Poéticas Indignadas

This dissertation intends to study the ways whereby contemporary Iberian poetry moves (in the double sense of emotionally touching and politically mobilizing), and therefore can potentially produce, different models of sociality within the context of the 2008 financial crisis in Portugal and Spain. For that sake, it draws from the relatively recent affective turn in Cultural Studies, resulting in an approach characterized by an understanding of emotions as practices. Contrary to traditional psychoanalytic perspectives, where emotions are considered inner states and/or properties of the subject, Affect theory studies emotions as a liminal, relational production: the result from the interaction of bodies with their environment, as well as between themselves. This approach has important implications for literary criticism, as it involves addressing literary texts from their very material dimension. Therefore, and apart from paying attention to its meaning, the key question would be what these texts do: what are their effects and how they impress, corporeal and intellectually, on their readers. Issues of agency and subject-object distinction need to be reconsidered once we acknowledge that the literary text acts upon the reader and transforms him/her. The project is structured in four chapters. The first one focuses in poetic texts which, be it through traditional formats or newer devices, work, following Germán Labrador's terminology, as spaces of action. These texts, poems from Antonio Orihuela, Filipa Leal, Pablo García Casado or Golgona Anghel, would be affective mediators, able to provide the reader with politically mobilizing narratives and myths. It is possible to identify voices, narratives or scenes that describe or reflect situations with which the reader empathizes, and that are able to move her to the point of changing a state of fear, disappointment or apathy by another of mobilizing indignation. The second chapter is dedicated to those poetics centered in a re-elaboration of language for subversive purposes. Following the premise that a new world cannot be thought using the old language of oppression, these poetics would strive to overcome the currently mainstream prosaic realism. In this part I will analyze works from María Salgado, Enrique Falcón and Antonio Méndez Rubio together with the Portuguese hypermedia poet Rui Torres; these authors distance themselves from figurative poetics and embrace openness and indetermination, experimenting with various avant-garde means and elements. In a third chapter, I pay attention to poets and MCs who shift between traditional formats and other material or virtual spatialities for their works, ranging from weblog literature to street walls or hip-hop performances, which entail new restrictions and opportunities. Among others, I study the work of Alberto Basterrechea, also known as neorrabioso (a mock self-definition that means "new enraged"). neorrabioso employs an aphoristic, inflammatory writing with a colloquial and ludic characteristic mark: his brevity is, among other factors, a consequence of the fact that he clandestinely paints his poems in the streets of Madrid. This will of regaining the public sphere for and by poetry is framed in the activities of the 15-M movement, with which neorrabioso shares a project of renewing language in order to counteract institutional newspeak. The last chapter studies, in an affective key, ecologist discourses in committed poetry. It will take Jorge Riechmann as its central figure, but will also consider other authors such as Rui Lage or Fernando Aguiar. Thanks to their relational quality, emotions and affects like shame or empathy (fundamental for the construction of a sense of community) have worked as dams for human ambitions, particularly in a competitive and individualistic culture such as the Western. Thus, in this chapter I analyze poems susceptible of rousing affects that function as limits: affects that, for instance, contribute to raise awareness that economic growth as an ends to itself is a self-destructive fiction, incompatible with nature's finiteness, of which human beings are an inseparable part.