Spanish Silver Age Literature And International Literary Market

The need for reflexive societies, conscious of their heritage and cultural identity as a collective social memory for the construction of a European citizenship is part of the working programs of the H2020 of the European Research Council, mostly in times of crisis such as the ones we are currently living. The challenge is, therefore, to explore how critical reflexion about the historical and cultural roots of Europe serves the development of our identity nowadays, from a regional, national and continental level. In this sense, the interferences, parallels, and interconnections in the construction of national and international identities are to be focused. For, as Pascale Casanova has stated, the political and intellectual maps of the world do not coincide: diversity of spaces and divergence in the historiographical construction add now the fights between territories/systems/field (political, linguistic, geographical, or poetic) to attract producers willing to enrich their cultural capital, mainly in a protean Europe.

It was precisely during the European interwar period, when –according to German Gullón- appropriation of literature by the market happened, which meant, on one hand, the professionalization of writing, and, on the other, its subjugation to the fields of economy and power. Consequently, the task of mediation, acquires a special relevance in its dimension across-borders. This is, the growing circulation of aesthetic and ideological repertoires builds a market of cultural goods, the nature, and potential of which has barely been explored, not only in the departure culture, but also in the arrival one, where these products gain new meaning in the frame of an alternative tradition and market.

In this sense, our web and projects aim to focus different kinds of international mediation as an active framework: firstly, to analyze the development of Spanish literary national field; secondly, to explore the coincidences and contradictions between the transnational diffusion of Spanish literary products during its Silver Age (1898-1940) and the process of historiographical canonization of writers and works.

Translation, Historiography And Digital Tools

According to Polysystem Theory or to the Manipulation School, translations have been widely studied as cultural products which acquire the same status as autochthonous literary ones in the frame of a reception culture, in terms of poetic, repertorial or reception analysis. This status provides a network of intertextuality, the conditions and results of which have been transferred the theory of translation and to the analysis of cultural markets, however not yet to the construction of literary historiography.

In a complementary way, from the perspective of literary and comparative theory, translation has become an particularly profiting object of study for those works building new interpretative and identitary concepts as a result of emerging new political and cultural orders: i.e. the concepts of European compared literature, World literature, Transliterature, Glocal literature or, even, Travelling cultures.

In the case of Spanish literary history, we have a wide range of studies on translations of foreign literary works into any of the four co-official languages of the Spanish State, as Lafarga´s recent bibliography (2014) has settled. However, we can objectively affirm that just a few works study the inverse process: the translation of Spanish literary history into other languages. Still, these revisions do have in common the examination about the function and position of Spanish literary production in those new political orders and cultural analysis theories, and, at the same time, the assertion on the difficulty of accessing up-to-date and primary data about the market of translation in Europe and the world.

Therefore, our projects focus both issues as primary items regarding the construction of our scientific agenda. Consequently, both an empirical and a theoretical framework support our work. This means, we firstly need to develop research and analytical digital tools to help us gather and manage a vast corpus of texts and metadata regarding the task of literary mediation in the mentioned period. Secondly, we aim for a constant update in the state of the art regarding the fields of historiographic processes, literature as an international phenomenon, and the use of digital methods in the literary research.

Feminist Archiving And Research Practices

As a result of the computational trend happened in Humanities research along the last five to ten years, the reconstruction of the literary system (either national or international) is now driven not from a synchronic, ubiquous and syncretic point of view, but from diachronical data that allow our re-evaluation of it. As far as women´s literary productions, as well as their roles in the international literary market in progress, we understand the need for the creation of databases and computational tools responsive to indexing parameters, metadata, searches and documents specifically treated from a gender perspective. Not only because of the necessary commitment of the academic world with women´s history –mainly when we talk about public economic resources- but because of the personal and institutional responsibility as researchers. In this sense, our projects aim at contraposing traditional androcentric visions of patrimony, memory or history, with objective data in order to provide new insights into Humanities research, but also to define new official parameters in archiving, especially when we are still in need of ontologies and protocols taking this issue into proper consideration.