This dissertation reassesses the dialogues between the aesthetic and cultural projects of Cuban writer José Lezama Lima (1910-1976) and the avant-garde, in both its European and Latin American manifestations. My main assertion is that Lezama Lima’s negative appraisals of the avant-garde are more a symptom of his will-to-power and self-legitimization than a categorical rejection of avant-garde values. My work thus revises the critical consensus that fixates on Lezama Lima’s presumed rejection of the avant-garde by documenting the deep relationships between texts and contexts, that is to say, between his poiesis and the intellectual, artistic and cultural manifestations that conform the late ‘30s and ‘40s Cuban scenario, to which the pervasiveness of European and Latin American avant-garde movements such as muralismo were fundamental. I hence consider Lezama Lima’s intricate engagement with avant-garde manifestations in the visual arts, an essential element in his aesthetics underestimated by critics despite the centrality of the concept of image to his works, and the attention 20th century art and thought gave to vision and visuality, as shown by critics Martin Jay and Mary Ann Caws. My dissertation thus explores the interconnections between intellectual, literary and visual art history in order to demonstrate how, despite his critical pronouncements against the avant-garde’s will-to-novelty and rejection of tradition, Lezama Lima actually incorporates several avant-garde topoi and techniques into his works (such as André Breton’s concept of “objective chance” and Pablo Picasso’s “completive technique”), in direct response to the epistemological shift they embody – a shift that has deeply impacted the contemporary regime of perception and patterns of representation. By driving Lezama Lima’s works back to its original contexts, my dissertation represents an important contribution to Cuban avant-garde criticism and its relationship to the broader cultural context of the avant-garde in Latin America and Europe, dialoguing with recent theories that emphasize the impact of the avant-garde on the establishment of contemporary regime of perception and patterns of representation as well. / text

A obra fílmica da artista plástica e cineasta Marie Menken (1909-1970) é contemplada, quase em sua totalidade, no presente trabalho, por meio de análises fílmicas que compreendem alguns aspectos da poética da realizadora norte-americana que consideramos relevantes para os estudos sobre o cinema experimental, de modo geral, e sobre a vanguarda norte-americana. Os aspectos aqui estudados correspondem aos das experimentações com a montagem cinematográfica e com a direção de fotografia, no ato de filmar, seja permeando os elementos físicos diante da câmera, seja contornando um discurso sobre a prática do cinema amador. São também investigados, por meio de aproximações com teorias sobre a arte moderna e a arte contemporânea, os aspectos formais de uma obra fílmica que pretende romper as possíveis fronteiras entre o cinema, as artes plásticas e a performance. / The film work of visual artist and filmmaker Marie Menken (1910-1970) is almost entirely contemplated in the present work, through film analysis which comprise some aspects of her poetics we consider relevant to the studies on experimental cinema, in general, as well on the American Avant-Garde. The aspects studied here correspond to the experiments with cinematographic editing and cinematography, during the act of filming, either bypassing the physical elements in front the camera, or building a discourse on amateur film practice. It\'s also engaged the investigation of the formal aspects of a filmic oeuvre which intends to surpass the possible frontiers between cinema, visual arts and performance dialoging with contemporary and modern art theories.

abstract: In the first thirty years of the XX century, an old literary visual tradition was reborn in a series of new striking visual texts better known as calligrams. They were produced by some avant-garde poets such as Vicente Huidobro, José Juan Tablada, Alberto Hidalgo and Carlos Oquendo de Amat in Latin America, and Juan Larrea, Guillermo de Torre, Francisco Vighi, Luis Mosquera, and others in Spain. However, with few exceptions, the interpretation of those written drawings has caught little attention from literary critics. This research, contrasted to that of Willard Bohn's, is a contribution to the deciphering of such literary art form, designated here as the figurative visual poem. It is a proposal for its visual reading which draws from the fact that this type of text is concretely a drawing formed by written verses. As such, it can be regarded as a plastic writing, combining pictorial and verbal signs in one perceptible configuration on the page. The result of this semiotic operation is a hybrid product in which the iconic forms become symbolic and vice versa. It is in fact, an art object which should be approached as a text that can be seen as well as read. The study leads to the conclusion that Willard Bohn misreads the order in which language and image are articulated in the visual poem identified with the second order semiological system proposed by Roland Barthes, placing preeminence on language over image. This results in reading the avant-garde visual figurative poem in an ekphrastic fashion. Consequently, the role of the image in the system is left in an ambiguous realm at the time of deciphering this hybrid text. Our contribution to re-conducting this undertaking has been equally drawn from a semiotic stance taken from Louis Hjemslev that balances language and image as correlates of a semiotic function. Due to the signaling nature of both, language and figure, a visual poem becomes an iconic metaphor as well as a metaphoric icon, and moreover a self-referential sign, thus justifying its status of an autonomous art. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Spanish 2011

