César Vallejo: Praxis and living Philology

Abstract

In this article, I focus on the series of prose writings published by the peruvian poet César Vallejo in different graphic media of the hispanic world (Mundial, Variedades, Amauta, Nosotros, Bolívar) from his european exile. I dwell especially on the series of writings that Vallejo published in the period of his closest approach to historical materialism and his communist commitment, a period marked by travel to the Soviet Union, between 1928 and 1931. I put the accent on my analysis in the strategies of appropriation of the discourse of historical materialism that put into play these writings. My hypothesis is that Vallejo does not carry forward in his writings a mere copy of the contents of marxism as it was posed in his time, but develops in them a peculiar vision of historical materialism as a worldview centered on praxis and as a philology of the living. In this way, I maintain that Vallejo’s texts dialogue with positions of marxist theorists who are raising similar questions in that period, such as José Carlos Mariátegui, Antonio Gramsci and Rodolfo Mondolfo. From these initial statements, I expand my analysis to the biopolitical and glotopolitical implications of the conception of praxis as a living philology displayed in Vallejo’s writings of that same stage.