Abstract

Science and Literary Culture during Spain's Edad de Plata (1923 - 1936)

by

Anna Eva Hiller

Doctor of Philosophy in Hispanic Languages and Literatures

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Milton M. Azevedo, Co-Chair

Professor Dru Dougherty, Co-Chair

"Science and Literary Culture during Spain's Edad de Plata (1923 - 1936)" is a five-chapter study of the dissemination, expression and manipulation of scientific ideas within Avant-garde literature. In it I advance the hypothesis that science and its associated imagery served as a metaphor for the process of modernity and modernization in Spain. I begin the study with a history of the unique trajectory of Spanish science as it developed between the Enlightenment and the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936. Thus established the historical grounding, I take up two of the main organs of cultural production in the 1920s and 1930s, José Ortega y Gasset's Revista de Occidente and Ernesto Giménez Caballero's La Gaceta Literaria, examining the presence and presentation of overt scientific content therein. Based on my findings within the periodicals, I then construct a discursive framework that establishes the way in which scientific discoveries and ideas of progress were both embraced and critiqued by the Spanish avant-garde, I conclude the dissertation with two chapters dedicated to the examination of a specific literary corpus, comprised of a variety of genres and authors, whose construction of science as a cultural phenomenon is symptomatic of the wider discussion(s) of modernity and its implications for Spain both internally and internationally. In the final analysis, I approach works by Pedro Salinas (Víspera del gozo), Federico García Lorca (Así que pasen cinco años and Poeta en Nueva York), Jorge Guillén (Cántico), Rafael Alberti (Cal y canto and Sobre los ángeles), Ramón Gómez de la Serna ("El dueño del átomo), and Valentín Andrés Álvarez ("Telarañas en el cielo" and ¡Tararí...!) using a scientific lens based on the princples of Einsteinian physics, quantum theory, and the controversy over the rise in importance of technology during the early 20th century. My principal conclusion is that science was a vital part of cultural discourse during these years, and that by examining the ways in which scientific ideas were disseminated and transformed by literary production, we can understand more clearly the aesthetic, social and--as a consequence of these--the ideological complexion of the era in question.