de Plata”
Nuria Capdevila-Argüelles
Exhaustive research on identity and the legacy of the modern woman, a key emblem of the modernity at the heart of the “Edad de Plata,” is revolutionizing the study of twentieth-century culture and creating new twenty-first century lines of study. The dictatorship and Spain’s subsequent transition to democracy largely omitted the presence and historical importance of the identity of the modern Spanish woman who became either a mere ornament or open secret that was largely ignored by male authors. The position she was forced to accept is evident in most of the film and literature of the second half of the twentieth century, cultural forms rich with figures such as silent, ghostly or forgetful grandmothers, such as the ones found in the film Cría cuervos (Carlos Saura 1976), in the novel Nada (Carmen Laforet 1944) or in the story Casa de verano (Nuria Amat 1999).
The study of the public, private and intimate lives of modern women must start from the premise that feminism is evolving and developing during the entirety of the twentieth century. From this perspective it is clear that one should focus on the fact that women were confined, and this closet to which they were relegated had definite consequences. The concept of the closet is essential to understanding identity from the perspective of gender. The emancipation of the Spanish modern woman speeds up and is increasingly visible, on the one hand, and subsequently slows down and is hidden, depending on the historical period we are considering.
When one opens the closet hiding away the complex identities of modern women one realizes that the development of research in the area of the “Edad de Plata” itself ignored women’s contributions to the literary and artistic production of the era. The identities of the authors as modern women were of interest and debated during the “roaring 20s” and for a brief time achieved some legitimacy tanks to the surge of legislation during the Second Republic that was sensitive to gender, but this was officially silenced during the dictatorship. As the study of the “Edad de Plata” began to flourish and open the closet the rich lives and work of these modern women began to come to light. As we progress further into the twenty-first century, this line of research has consolidated into a key connection between North American and European academics. The identity of the modern female author, defined by the experience of “inner exile” or a more transatlantic experience, is a subject that transcends borders that we are now considering as we break with oblivion and incorporate their legacy more fully into our critical work.
A few thoughts on Spanish modernism today
Nicolás Fernández-Medina
How do we best conceptualize the rich and complex period in Spanish culture that runs from roughly 1890 to 1939? Since Azorín introducted the concept of “La generación del 98” in 1912, scholars have employed generational models to evaluate this period’s cultural production. It is well established that these models have marginalized, and even excluded, not only various individuals and groups that made such production possible (for instance, women’s contributions), but also several of the important transnational debates in epistemology, science, and philosophy that enabled Spanish intellectuals to participate in global discussions about modernity. While the “Edad de Plata” critical paradigm first introduced in the mid-seventies has gone a long way in avoiding many of the pitfalls of these generational models, it nevertheless has its shortcomings, not the least of which is its blind spot with respect to the late nineteenth-century interdisciplinary dialogue between the arts and sciences that powerfully informed Spanish modernism. Clearly, there is no single approach with which to best conceptualize this period of Spanish culture, but we can and should continue broadening our critical perspectives of the transnational debates and interdisciplinarity that were essential to its constitution. We would do well to expand our understanding of this period on the peninsula as a complex cultural response to diverse socioeconomic realities that concurrently and over time cut across (and connected) various strata of regional, national, and international cultural life. From this vantage point, we would find ourselves on more stable footing to engage cross-disciplinary conversations on the modern, which has always been somewhat of a challenge (and at times impossible) when using insular, non-inclusive models of micro-periodization. These ideas are not new. In recent years, a number of scholars, myself included, have expanded the scope and definition of Spanish modernism—also Iberian modernism(s)—and its unique development. This line of critical rethinking promises to highlight even greater diversity within Modernist studies and yield new discoveries in the years to come.
