Galdós against the modernist discourse of modernity. For a complex reading of realism

Abstract

In the first part of this article is examined the esthetics hostility climate toward Galdós that emerges in the sixties, consequence of the control of the literary norm by the triple alliance that configure the neo-avant-garde and ex-realists novelists (J.Goytisolo), the novísimos, and J. Benet, that represents the Modernism intenacional tradition. But the consequent exclusion of Realism and of Galdós of the canon could not have produced by strictly internal causes to the Spanish literary practise. Over the dominant currents in this, it operates the scientific model of the General Linguistics, and the formalista-estructuralista-semiótico paradigm that imposed in the humanistic disciplines of this time. In a second moment is studied how after World War Two a critical speech is formed on the Modernity that, with its origin in the German Romanticism and in the sociology ofMax Weber, is elaborated in a decisive way by the critical theory of Francfort (Adorno and Horkheimer) and remade by Postestructuralism and by the first Postmodernism. This speech, to that we denominated the Modernist Speech on Modernity, and that imposes an esthetic-ideological norm (symbolist-modernist) and an artistic-literary canon, is analyzed through its fundamental thesis. It allows to elaborate a critic of that speech and to relate it to the shift of paradigm that begins in the years 80 of the 20th century (Habermas, Berman, Touraine, Barman, Foucault, re-reading of Bajtin, Harvey…). From that critic it is possible to put in question the false one and interested homologation between Cultural Modernity and Literary Modernism and to deconstruct the image built by the Modernist Speech on Modernity on the work of Galdós, as well as to devise the bases of a different and more complex vision of the Realism and of the role played by the realistic aesthetics in the framing of
Modernity.