This dissertation analyzes the prose works of the “Nova Novorum,” a fiction series created and published by José Ortega y Gasset between 1926 and 1929. This collection included six works by four authors, five of which will be discussed in this dissertation. Pedro Salinas’ Víspera del gozo (1926) inaugurated the series. Benjamín Jarnés published two works: El profesor inútil (1926) and Paula y Paulita (1929). Antonio Espina is also responsible for two works: Pájaro pinto (1927) and Luna de copas (1929). The dissertation is divided into five sections. The first chapter introduces the topic of avant-garde prose during the 1920s in Spain, and the concept of ekphrasis as a methodological approach. Prose authors of the avant-garde were prolific during the first third of the twentieth century in Spain. They produced a new aesthetic sensibility with their experimental narrations. All of the works analyzed are examined through the lens of ekphrasis, which is the verbal representation of visual representation. Chapter Two discusses three relational aspects of ekphrasis: word and image, time and space, and the hermeneutics of ekphrasis. The first section examines the difference between narration and description. The second explores the relationship between time and space and the implications of the fact that a visual object is normally associated with space, while a verbal representation is associated with time. This section examines how authors incorporate spatial techniques into their narrations in ways that are commonly employed by painters. The third section of Chapter Two examines iconology and the hermeneutics of ekphrasis and how the authors use the trope of mimesis not to imitate nature but rather to distort reality. Chapters Three, Four and Five closely examine the images described by each author. This study draws on understanding of ekphrasis from literary studies and art history as well as theories of the literary avant-garde that stems both from Europe and from Spain in particular. Ortega y Gasset’s ideas about the novel and the avant-garde informed the basic assumptions of the authors of the “Nova Novorum,” who often used ekphrasis as a means of avoiding narrative progress. In many cases of ekphrasis found in the “Nova Novorum” collection, the representations of art are deployed in the same way in which the authors utilize metaphor, as a means of digressing from the narrative. These ekphrastic moments allow each author to withdraw from or slow down the narration, providing the author with the opportunity to focus on the use of language itself.

En esta tesis se interpreta a través del prisma conceptual del nihilismo el desarrollo de la literatura española de entreguerras, y el papel central de los escritores en el reconocimiento de desorientación del hombre moderno. Primero se analiza teóricamente el concepto de nihilismo; luego se proporciona una descripción del contexto ideológico-estético de entreguerras, la coyuntura de la literatura de vanguardia y la cuestión de la jovialidad del Arte Nuevo ante una profunda crisis de valores. Posteriormente se atiende diacrónicamente a las interrelaciones del Arte Nuevo con el nihilismo, se analiza el cambio de sensibilidad de la actitud vanguardista en revolucionaria y se presenta el horizonte de las distintas alternativas ideológicas que afectan al escritor: liberalismo, pensamiento religioso y propuestas ideológicas "totales" como son el fascismo y el bolchevismo. Finalmente se estudia la ideología estética del novelista Benjamín Jarnés, cuya evolución ejemplifica la tarea de la práctica artística como modo de resistencia frente al nihilismo. / This research interprets through the concept of nihilism the evolution of the Spanish interwar literature (1918-1936) and the central role of writers in recognizing the essential disorientation of modern man.First there is the analysis of the concept of nihilism. Then it is provided a description of the ideological and aesthetical context of interwar years, and it is discussed the position of avant-garde literature and the question of the joyfulness of the new art before a deep crisis of values. After that, I try to explain the interactions between new literature and nihilism and I analyze the change of sensibility from avant-gardism to revolution, and how writers react to several ideological alternatives: liberalism, religious thought and especially total proposals such as Fascism and Bolchevism. Finally I focus on the aesthetic ideology of the novelist Benjamín Jarnés, whose evolution shows how the artistic praxis posits itself as a mode of resistance to nihilism.

El trabajo de investigación presente ha pretendido establecer conexiones temáticas y formales, pero también divergencias argumentales y estructurales entre el planteamiento de la materia caballeresca medieval y áurea en la Literatura española, y su recuperación renovada a lo largo del pasado siglo XX. La inmanencia de motivos y tópicos permitirá adaptarla formalmente a los géneros históricos, desplegando un recorrido desde el primitivo roman hasta la actual novela, sin olvidar la sólida presencia del romance caballeresco o el influjo que las contemporáneas novela lírica, histórica o bildungsroman han ejercido hasta conferirles plena singularidad. Éste es el objetivo perseguido en el análisis de obras significativas de Juan Valera (Morsamor, 1899), Benjamín Jarnés (Viviana y Merlín, 1930), Álvaro Cunqueiro (Merlín y familia, 1955), Manuel Mujica Láinez (El unicornio, 1965), Paloma Díaz-Mas (La búsqueda del Santo Grial, 1983), Soledad Puértolas (La rosa de plata, 1999) y Ana María Matute (Olvidado Rey Gudú, 1996) / he main proposal of this research has been connecting the ancient chivalry plots with a group of modern Spanish novels, which present interesting and similar points of view, however important differences. It is pretended searching how the materials have been treated in similar ways, as well as how it has been looked for the narrative strategies that have allowed creating singular novels. Historical and lyrical novels, bildungsroman, even tales, will have influenced in these last ones along the past twentieth century.

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