Aesthetic theory in 20th-century Spain: 'Style' in Jose Ortega y Gasset, Maria Zambrano and Eugenio d'Ors

This critical reading of the concept of style in 20th-century Spanish aesthetic thought ranges from Eugenio d'Ors' 1908 Glosari Catala via Jose Ortega y Gasset's 1913 Meditaciones del Quiiote to Maria Zambrano's 1981 La Espana de Galdos. In redrawing the theoretical boundaries of the notion of style, these writers develop a non-essentialist understanding of the term. Style articulates a "bindingness" of culture (Adorno), either by enabling critical cultural reflection (prominent in Ortega and Zambrano) or by ordering what is experienced as a chaotic culture (d'Ors). My study underscores how the selected texts question the relations between the world of the arts and the world of culture, while simultaneously re-examining the function of the artist and the beholder in a fragmented, "post-auratic," modern condition.; In addition to framing these authors in a particular Spanish post-Generation of 1898 and vanguard context, my analysis takes into consideration main trends in European phenomenology (Husserl and Merleau Ponty), existentialism and hermeneutics (Gadamer, Heidegger, Iser). By introducing these 20th -century modes of philosophy as points of comparison, I underscore how the three Spanish writers re-read the prototypically "modern" aesthetic paradigms set forward by Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche. A site of critical interest in the three chapters concerns the reflections on the genre of the novel. The dynamic understanding of style as an interface between form and substance testifies in these texts to a crisis of Modernity and leads to a theoretical reevaluation of the novel. These writers critique the novelistic narrative as the expressive site for modern "melancholia" and for Bildung of subjectivity, and thereby articulate the idea of a non-essentialist but nevertheless culturally productive rapprochement between the artist and reader. In thinking about the novel, they either re-confirm their theory on style, or underscore the inner paradoxes related to style (Zambrano, d'Ors).; The relevance of this study is two-fold. It analyzes Spanish aesthetic theory in the twentieth century beyond a facile reading of Ortega y Gasset's La Deshumanizacion del Arte. In addition, it presents a European perspective on the poetic generations of early 20th -century Spain and so re-appraises the "other" literary production in prose.