Translating Iberian modernisms
Leslie J. Harkema
Scholars of early twentieth-century Spanish literature working in the United States have always, at least to some degree, been translators. By this I do not only mean that when publishing in English we must translate quotations. In our writing and teaching, we also carry our subject matter over to the domain of the Anglophone academy, endeavoring to render the texts and movements we study legible to an English-speaking public at our institutions and in our professional milieu. As in translation between languages, there are no perfect equivalencies. The difficulty Hispanists have had in using the term “modernism” to speak of early twentieth-century Spain presents the obvious example. Try as we may, we cannot eliminate the interference between modernism and modernismo. Nor, I think, do we want to. The potential erasure of cultural specificity looms over our attempts to discuss Iberian cultural production according to Anglo-centric critical paradigms. While in my work I embrace modernist studies as a framework that facilitates dialog among Spanish and other literatures, I am also wary of producing scholarship that domesticates and flattens Iberian difference for a North American audience. To paraphrase Emily Apter, I find myself aspiring to place speed bumps on the thoroughfare of Global Modernism.
One way to do this is to attend to the cultural and linguistic diversity of Iberian modernisms; to become scholars of comparative modernisms within the Iberian Peninsula. Curiously, though contemporary Iberian Studies as formulated by Joan Ramon Resina looked precisely to the cultural Iberianism of the early twentieth century as its model, scholars of Iberian Studies (particularly in the United States) have in general focused little on the modernist period and the historical avant-garde. Yet it remains the case that many Iberian modernists registered and responded to intra-peninsular difference—often by becoming translators themselves. Consider Unamuno’s translations of Maragall, María Luz Morales’ translations of Víctor Català, or even the more figurative self-translation of Lorca’s Seis poemas gallegos (Six Galician Poems). Taking a comparative approach to Iberian modernisms will not make our own translation work easier, but it may make it more faithful to the varied landscape of peninsular culture in the early twentieth century.
Broadening the field of vision of Spain’s “Silver Age”
Juan Herrero-Senés
I propose a more global view of Spain’s “Silver Age” that takes the concept of circulation into account—a concept which entails such things as interconnectedness, polycentrism, relationality, interaction and dynamism. In the first place, I think it is pertinent to consider the environment and junctures in which this intellectual production takes place, and the agents involved. It is essential to link historical and cultural events within a framework of literary fields. This requires, on the one hand, trying to return to the complexity of the context in which cultural products arise and, on the other, assuming that the circulation of ideas is always based on a material substrate of circulation that demands that we broaden our vision to include the authors themselves, editors and publishers, critics, journalists, magazines, readers, cultural promoters, translators and booksellers. It is worthwhile to remember the distinction between cultural products that we recognize as having esthetic value versus those whose significance lies in the fact that they are cultural documents and signs of their time but might not enjoy a notable quality: not in order to separate them, but to categorize them in some coherent way.
Secondly, I suggest attending to the synchronicities, interrelationships, exchanges, similarities and differences between these cultural manifestations in different places. Much of the context, worldview, ethos and cultural traffic of the “Silver Age” is transnational. Working within this more global framework aids in the definitive adoption of modernism as a comprehensive concept, promotes comparative approaches and makes use of network theory. Intellectual networks involve a set of ties that link members of the social system through, but also beyond, social categories, groups, generations or national ascriptions. These allow for communication and exchange between agents engaged in the production and dissemination of knowledge and its material expression. Talking about networks allows observing the literary phenomenon at the time of its production, emphasizes the idea of horizontality and simultaneity, as well as a willingness to establish voluntary associations. Studying the transnational connections of Spanish literature also helps to firmly question the ideas of localism and insularity around it that still survive in a certain sector of criticism.
The expanding horizons of modernity and avant-garde studies
Juli Highfill
The symposium provided a unique and very welcome opportunity for scholars working on the Silver Age to engage in critical conversations about the state of our field in the US and in Spain. For decades, through the 1980s, the scholarship tended to suppress the heterogeneity and complexity of literary-artistic production in this period, often exaggerating aestheticist tendencies and disregarding popular and mass culture. But as is evident in the work of the scholars gathered here, the field has diversified and expanded significantly in the past 25 years. For example, studies have emerged that focus on kiosk literature, youth culture, neglected authors or artists—many of them women—and the transformation of urban space. Recent approaches have addressed inter-artistic and interdisciplinary engagements, thus foregrounding the extraordinary cross-fertilization that took place across the fields of music, visual arts, philosophy, sciences. Other compelling studies have paid overdue attention to the evolving conceptions of the body and sexuality, the transatlantic connections among writers and artists, and the peripheral avant-gardes.
