The poet, dramatist, and scriptwriter Concha Méndez (1898-1986), like many of the women of the Spanish Generation of 27, has been forgotten by the scholars that have been working in this generation. Few articles analyze the work done by Concha Méndez, but there are still some of Méndez’s texts that are unknown and so many questions about her work that we already know. As far as we know Méndez was influenced by her generation’s colleagues, such as the poets Alberti and Lorca. We don’t know anything about the influence from her women colleagues. Concha Méndez was not only supported by her family, but she was condemned and rejected for being a woman who did not follow the social rules in those times in Spain. But she decided to be a poet and an independent woman. In order to pursue that, she had to suffer exile many times during her life. In her first exile Méndez met Maruja Mallo, a painter who was always breaking the socials rules and fighting for the liberation of women. Together they enjoyed an intellectual life and they contributed to enrich it and to destroy the image of woman as an obedient and submissive mother and wife. After that experience, she traveled to Argentina. She was in her second exile when she met Consuelo Berges, a writer. Berges offered her friendship to Méndez and also her influence in intellectual circles. Later, when Méndez had to suffer political exile after the Spanish Civil War, she reinforced her friendship with María Zambrano, a philosopher who also lived in exile and who was always there to advise her about her works and support her from the pain of many personal incidents. All these friendships are traces in her work. My thesis is going to study all these traces in order to better know Méndez’s works and also to expand the study of the women in the Generation of 27, which has been studied from a man’s perspective very well but still lacks study from a woman’s point of view.

Les philosophes de l’exil républicain espagnol appartiennent au camp des défenseurs de la Seconde république légitimement proclamée le 14 avril 1931, et plus largement, de la lutte anti-fasciste des années trente. Ils se trouvent au côté du "peuple" lors de la guerre civile, qui dure trois ans. La victoire en 1939 du Général Francisco Franco, soutenu par l’Allemagne nazie et par l’Italie fasciste, les forcent à fuir l’Espagne en 1939 – au péril de leur vie. Certains intellectuels connaîtront les camps de concentration français, mais la plupart trouveront refuge en Amérique latine, en particulier au Mexique et au Venezuela. En exil, ils jurent de rester fidèles à la Seconde république et à l’esprit du peuple espagnol. Ces philosophes appartiennent au camp des vaincus, à l’instar de tous ceux qui, mus par des idéaux progressistes et d’humanité, partout en Europe se sont élevés contre la barbarie fasciste. C’est pourquoi leurs œuvres respectives demeurent aujourd’hui encore inconnues dans leur quasi intégralité – malgré les tentatives de "récupération" menées tout au long des cinquante ou soixante dernières années pour promouvoir leur pensée auprès d’un lectorat plus large. Au contexte de crise historique de l’entre-deux guerres, s’ajoute la situation particulière de la philosophie espagnole proprement dite. En effet, celle-ci n’est institutionnalisée que dans le premier tiers du vingtième siècle : on voit alors apparaître l’École de Madrid et l’École de Barcelone. L’Espagne en ce sens rattrape le "retard" pris par rapport aux autres pays européens, notamment l’Allemagne. Aussi la génération des philosophes que j’étudie, nés autour de 1900, est-elle la première bénéficiaire de cette politique de renouveau culturel et intellectuel : au moment où éclate la guerre d’Espagne, ce sont des philosophes professionnels jouissant d’une reconnaissance internationale qui s’engagent dans le conflit. Par conséquent, l’oubli qui recouvre leurs noms n’est pas seulement dû aux dramatiques circonstances historiques et politiques de la première moitié du vingtième siècle : il est également dû aux limites de la philosophie dogmatique elle-même. L’expérience de l’exil elle-même, à mon sens, s’avère un catalyseur : ceux-ci visent à s’émanciper des conventions académiques pour philosopher de façon autonome, c’est-à-dire en espagnol et dans l’esprit du peuple. Cet idéal de liberté est à n’en pas douter à la source de la "raison poétique", véritable invention de l’exil républicain espagnol. / Spanish Republican philosophers in exile sided with the Second Republic, legally proclaimed on April 14, 1931. They embraced the anti-fascist cause rising in the 1920s and 1930s in Europe. During the Civil war they stood among the people. The war lasted three years. 1939 saw the victory of General Francisco Franco, supported by Nazi Germany and the Italy of Mussolini. Threatened with death, they had no choice but to escape Spain. Some intellectuals experienced French concentration camps but, for the most part, they found refuge in Latin America, especially in Mexico and Venezuela. In exile, they swore to remain loyal to the Second Republic and to the spirit of the Spanish people. These philosophers belonged to the vainquished, as those everywhere in Europe who, moved by liberal views and humane ideals rised against Fascist barbarity. As a result, their respective works are still widely unknown today – despite restless efforts made to promote their thought to a larger audience for over half a century. In addition to the historical context of crisis during the interwar period, the situation of Spanish philosophy itself is suggestive. Indeed, Spanish philosophy was institutionalised at the beginning of the twentieth century only ; the Schools of Madrid and Barcelona were created. In this sense, Spain caught up on other European countries, Germany especially. These politics of cultural and intellectual renovation are first bestowed upon the generation of philosophers I study, born in the 1900s. When the Spanish war erupts, they had become professionals of international recognition. This shows the actual limits of academic philosophy, incapable of taking or unwilling to accept unorthodox ways of philosophising. The experience of exile itself serves in my opinion as a catalyst : Spanish republican philosophers in exile seek emancipation from academic conventions to philosophise freely ; that is, in Spanish and according to the spirit of the people. No doubt "poetic reason" – the true invention of Spanish republican exile – stems from this ideal of autonomous thinking.

