All Changed Around Me: The Life of an Exile, Literary History, Poetic Memory, and the Uncanniness of Reading

Authors

  • Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza Harvard University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.30827/tnj.v4i1.16248

Keywords:

Spanish Civil War, Spanish Exile, historical memory, literary history, poetic memory, Hispanism, Rafael Alberti, Antonio Alcalá Galiano, Vicente Llorens, Antonio Machado, Tomás Segovia.

Abstract

Shortly after passing away as an exile in 1939, near the end of the Spanish civil war, Antonio Machado became an emblematic figure for Republican and Francoist intellectuals. In 1979, during a reading held in Mexico to commemorate his death, Tomás Segovia criticized the institutionalization of Machado and the reduction of his poetry to a commonplace of Hispanism. Tracing some landmarks of Spanish literary historiography from this perspective reveals a tension between narratives of discontinuity and narratives of continuity in terms of national (re)construction. Approaching this tension on the basis of the concept of poetic memory suggested by Segovia in the framework of exilic cultures enables us to elucidate textual discrepancies between poetic memory and literary history.

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Author Biography

Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza, Harvard University

Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza is associate professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. He is a scholar of modern Spanish Peninsular literature and culture with broad interests in Spanish, Latin-American and U.S. poetry. His research focuses on 19th- to 21st-Century Spanish literature, literary history, literary translation, and cultural studies, with special emphasis on the tensions between poetics and politics since the emergence of modernity in the late nineteenth century. Thus far, his work has concentrated mainly on the value and function of poetry as cultural memory with regard to discourses of political commitment and nation-building, situating poetry in Spanish in comparative frames of legibility marked by a translational, transnational, and cross-temporal understanding of textuality. This comparative perspective has led to a particular focus on poetry as a prevalent cultural discourse in times of socio-cultural upheaval and disruption like the 1930s and 1940s. His first scholarly book was El salto a lo desconocido: yo lírico y negatividad dialéctica en la poesía de la modernidad (2013). His second book, El canto de la desaparición: Memoria, historia y testimonio en la poesía de Antonio Gamoneda (2015), investigated recent debates about collective memory in Spanish and European contexts through the lens of the Spanish poet Antonio Gamoneda. His latest book This Ghostly Poetry: History and Memory of Exiled Spanish Republican Poets (2020) explores the fraught relationship between poetry and national literary history in the context of the Spanish Civil War. His new book project, (In)translation: Poetry and Politics of Identity in 21st-Century Spain, asks how poetry translation can resist exclusionary identity-building discourses in 21st-century Spain.

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Published

2021-01-22

How to Cite

Aguirre-Oteiza, D. (2021). All Changed Around Me: The Life of an Exile, Literary History, Poetic Memory, and the Uncanniness of Reading. Theory Now. Journal of Literature, Critique, and Thought, 4(1), 67–93. https://doi.org/10.30827/tnj.v4i1.16248

Issue

Section

Monográfico: La teoría hoy I. Hacia una cartografía del pensamiento literario