In our discussions, attendees acknowledged the transformation of our field and agreed on the need to continue expanding the corpus, rescuing forgotten figures, attending to “eccentric modernities” and to literature in the “minor languages.” At the same time, certain preoccupations emerged. The issue of nomenclature became a persistent point of discussion, with all recognizing the problematics (perhaps intractable) of terms such as “Silver Age,” “Generation of 27,” modernism, and modernismo. Some scholars expressed concerns about hyper-specialization, suggesting that in diversifying, we may have “over-corrected” for the overly general, if not reductive, studies of the past and that it is now time for new panoramic approaches. Others remarked on the lack of a satisfactory theory of the avant-garde among the longstanding extant studies. Among the most promising approaches mentioned by attendees was network theory, given that it offers rigorous tools to account for the dynamic and complex interactivity among nodes in the cultural field, for example: publishing houses, the press, spaces of transit, such as hotels, stations, kiosks, bars, banquet halls, and mass spectacles. The participants recognized the enduring disconnection between “the two hispanisms” in Spain and the US, and expressed hopes that more occasions such as this will provide opportunities for ongoing dialog and collaboration across the Atlantic.
Anglo-American literary theory and Spanish avant-garde prose: An exceedingly poor translation
Susan Larson
I have been fortunate to teach graduate seminars on the Spanish novel for about 20 years at various universities in the United States. Inevitably, when we arrive at the point in the semester to talk about avant-garde prose, the following difficult to answer question emerges: Hadn’t the Spanish avant-garde authors of the 1920s and 1930s already been using all of the experimental narrative techniques that we have been told were postmodern? This question points to a grave problem in the field of Hispanic Literary Studies in the United States in general and in the way that the avant-garde literature of the “Edad de Plata” is taught. There is a significant gap between the almost exclusively Anglo-American or French theoretical approaches that we use to understand Spanish literature that often coexists with an ignorance of the particularities of the Spanish avant-garde in terms of esthetics, social issues and political context. This gap often results in serious misunderstandings within the field. If we are going to continue to stress the importance of Spanish avant-garde literature we need as professors and researchers to make clear that Anglo-American concepts of the postmodern are incongruous with a true understanding of the Spanish avant-garde since in the Anglo-American literary tradition, there is, relatively speaking, no significant avant-garde to speak of (and I’m considering the influence of Surrealism Dadaism, Cubism, Futurism so evident in the Spanish authors). This significant difference in literary traditions complicates the clean division between the Modern and the Postmodern that is a given in the United States and Great Britain.
Critics of Spanish literature based in the United States regularly participate in debates with our colleagues about the literary techniques of Spanish avant-garde literature as a testing ground for much of what would be used in experimental literature for the next century, but we are often talking at cross purposes, relying on a set of very different theoretical assumptions and I fear that until we address this problem, Spanish avant-garde prose in particular will remain unable to participate actively in these debates. There are several solutions, however: (1) translate more of the key texts; (2) write more global theories of Modernism and the avant-garde that question the dominance of Anglo-American theories and assumptions; (3) prioritize literary theories circulating during the first third of the twentieth century in Spain, but de-centralizing the figure of José Ortega y Gasset; and (4) writing well-documented books in English for a broad audience about the richness and unique particularity of the affective cosmopolitan networks of influence within which the Spanish authors are working.
Modernity and the avant-garde
Abelardo Linares
The Culture of the Book or, if you prefer, Culture and the Book are increasingly in crisis. There are a thousand signs, but I will point out just how discouraging it is to compare how much happened in Spanish literature (not to mention in world literature) between 1900 and 1919, to the relatively little that has happened between 2000 and 2019. Because of the fact that Culture and Books will continue to exist for a long time and they will not accept being disappeared without fighting back, controversies, debates, conferences and meetings will be increasingly useful and stimulating, such as the one held this past July in the Residencia de Estudiantes on a variety of different Hispanic literatures, which are somehow one.
