The Spanish Generation of '27 in the pages of Litoral (Málaga, 1926-1929)

Synapses and Symbolic Cartographies

Abstract

Based on the premise that the so-called Spanish Generation of '27 needs to be considered within the framework of the avant-garde and the articulation it fostered between the lyrical genre and multiple artistic expressions (Macciuci, 2019), this article focuses on the magazines created by the poets and artists who emerged on the Spanish cultural scene in the 1920s, with particular attention to the emblematic magazine Litoral, founded in Málaga in 1926. The publication, spearheaded by poets Emilio Prados and Manuel Altolaguirre, is analyzed by investigating its syntax (Sarlo, 1992). This perspective requires considering not only the published texts, but also how they are presented to the reader and the relationship established between them, as well as the potential aesthetic and political meanings of this arrangement. The syntax of Litoral reveals how the tension and expansion of the notion of limit was central to the artists of '27, as a reading of the present and a project for the future, extending from aesthetic debate to a sophisticated form of political intervention. Situated between the written word and the life of societies (Weinberg, 2021), Litoral bears witness to a conception of art and of the world sustained by a network of literate sociability without which it is not possible to critically read the cultural and political history of Spain from the 20th century to the present day.