Some core questions here are: How do notions of authorship, especially those of Barthes

and Foucault, integrate with the practice of automatic writing, theoretically and politically, in the

transnational avant-gardes? What is at stake in these criticisms against “automaticity” as a mode

of being? Finally, how can we understand the way both Surrealism and the Vanguards attempt to

solve the problems of modernity through the “opposed” positions of rationality and chance, even

while their object of critique is the same?

Ultimately, I argue that the Surrealist notion of automaticity, a mode of artistic production that

allows access to ludic, erotic, unexpected, and ultimately irrational images, innervates Latin

American poetry into largely two contradictory responses. On the one hand is the automatic

method as an increasingly saught after and practiced methodology that, while including

Peruvians Cesar Moro and Emilio Westphalen, culminates in the writintgs of Chilean Braulio

Arenas and the *Mandragora group.

Finally, notions of authorial agency, inspiration, mimesis, colonialism are all tied to the way the

spontaneous mode of non-reflective, mechanistic production of poetry1 threatens to

Futher, my dissertation will focus on this point of tension to argue that Latin American attempts

to recuperate automaticity primarily as “style” critiques Europe’s response to an exhaustion with

lterature exhaustion with modernity’s (ir)rational

While Europe’s avant-garde movements expressed to reel from two World Wars in ways that

critiqued language The methods differed, but the desire for aesthetic renovation, freedom, nwew

registers of poetic expression, and a critique of remained parallel concerns for many

transnational artists.

1
The argument of avant-garde European art as fragmentary, problematically anti—mimetic, and overly concerned
with aesthetics rather than experience has been foregrounded in Ortega and Gasset’s seminal 1925 essay, La
Deshumanizacion del Arte (The Dehumanization of Art).