Literary Vanguards, Existential Narrative, and Generation of ’27
Literary Vanguards
The Vanguards arose in the 20th century, at the end of World War I. They were fractious against the established culture and bourgeois morality, and they despised the crowd. They stood out for their attitude towards their products. Through art, they created their own rules and their own worlds. They created a frivolous art, oblivious to the social. R. Gomez de la Serna, creator of the greguerias, is emphasized.
Different Movements
Futurism
T. Marinetti advocated overcoming traditional culture, embracing technological advances, adventure, and sport. The infinitive was used as a verbal form, syntax was destroyed, and all his works showed dehumanization.
Cubism
Valuation was based on three-dimensional space and the geometric decomposition of objects. The visual aspect was exploited in poetry, creating calligrams.
Dadaism
Tristan Tzara believed the artist should express themselves with absolute freedom to obtain the release of the creative self. It eliminated the logical process of thought, embraced spontaneity, chance, and rupture of logic.
Surrealism
Andre Breton, in the Surrealist Manifesto, advocated the liberation of man and his creative activity through dreams and the unconscious. It involved the rupture of the logical link and mixing concepts.
The New Novel
Marcel Proust, in In Search of Lost Time (7 novels), recreates his life and bourgeois past world. He describes in detail places, people, analyzing their emotions and feelings in the middle of the book, with digressions. He reconstructs a world of aristocratic and high bourgeoisie, through flashbacks, breaking the chronological order and being introspective.
Thomas Mann, creator of the intellectual novel, sought to know the value and meaning of life. The Magic Mountain is a novel-essay with collective characters.
Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis presents a bleak and distressed vision of the world, and the characters live in extreme situations.
James Joyce’s Ulysses proposes the narrative of events in two ways: interior monologue (not automatic writing, which is psychological), aims to give a plausible effect.
Faithful transcriptions of dialogues appear, explaining reality from different viewpoints, allowing the disappearance of the author and giving an appearance of objectivity.
Existential Narrative
The theme is the anguish of a man who lives in an absurd world, having lost all transcendent sense and unable to find justification for living. Sartre’s Nausea and Camus’ The Stranger and The Plague are stressed.
Generation of ’27
A literary generation is a group of writers who were born at about the same time and moved by an event of their time, facing the same problems and reacting similarly.
Characteristics of the Generation of ’27
It was based on Gongora’s poetic language in classics and popular forms of balladry, daring to try to find the beauty of the image, eliminating from the poem what does not achieve beauty of pure poetry. The main themes are love, death, fate, and are loaded with popular roots issues. In a matter of style, they are concerned with linguistic expression and used a language full of lyricism. The verse form is free, using traditional and classic stanzas.
Authors
- Gerardo Diego: traditional themes like love, religion, music… in the form of ballads and sonnets. The Romance of the Bride, Photography, Manual Foam.
- Pedro Salinas: Focus on love. The Voice Due to You, the poet seeks the beloved beyond the real world, representative of pure poetry.
- Rafael Alberti: Sailor on Land and On the Angels.
- Federico Garcia Lorca: Works in a tragic tone with the presence of death as a hunch, and includes elements of Andalusian folklore. Gypsy Romances is a lyrical work. Popular Theater includes amorous passions in Mariana Pineda and Blood Wedding.
- Vicente Aleixandre: His work revolves around man, pessimistic and anxious, with topics such as love, life, passion, and death. Destruction or Love and Shadow of Paradise.
- Miguel Hernandez: The poetry is passionate, full of zeal and force that infects the reader. The Ray Does Not Stop, Songbook and Ballads of Absence.