Melancholy Machines: On Vitalism and Mechanism in the Poetics of the Historic Vanguards in Latin America

This thesis considers the role of technologies in the poetry of Latin America’s avant-gardes of the 1920s, developing a critique of the machine that is situated in postcolonial intellectual and socioeconomic history. As novel communication technologies impressed a feeling of global connectedness, Latin American integration of loosely Futurist aesthetic styles, inspired by machines, gave voice to the sentiment. Scholarly literature often interprets this machine poetics in accordance with certain critical commonplaces: technological references in poems tend to be abstract—signposting global connectedness and cosmopolitanism—rather than engaging actual machines embedded in social reality; and planes, trains and automobiles—fixating upon velocity—tend to translate a developmentalist politics into poetic language, bringing Latin America in step with European and US visions of modernity. ‘Melancholy Machines’ complicates these ideas by retracing vanguard poetry’s painstaking encounter with material conditions in Latin America, passing from a period of relative optimism about the project of modernity into one of political crises and commitments towards the end of the 1920s. Focusing on Brazilian, Mexican and Peruvian movements, this diachronic approach observes the estrangement of technological figures from their initial values and functions, now mediating ontological impasses and colonial legacies rather than progress and universalism. The thesis is divided to delineate this transformation, foreshadowed by a chapter on the Peruvian poet Magda Portal’s call for Latin American vanguards to step from the building’s lintel down to the factory floor, from disinterested mechanical mimesis to the technical life of workers. Accordingly, the first half of the thesis reconstructs the crisis of cosmopolitan technologies against the backcloth of socioeconomic instability in Latin America; the second half, in turn, brings into focus poets’ melancholy encounters with actual machines, and how they appropriate elements to material process—noise, spacetime compression, repetition—to express personal feelings of displacement, delay and community in uprootedness. In this perverse intimacy with machines, the thesis identifies hybridization of philosophies of vitalism and mechanism, paving the way for both new modes of resistance, by humanizing and thus decentring the technological, and new forms of domination, by reorganizing life in subtly mechanistic ways.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Temple, Leo

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Kantaris, Geoffrey
• Conde, Maite

• Aesthetics of industrialisation
• Avant-garde poetics
• Latin American avant-gardes
• Latin American Marxism
• Literary nationalism
• Mário de Andrade
• Melancholy and Estrangement
• Technological modernity
• Vitalism

Licence

• https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/701fef5d-b843-4cc2-8511-a917f48d839a/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.120637

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/388164