Este trabalho cria um diálogo entre dois movimentos literários de vanguarda surgidos nos anos vinte do século passado no Peru e no Brasil: por um lado, a vanguarda indigenista de Puno dirigida por Gamaliel Churata, que afirmava tanto sua identidade regional e étnica, como os procedimentos vanguardistas empregados para expressá-la; e, por outro lado, seu contemporâneo brasileiro, a Antropofagia de Oswald de Andrade, que desde a metrópole paulista reunia elementos semelhantes (o indígena e o impulso vanguardista) com distintos propósitos. A tese pretende refletir sobre a imagem do indígena elaborada por ambos os movimentos nas revistas Boletín Titikaka e Revista de Antropofagia e que está subjacente em El pez de oro de Churata e em Serafim Ponte Grande de Andrade; esta imagem foi usada como plataforma simbólica a partir da qual enfrentar as configurações históricas, literárias e sociais hegemônicas, e elaborar um projeto de modernidade nacional. Os limites e aporias de ambos os programas, que falavam através de uma voz emprestada e ausente, não ressaltados com a intenção de mostrar as contradições da sociedade em que foram gestados. / The present work creates a dialogue between two literary avant-garde movementes that emerged in the twenties of last century in Peru and Brazil: on the one hand, the avant-garde\'s indigenismo of Puno directed by Gamaliel Churata, that claimed both their regional and ethnic identity, as the procedures avant-garde use to express it; and, on the other hand, his Brazilian contemporary, the Oswald de Andrade\'s Anthropophagy, who from the São Paulo metropolis brought together similar elements (the indigenous and the avant-garde impulse) with different intentions. The thesis intends to discuss the indigenous\'s picture drawn by both movements in the journals Boletín Titikaka and Revista de Antropofagia and present in El pez de oro by Churata and Serafim Ponte Grande by Andrade; this image was used as a symbolic platform which deal with historical, literary and perplexities of both programs, which spoke through an absent voise, are underlined with the intention of showing the contradictions of their society.

Este trabalho cria um diálogo entre dois movimentos literários de vanguarda surgidos nos anos vinte do século passado no Peru e no Brasil: por um lado, a vanguarda indigenista de Puno dirigida por Gamaliel Churata, que afirmava tanto sua identidade regional e étnica, como os procedimentos vanguardistas empregados para expressá-la; e, por outro lado, seu contemporâneo brasileiro, a Antropofagia de Oswald de Andrade, que desde a metrópole paulista reunia elementos semelhantes (o indígena e o impulso vanguardista) com distintos propósitos. A tese pretende refletir sobre a imagem do indígena elaborada por ambos os movimentos nas revistas Boletín Titikaka e Revista de Antropofagia e que está subjacente em El pez de oro de Churata e em Serafim Ponte Grande de Andrade; esta imagem foi usada como plataforma simbólica a partir da qual enfrentar as configurações históricas, literárias e sociais hegemônicas, e elaborar um projeto de modernidade nacional. Os limites e aporias de ambos os programas, que falavam através de uma voz emprestada e ausente, não ressaltados com a intenção de mostrar as contradições da sociedade em que foram gestados. / The present work creates a dialogue between two literary avant-garde movementes that emerged in the twenties of last century in Peru and Brazil: on the one hand, the avant-garde\'s indigenismo of Puno directed by Gamaliel Churata, that claimed both their regional and ethnic identity, as the procedures avant-garde use to express it; and, on the other hand, his Brazilian contemporary, the Oswald de Andrade\'s Anthropophagy, who from the São Paulo metropolis brought together similar elements (the indigenous and the avant-garde impulse) with different intentions. The thesis intends to discuss the indigenous\'s picture drawn by both movements in the journals Boletín Titikaka and Revista de Antropofagia and present in El pez de oro by Churata and Serafim Ponte Grande by Andrade; this image was used as a symbolic platform which deal with historical, literary and perplexities of both programs, which spoke through an absent voise, are underlined with the intention of showing the contradictions of their society.