Testimonial ethos and against-canon (Gabriel Celaya’s case)

  • Laura Scarano Universidad de Mar del Plata / Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas

Keywords:

Gabriel Celaya, ethos, auopoetics, canon, testimony

Abstract

The work of Gabriel Celaya (San Sebastián, 1911-1991) consolidates a poetic trend, known as “social poetry”, against the four decades of dictatorship of General Franco after the Spanish civil war, allowing us to reconstruct a space of distinctive positions from his autopoetics in prose and metapoems. For Celaya, the poem must be dialogical and perlocutionary: it does things and speaks. To speak means to talk with others, to exchange ideas and values, to share. To do things with words means to take active action, to be part of the social space, to interfere against power restrictions, to replicate the impositions of the regime, even from such a small place that means nothing in real terms. This possibilism is better than remaining in silence or in a paralyzed muteness. Poetry and essay both help to rationalize the functions of art, the figurations of the poet and the nature of the poetic act, all vectors that converge in the modulation of a testimonial ethos for the lyrical genre, a discursive type basically hybrid and rarely applied to poetry. Our study will explore textual and contextual indexes that support Celaya’s authorial project and that enact a contract to approach texts in a specific way, thereby formulating a contra-canon of resistance to power, during the period that some critics maliciously called "the waste land" of the Spanish post-civil war.

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Author Biography

Laura Scarano, Universidad de Mar del Plata / Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas

Doctora en Letras (UBA, Argentina) y Master of Arts (USA), Profesora Titular en la Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata e Investigadora Principal del CONICET. Es Directora del grupo Semiótica del Discurso del Área de Literatura Española del Celehis. Fue  Directora del Departamento de Letras y del Doctorado en Letras, Vice-coordinadora de la Maestría en Letras Hispánicas, Secretaria de Investigación y Posgrado  y fue elegida Presidenta de la Asociación Argentina de Hispanistas.  Es autora de  más de quince libros, y más de cien trabajos, entre capítulos, actas de congresos y conferencias en Europa, Estados Unidos y Latinoamérica. Se destacan sus aportes en cuestiones de poética, semiótica social y crítica y teoría literaria.

How to Cite

Scarano, L. (2016). Testimonial ethos and against-canon (Gabriel Celaya’s case). Anclajes , 20(1), 35–61. Retrieved from https://cerac.unlpam.edu.ar/ojs/index.php/anclajes/article/view/1149