Authorial Death and Resurrection: Liminality, Genre and Poetic Selfhood in Elisabeth Mulder’s Sinfonía en rojo (1929)

Abstract

This article analyses the critically neglected poetry of the Spanish author Elisabeth Mulder, who despite writing at a time of profound experimentation in the field of poetry draws on traditional rather than avant-garde renovation. This article considers the strategies of signification in two of her poems from her 1929 collection Sinfonia en rojo, engaging with theoretical ideas from Deleuze and Guattari, Barthes and Burke in an attempt to understand the processes at work, and the extent to which the poetic self is moulded and shaped by discursive structures which condition the poetic voice. It is argued that the relationship between the poetic self and the structural forces of language should not be understood in terms of dualism, but that of multiplicity and possibility.