If the twentieth century has seen a new Golden or Silver Age, it is mainly thanks to the alliance between literature and journalism. The vast majority of everything printed in books between 1900 and 1950 was previously published in magazines and newspapers in Spain and America and there is still an immense amount of valuable texts buried in periodical publications that are difficult to access. Much of that material is about to be lost and much has definitely been lost already. Magazines and newspapers will be in the near future an inexhaustible source for Literary Studies that will contribute in extraordinary ways to completing or questioning the literary canon of the Silver Age on two continents.
If the relationship between literature and journalism remains a pressing issue subject to study and debate, the revaluation and critical review of everything written by women in the first two thirds of the twentieth century, both in Spain and in America, is the other major challenge for Hispanic Studies in the most immediate future.
Of periodizations and polemics
José-Carlos Mainer
Predictably, the dispute over the names for the period in Spanish literature between the 1880s and the Civil War of 1936 has played a very important role in this symposium. In my long experience I have had the opportunity to fight two onomastic battles, both lost: the first, more than 30 years ago, was when the revision of the Generation of “98” title and its relationship with “modernism” took place. Many of us considered the contrast between the two terms to be a didactic and deceiving simplification and opted for the hegemony of modernism, which—in America and in Catalonia—offered a solid support for understanding the period as a crisis of social and esthetic values. The battle began in the sixties and seventies, within a highly politicized climate, but it did not bear much fruit (as evidenced by the tenor of the many official centenary commemorations of the period in 1998).
The 1927 dispute—the second battle—did not amount to much either. It was clear that arguments against it (which Andrew Anderson has supported here during the symposium) have not done away with a term whose fortune rests on a myth, on an emotional yearning (confirmed again in the centenaries of 1992–1993) and perhaps—as Bergamín pointed out—on the interests of its beneficiaries. The myth of 1927 was born early on because since 1925 the word “generation” circulates widely as a slogan of self-recognition. But it has become insistent and persuasive since 1940 when memories (from foreign exile) and bad consciences (from the inside) turn the name into a fetish that to this day takes shape as a cult.
The sentimental configuration of the object “1927” was further formalized in the fifties and sixties, along with the creation and defense of the term “Generation of 1936,” born of other needs for affirmation that sometimes overlapped between (more or less disappointed) Falangist authors, among writers exiled in America and, even more so, among those existing in a state of interior exile. Ultimately and still today, Generation of “27” and “Generation of “36” are forms of historical memory rather than of literary history. By the same token, the concept of the “Edad de Plata,” to which I am so bound, never meant to be anything other than the title of a book that, in any case, wanted to consign the historiographic unit of a “cultural process” that begins in the decade of the fertile eighties of the nineteenth century. It may be that what we as critics should consider in the coming years is the reconsideration of the common thread (in all of its diverse manifestations) that is the professionalization of the writer, that more attention should be paid to more nuanced approaches to the construction of the national imaginary (compatible with obvious internationalization), and to issues related to the composition of the reading public.
Pending tasks and some pitfalls
Domingo Ródenas de Moya
The richness of the period between the fin-de-siècle and 1939 in Spanish culture continues to offer an intense appeal for research, but it’s almost complete absence in international studies and panoramas of that time frame, i.e., Modernism, is striking. The reasons are diverse and have deep roots that will not be easy to remove, but it is still surprising that Unamuno, Ortega, Guillén or García Lorca (the list could include other names and be much more extensive) are hardly cited in such works, and sometimes they are only mentioned in chapters dedicated to presenting the Spanish case.
In broad strokes, we have two parallel tasks ahead that are already in progress, although with uneven success. The least fortunate for now is to insert Spanish esthetic modernity within the framework of international Modernism, largely because it depends on a paradigm shift not so much in Hispanic Studies as in Comparative Literature. Just review the indexes of the magazine Modernism/Modernity to get an idea of the marginality of Spanish literature in that area. On the other hand, those of us who dedicate ourselves to this discipline cannot maintain a national study of authors, works or field phenomena without taking into account the fluid transnational circulation of people, ideas and repertoires during this extraordinary time period. A mobility of symbolic materials and “the production of presence” (to use the concept of H.U. Gumbrecht) that defines, within its network of transfers, exchanges and collaborations, a common ideological-esthetic substrate, an unquestionable epistemology of modernity in which Spain participated both historically and socially.
