Literaturas europeas de vanguardia, by Guillermo de Torre: positioning manoeuvres in the aesthetic adventure of the 1920s

Abstract

In the following pages, I will carry out a sociological reading of Literaturas europeas de vanguardia, a work published by Guillermo de Torre in 1925, in order to examine his positions in the new aesthetic adventure that opened up in the Spanish literary field of the 1920s. This work reveals Torre's ability to build his own identity and legitimize himself in this new aesthetic age through various positioning manoeuvres. First, with a forceful response to the problem of the responsibility of the writer, which was a hot topic at the time and idiosyncratic of the aesthetic modernity in Spain, in which the critic claimed a new literary statute (creative and anti-mimetic), placing himself as a commissioner of avant-garde art. The remaining manoeuvers are addressed in the second part of the article, and with them Guillermo de Torre proclaimed himself the unrivalled founder of Ultraism, a pioneer of the new critical system, as well as a driver of the literature of construction that followed the destructive phase of the avant-garde, rivalling Ortega y Gasset himself.