From stage to page: toward a history of the literary lecture in Spain (1900-1926)

Abstract

The literary lecture is a subgenre of the traditional academic lecture that combines literary and metaliterary analysis, artistic self-fashioning, and public performance. This study considers the literary lectures of five writers as a sampling of a major transformation in this genre in Spain between 1900 and 1926. Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Ramón Gómez de la Serna, José Ortega y Gasset, Federico García Sanchiz, and Federico García Lorca have been chosen for their representation of a range of literary generations, cultural backgrounds, and socio-political beliefs, and for what their innovative practices of lecturing reveal about the mechanics of this reinvented genre. These five case studies demonstrate that the literary lecture is a complex literary genre that exists in a liminal state between the spoken and the written, reality and fiction, and the public persona and the internal self. Furthermore, these changes come at a time when audience composition was beginning to skew heavily toward the rising middle and upper-middle classes, and especially toward women. Ultimately, the transformation of the lecture from 1900-1926 in Spain is seen as the product of the appropriation of a traditionally academic, essay-like genre for both artistic and educational purposes and for satisfying the desires of middle-class consumer culture. Finally, this dissertation explores for the first time the implications of editorial treatments of the lecture: the classificatory anxieties of editors in the passage of the lecture from stage to page, exemplified in the treatment of the lecture as written text in the Obras completas of Federico García Lorca