Is There Space for Literature? Ideology, Militancy and Aesthetics in the Literary Criticism of the 1950s in Spain

Abstract

In what follows three representative literary works from the Spanish’s mid century literary criticism will be in dialogue: Josep María Castellet’s La hora del lector (1957), Juan Goytisolo’s Problemas de la novela (1959), and the least famous and less assimilated out of the three, Guillermo de Torre’s Problemática de la literatura (1951, 1958, 1966). I will aim at showing that, in the first two cases, we are facing theories on politics given their strong militant character, inherited from the political positioning of their authors, whereas Torre’s contribution is closer to the concept of literary theory which, precisely because of the absence of a partisan intervention in it, was relegated to the edges of the Spanish literary system, which was extremely instrumentalised at that time. The good reception of La hora del lector and Problemas de la novela, which directed the contemporary canon, together with their legitimation in the History of Spanish literature as emblematic critical theories, hindered the assimilation of Problemática de la literatura, despite the fact that its approach to the literary phenomenon is more strictly aesthetic in nature, and, as a consequence of this, it is also much more effective in order to understand the production of the 20th century.