The other task, which is producing exciting results, points to the critical review of the historiographic canon. This involves not a few different but interconnected operations. The most obvious is the reevaluation of genres and literary practices considered minor or marginal, as well as authors and especially female authors who had been circumvented or underestimated; this implies, for instance, a new consideration of the prose writers (both the narrators and the essayists or journalists) and the role they played in the internal dynamics of the system. It is just as important, however, to pay attention to not just the creators, but to the mechanisms of a much more complicated dynamic made up of the publishing industry and the press, cultural sociability (since interpersonal relations exceeded the literary sphere of the literary), the links with educational and cultural policies, and the individual and institutional channels that promoted international dissemination.
This research horizon poses some risks, however, and I will only mention two of them here. The first task is threatened by the pointless repetition of the complaints or justifying allegations of those who aspire to be admitted to a select club (for example, the crushing reiteration of the features of Modernism that also occur in Spanish letters). In the second task, the danger is of another kind, perhaps more pernicious: it’s the danger of overcorrection, since the exhumation of forgotten names or works, stimulated by the demands of academic production, can lead to overvaluations or hyperbolic claims. In some cases, this can be very disorienting for students who lack discriminatory criteria. This kind of research, rather than shedding light, can leave us in the dark.
Spanish peninsular studies in the Global Age
Nil Santiáñez
As a result of the ongoing processes of globalization, the nation-state has lost its former autonomy and hegemony. Furthermore, our hermeneutic horizon has been radically transformed. In this context, the traditional study of national literatures and cultures may be considered as an obsolete practice. To make it feasible and valid again, it is necessary to renew its methods and adapt the discipline to the new ways of seeing and reading that have arisen from the hermeneutic horizon of the global age. A new epoch demands new theories and approaches. The practice of Peninsular Spanish Studies as if nothing had happened in the last 20 years constitutes an anachronistic activity. The renewal of Peninsular Spanish Studies can be achieved by the overlapping of two interrelated methodologies. The first one derives from Comparative Studies, which ought to be the substance, and not the accessory, of Peninsular Spanish Studies. The deployment of transnationalism would allow us to see connections between texts, movements, motifs, themes, and literary techniques that belong to different national literary fields. More than ever, literature is today a space shaped as a transnational network. The most productive way to study it consists of projecting to the literary field the notion of the space of fluxes. Iberian Studies is the second methodology that ought to be applied. In this intranational comparative practice the exploration of Galician, Catalan, and Basque literature would be added to the study of the literature produced in Spanish. This double methodology (i.e., Comparative Studies and Iberian Studies) would provide renewed currency to Hispanic Studies. Peninsular Hispanism, as in fact any discipline devoted to the study of a national literature, requires a profound transformation in tune with the new hermeneutic horizon that has emerged from the age of globalization. The overlapping of Comparative Studies and Iberian Studies will not only give a new intellectual relevance to the discipline. In addition, it will also contribute to disseminate an image of Spanish culture that better reflects Spain’s multinational and multilingual nature. Today, to study the literature of Spain as if it only consisted of that produced in Spanish is something unacceptable from an intellectual standpoint as much as from a political stance.
From generations to relational webs: “1927” revisited
Renée M. Silverman
When we think of the Spanish “Generation of 1927,” what comes most quickly to mind is the well-known and highly decorated group of writers that includes Rafael Alberti, Vicente Aleixandre, Dámaso Alonso, Manuel Altolaguirre, Luis Cernuda, Gerardo Diego, Jorge Guillén, Federico García Lorca, Emilio Prados, and Pedro Salinas. Yet neither the existence nor the composition of this group are unquestionable matters of fact, but rather products of a finely wrought concept of literary generations whose basis lies in the theories of the German Julius Petersen, and whose presuppositions inform the idea of the Generation of 27 that was embraced and disseminated by Salinas and philosopher José Ortega y Gasset. To unpack the concept of the literary generation as according to Petersen would be to expose the fault lines in the very foundations of the Generation of 27, which rest on affective ties and common experiences like the celebration of the 1927 Góngora tricentennial from which the cohort takes its name. In the context of 1920s and 1930s Spain, these relationships and activities depend on the privileges afforded by a masculine gender identity and a certain economic and social position.
