La filologia en el purgatorio: Los estudios literarios en torno a 1950 (review)

Abstract

MAINER, JOSE - CARLOS. La filologia en el purgatorio. estudios literarios en torno a Barcelona: Critica, 2003. 228 pages.It is not uncommon for literary scholars to collect previously published essays in book form. The justifications for doing so are diverse: the relative inaccessibility of many of the pieces; a common theoretical or historical framework for the whole; a renewed interest in the topic(s) of the essays. In Jose-Carlos Mainer's La filologia en el purgatorio, the convergence of the essays is revealed in the book's subtitle: Los estudios literarios en torno a 1950. The subtitle refers not to the generation of poets and novelists who gained prominence in Spain following a decade of post-civil war malaise (e.g., Rafael Sanchez Ferlosio, Carmen Martin Gaite, Jesus Fernandez Santos, Juan Goytisolo), but rather to a group of academics whose work, in Mainer's view, gives solidity to literary and cultural criticism in Spain during the first two decades following the Civil War. The critics studied by Mainer (though he notes that there are others with equal stature) include Guillermo DiazPlaja, Francisco Yndurain, Jose Luis Cano, Jose Manuel Blecua, Alonso Zamora Vicente, Emilio Alarcos, and Jose Maria Valverde; chapters are also included on the literary periodical Clavileno and on the correspondence between Blecua and Ramon Sender. Linked by circumstance and intellectual commitment rather than by a purposeful attempt to forge a critical school, these scholars emerge in Mainer's scheme as both tradition-bound and innovative in postwar Spain as they develop a body of critical work that influenced Hispanic Studies in Europe and the United States.The substance of Mainer's essays derives from his broad knowledge of the time period, the critical body of materials he explores, and the personal lives of the authors studied. It is further sustained by Mainer's passion for what these scholars achieved in a postwar atmosphere fraught with intellectual barriers and political tensions. He asserts that two dominant literary languages shape critical thinking during the 19505 (el del exilio y el del interior [12]), and perceives unity in the writing of this period in the development of university scholarship, the emergence of a cultural market place, and the closely managed connections between the State and cultural production. To be sure, Mainer's scrutiny of these areas of academic criticism is useful. Each chapter generally follows a similar format, with varying degrees of emphasis placed on the life of the particular scholar at hand, the chronological development of his critical thinking, and his salient contributions to Hispanic Studies.For example, Mainer points to Jose Luis Cano's work in Insula (both as critic and as member of the editorial staff of the magazine) in the late 19405 and 19505 as a crucial component of literary renascence under Franco; he glosses the anthological work of Jose Manuel Blecua (for whom Mainer expresses special affection as his professor and intellectual mentor) and brings to the fore Blecua's important work on Spanish poetry. …