VERBOEXORBITANCIAS. EL PASO DE LA LITERATURA A LAS ARTES VERBALES EN ESPAÑA, 1909-1936

Abstract

This dissertation aims to offer a new constellation of the Spanish cultural history of 1909-1936. Leaving the book and entering the interface, substituting reading with reception, making the literary work a possibility within the method, understanding authorship as the hegemonic, but not the sole, public operation, expanding writing to production, and thinking of language as a cultural rendering of the code, Verboexorbitancias: The Transition from Literature to the Verbal Arts in Spain, 1909-1936 puts together an archive of “verbal arts.” The first part of this dissertation, “Multiple Authorship and Situational Art: From Non-Literary Writing to Performance,” is dedicated to analyzing what the Pombo gathering was from a social, performative, and durational perspective, that is, beyond the authorial and literary consistency that has assigned the project to Gómez de la Serna’s realm. In my research, I try to offset the authorial perspective with a focus that places the value of Pombo on the participative actions that took place at the gathering. By looking at other “pombianos,” I amplify the authorship of Pombo to the group, and thus understand the two volumes of POMBO as a trace and document of what occurred at an interactional level. Part II of this dissertation, “Vocal Imagination and Sound Reproduction: From Audible Action to Illiterate Counterphilology,” seeks to unearth the two key gestures of the new sound culture of the 1920s and 1930s: the migration of the efforts of the literatos towards radio experimenting and speculation, as portrayed in the magazine Ondas and in some early sound-art endeavors, and the struggle for vocality and aurality that was held between poets and philologists, developed in depth in the linguistic theory of José Bergamín. The last part of this dissertation, “Literary and Linguistic Politics of Spiritualism: From the Death of the Author to Neo-Literate Techno-Linguistics,” examines the spiritualists’ practices that expanded and distorted the literary dynamics of the book-language axis. The forces of vocality, morphological voluntarism, and alphabetic coding, deployed by mediums like Agustina González López, serve here to uncover the popular knowledge that shaped the Spanish spiritualist movement: the possibility to affect the processes of meaning-making was not unique to literature.