It is crucial to question the assumption of the neutrality of networks (in terms of gender, ethnicity, etc.) that has been naturalized into our idea of the Generation of 27. On one level, gender must be plugged back in to the “generational” web: for example, by foregrounding the female body in their work, poet Concha Méndez and painter Maruja Mallo open spaces for creative women to be seen and thus heard, bringing them back towards the center from the periphery to which they had been relegated. On another level, to go against the grain of the Generation of 27 as a concept demands close examination of some of its members’ neo-popular and neo-Romantic (and not uncomplicated) integration of elements belonging to the cultural and ethnic “other.” Although the social import of Lorca’s Romancero gitano has been extensively studied, much is still to be learned, for instance, from the way in which his Poeta en Nueva York draws upon African-American and Afro-Caribbean idioms; the inclusion of such textures and motifs speaks to and about the poet’s progressive attitudes and esthetic, as well as revealing how far his and the Generation of 27’s networks extend beyond Europe and the European-American. Recognizing the positional inequality of subjects as they navigate artistic, intellectual, and socio-political currents constitutes an important initial step in changing the way in which we conceptualize generations in general and the Generation of 27 in particular. In doing so, and then by reimagining the Generation of 27 as consisting of an expansive set of intercalated webs, it becomes possible to restore the true diversity and relational complexity to our portrait of this group.
A vein of that silver
Andrés Soria Olmedo
In order for me to reflect back on my work on modernity and the avant-garde, a bit of autobiography is required. The writing of my doctoral dissertation took place between 1977 and 1980.The purpose of Avant-Garde and Literary Criticism in Spain (published in 1988) is inseparable from the historical period of the Transition. The book was about exploring the areas of literary history that Franco’s Spain had left in the shadows, and putting himself at the height of Moreno Villa’s statement: “[…] the history of Spain of that period was made by the intellectuals, the modernists, the followers of Juan Ramón Jiménez, the “pure” poets, the “alacres” [young bohemians, some of whom studied in the Residencia de Estudiantes by day and the cafés and streets of Madrid by night] the Ultraists, […]. Neither Falangists nor cavemen may write a single true line about that time without our names; not theirs, ours.”
When it came to methodology, from the Marxist tradition brought back by Juan Carlos Rodríguez came an awareness of historicity and the idea that literature as a form of ideological production has a relative autonomy within a given social formation, beyond reflection. From H.R. Jauss’s esthetics of reception we took the effectiveness of the different avant-garde standards within different horizons of expectation (which, for example, explained the predilection for the constructive aspects of the avant-garde).
With the exception of essays such as Literaturas europeas de vanguardia (1925) by Guillermo de Torre, the main focus of my research was not books but magazines published between 1909 and 1930, ranging from futurism, ultraism and creationism to the crisis at the edge of the thirties. Except in the first chapter, revised in 1985, the articulation of the avant-garde in the dialectics between modernization and modernity was not mentioned. In successive interventions I reflected on the literary system in which these novelties took place, and their position within modernity. Modernity was understood as a field of forces shaken by structural disagreement between bourgeois modernization and esthetic modernity. Modernismo, the avant-garde and modernism are all different modern reactions against modernity, on which they simultaneously depend.
The book did not make any use of the concept of generation, and when I used it in later writing, it was more productive to study the concept's own history and see that it began to be built from the rappel à l´ordre enacted by the European avant-gardes themselves around 1921–1922. Following Charles Russell’s distinction between “avant-gardists” and “modernists” (the former more oriented towards political activism, the latter towards artistic autonomy) I positioned the participation of writers and artists of the so-called “Generation of 27” in both options at successive times, with these moments understood as links between closely-related modernization and esthetic modernity, as well as pursuing a negotiation between the “young literature” and avant-garde options.