Whereas contemporary debates in Latin American studies addressing sovereignty often focus on dictatorships and the transitions to democratic governments in Latin America in the late twentieth century, Sovereignties Displaced: Avant-Garde Prose and Authoritarianism in Spain, Chile, and Argentina (1923-1936) adopts a transatlantic framework and directs critical attention to the cultural production of the interwar period. The historical and cultural events preceding and following 1929 are connected to World War I, the political crisis of democratic systems, and the global socioeconomic instability of the period. The three countries studied in the present work would be affected by these conditions, sharing an almost synchronic development of the authoritarian governments of Miguel Primo de Rivera in Spain (1923-1930), of Carlos Ibáñez del Campo in Chile (1927-1931), and José Félix Uriburu in Argentina (1930-1932). Additionally, the rise of authoritarianism and the decay of parliamentary institutions characterizing this epoch condition and inscribe the political essays and avant-garde novels composed by the intellectuals and writers analyzed in this study: from Spain, María Zambrano (1904-1991), Ramón Gómez de la Serna (1888-1963), and Benjamín Jarnés (1888-1949); from Chile, Alberto Edwards Vives (1874-1932), Juan Emar (1893-1964), and Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948); and from Argentina, Ramón Doll (1896-1970), Norah Lange (1905-1972), and Roberto Arlt (1900-1942). It should be noted that while considering national circumstances, my argumentation is divided into sections organized not by country, but rather by subject matter: a methodological and theoretical introduction, three analytical chapters, and concluding remarks. Established critical assessments of the avant-gardes, as offered by experts like Renato Poggioli (1907-1963), have underscored that democratic forms of government would provide the initial conditions of possibility of the historical avant-gardes. Other scholars, however, have recognized the interdependency of early twentieth century artistic discourses, revolutionary ideas, and authoritarianism. Informed by the theorization of sovereignty and democracy of Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), and the concept of community of Roberto Esposito (1950-), my research examines, in political essays and vanguard novels, the opposition of individual vis-à-vis collective forms of rule. The texts of my corpus manifest a recurrent concern relating to the tension between self-rule and collective-rule, a dynamic which organizes and destabilizes avant-garde formations themselves. Consequently, I analyze the philosophical and political ramifications of these authors’ defense, negation, or destabilization of the individual-collective opposition in the context of the deterioration of parliamentarism. In my first chapter, I examine the following essays that represent a range of political positions from the interwar years: Horizonte del liberalismo (1930) by María Zambrano, Liberalismo en la literatura y la política (Con una segunda edición de: “Democracia mal menor”) (1934, n/d) by Ramón Doll, and La fronda aristocrática en Chile (1928) by Alberto Edwards Vives. Framed by the sociological assessments of José Ortega y Gasset in La rebelión de las masas (1930), this chapter considers these essayists’ observations regarding mass politics and the role of political and economic elites. I foreground the ethical problems relating to these authors’ conceptions of the human subject and their concomitant formulations of governance, deriving from various ideological orientations. The essayists’ comparable anxieties regarding the limits of democratic politics reveal the complexities of the period and serve as a springboard for the subsequent chapters that study the politics of avant-garde novels. In my second chapter, shifting from essayistic discourse to vanguard fiction, I analyze philosophical oppositions central to the configuration of sovereignty, and to the theory and practice of democracy. These tensions organize various components of the following novels: Un año (1935) by Juan Emar (pseudonym of Álvaro Yáñez Bianchi), 45 días y 30 marineros (1933) by Norah Lange, and El caballero del hongo gris (1928) by Ramón Gómez de la Serna. I demonstrate that, although these narratives do not contain explicit references to the emergence of authoritarianism and the erosion of parliamentarism of the period, these narratives are structured by problems that have implications for a thinking of issues relating to sovereignty and democracy. These novels similarly present how individuals interact with groups, such that it becomes imperative to consider the political consequences of these relations in order to critique, for example, fraternalistic and nationalistic notions of political filiation. My final chapter studies the narrative presentations of radical political projects that aim to restructure society in Los siete locos (1929) by Roberto Arlt, La próxima (1934) by Vicente Huidobro, and Lo rojo y lo azul (1932) by Benjamín Jarnés. In contrast to the narratives included in the second chapter, these avant-garde novels establish an explicit dialogue with the conditions of crisis of the interwar years. From insurrections and utopian settlements, to revolutionary military revolts, these narrations depict small vanguard groups that propose various plots that seek to radically reshape the social order. Even though poetry is often positioned as the paradigmatic form of vanguard literary expression, my research theorizes the understudied phenomenon of Hispanic avant-garde prose. In particular, I account for the variation among avant-garde novels of the period, by sustaining that there are gradations of vanguard narrative depending on different factors that range from the transparency or opacity of linguistic expression, to the organization of the narrative material. In this sense, some novels considered vanguardist, while approaching a certain radicality in terms of language and form, may incorporate elements of the realist-naturalist novelistic tradition. Likewise, I assert the importance of attending to the varied uses of meta-reflexive procedures in Hispanic vanguard prose. Given their implicit and explicit interaction with contemporary historical conditions and political and artistic discourses of the 1920s and 1930s, I contend that the essays and avant-garde novels analyzed offer a fertile ground to examine the nature of sovereignty, while also presenting, in some crucial instances, potential images of what a democracy worthy of this name could look like. / Spanish