The Department of Comparative Literature
Open Forum Series
Presents
Vanessa Gubbins, PhD candidate Comparative Literature
“Negative Visions of Political Community at the turn of the 20th Century: César Vallejo and Rainer Maria Rilke on the Collection of Poetic Things.”
In this chapter, I offer a comparative study of poetic language in Vallejo’s Trilce (1922) and Rilke’s Neue Gedichte and Neue Gedichte, Anderer Teil (1907-1908), and argue for the parallel political stakes of their poetic projects. Notwithstanding the poets’ own divergent political self-understandings, I contend that their works respond to the contradictions inherent to the modern project of linguistic nationalisms from their distinctive socio-historical contexts: post-emancipation Peru and post-Bismarck Austro-Hungary. Their works, however, do not imagine a different model for the nation—or political community—, but raise the problematic of imagining in the first place. I argue that they carry out the undoing of the image of the nation by means of the thingification of language, a process consisting in language’s self-alienation in the thing, as what is crucially neither object nor medium. In Vallejo, this process will unfold as a decomposition of language; in Rilke, as its perfection. In freeing up language from both the image and the nation, the poets’ works posit a redemption of the collective outside of the representational schema—one consisting in a fundamentally anti-collective standpoint from within a collection of things. I hold that the texts’ joint final challenge lies in demanding that we think through this paradox, wherein the possibility of political community lies.
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Vanessa Gubbins is a fifth year PhD student at Yale’s Comparative Literature Department. She studies the intersections of literature, philosophy and politics in primarily 19th and 20th century German and Spanish literary and theoretical texts. Her general research interests include Critical Theory, Psychoanalysis, Postcolonial Theory and Gender Studies. Aside from German and Spanish, her languages include French and Ancient Greek, and she hopes to soon learn Quechua and Aymara. She is currently working on her dissertation, provisionally entitled: “On the Uses and Abuses of Translation: Modern National Identity Crisis in German-Speaking Europe and Andean Latin America.”