Tres acercamientos al ensayo espanol contemporaneo: El arte de vivir entre la filosofia y la poesia en Antonio Machado, Jose Ortega y Gasset y Maria Zambrano (Spanish text)

Through the study of three contemporary Spanish essayists, Antonio Machado, José Ortega y Gasset and María Zambrano, I study the problematic relationship between philosophy and poetry. The three philosophers I investigate attempt to think, from three very different traditions, the place of art in the modern world. Antonio Machado believes that in order to resolve the crisis of the work of art in the modern world one must have a critical relationship to tradition. That critical relationship must pass through the invention of apocryphal traditions, of possible traditions, and through the recovery of possibility in the past. Machado also attempts to think about the challenges that the masses, the multitude and massification pose to the work of art. María Zambrano attempts to think about the work of art by employing the concept of the sacred. The sacred in Zambrano functions as a dead language that has to be saved in order to recover the concept of the artistic in modernity. José Ortega y Gasset turns the philosopher into an exemplary figure who becomes the model for the way to live in the social sphere. The work of José Ortega y Gasset reads like an art of living. Ortega y Gasset believes that through some reflection about the work of art one can eliminate the boundaries between art and society, art and thought, art and life. The methodology that I employ with all three philosophers in my thesis is a close reading of their work with a philosophical and aesthetic approach.