The terrain of poetry and cultural memory in the first Spanish avant-garde (1914--1925)

The first Spanish avant-garde embraced the Europeanization that followed Spain's World War I neutrality by contesting the fin-de-siecle rooting of identity in an authentic national landscape. The poetry of the avant-garde movements Ultraismo and Creacionismo represent the cosmopolitan as opposed to the national through the fragmented lens of modern perception. As a result, the topography of their texts becomes broken apart, at once producing and re-producing the atomized existence of the subject. This dissertation draws on archival material as it examines the shift from locating identity in a restricted view of the national landscape to mapping cosmopolitan subjectivity in a flexible space.; The first chapter introduces the concept of plotting national identity in the Castilian landscape through several texts associated with the Generation of 1898: Antonio Machado's Campos de Castilla (1912); En torno al casticismo (1895; 1902) and Andanzas y visiones espanolas (1920) by Miguel de Unamuno; and Azorin's Espana (1909). Chapter two shows how Ultra poet Guillermo de Torre uproots the subject from the Castilian landscape by interfering with the rhetorical, perceptual, and mnemonic techniques that position the "I." In de Torre's Helices (1923), his "perceptual cosmopolitanism," the textual equivalent of internationalism, disturbs the poetic and sensory mechanisms that situate the subject within the bounds of a singular Spanish identity. Chapter three analyzes the way in which the intellectual exchange between de Torre, Blaise Cendrars, and the French painters Robert and Sonia Delaunay shapes the Spanish poet's representation of perception.; Since the diminished expressability of subjectivity and the steady erasure of cultural memory by precisely this inability to articulate identity become major drawbacks in de Torre, chapter four proposes poet Gerardo Diego as an exception to the first Spanish avant-garde's break-up of the subject and related exclusion of a collective past. In his Imagen (1922) and Manual de espumas (1924) Diego brings about the return of cultural memory by turning the dissociated perception typical of Spanish avant-garde texts into common ground. Diego's musical "avant-garde anamnesis," in contrast with de Torre's "perceptual cosmopolitanism," uses modernity's fragmented perception to articulate the subject and jog cultural memory through the sharing of experience.