Josué Rodríguez, 3rd year Ph.D. student, has just been awarded a Mellon Summer Fellowship to conduct pre-dissertation research in Santiago, Chile. Here is what he told us about the importance of visiting the Vicente Huidobro Foundation for his current project.
What are you going to do this summer thanks to the Mellon Summer Fellowship?
The Mellon Summer Study Grant will allow me to travel to the Vicente Huidobro Foundation in Santiago, Chile. There, I hope to analyze Huidobro’s literary journals, magazines and other collaborative texts, and trace the way they reflect and respond to avant-garde activity both across Latin America and in Europe. The networks of artists, poets, and thinkers these texts form, as well as the essays, manifestos, and poetry they circulate are important in conceiving the complex trans-Atlantic relationship between movements like French Surrealism and Huidobro’s Creacionismo.
The foundation itself performs a variety of roles in addition to being both museum and archive. It has benefitted from the membership of prominent poets like Octavio Paz and Nicanor Parra and scholars like Saul Yurkievich and René de Costa. It contains over 8,000 archived records, including manuscripts, photographs, first editions, and personal documents. Some of these documents include letters and photographs that catalog Huidobro’s relationships and with artists and intellectuals like Pablo Picasso and André Breton who are central to the avant-garde. Ultimately, through a wide variety of available materials, the Fundación makes a great effort to contextualize Huidobro and his work within his multifaceted historical and cultural milieu. I feel very fortunate to be able to visit and explore this unequaled site of research.
How do you think the Mellon Summer Fellowship will help you develop your dissertation?
Primarily, I am interested in examining how Surrealism’s conceptualization of authorship, politics, poetry, and art was appropriated, rejected, and/or otherwise reconfigured by Latin American vanguard poets in the early to mid 20th century.
As a result, at this early juncture of my research, the Mellon Summer Study Grant will allow me to begin formulating research questions for my prospectus around one of the prominent voices of Latin American vanguard poetics, the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro. Focusing on the literary journals founded by Huidobro will help reveal the constant shifts in his aesthetic and political goals. Huidobro’s participation in avant-garde activity between 1916 and 1925 in Europe is crucial to his later re-articulation of what Latin American vanguard poetics should be in method, politics, style, and tone. As a result, studying these documents at the Foundation will provide important framing for a broader theorization of a Latin American poetic identity and its relationship to trans-Atlantic movements like Surrealism.
What professor(s) are you working with and what role did they have in helping you with shaping your research interest and/or in writing a competitive application for the Fellowship?
I have been fortunate enough to find a number of professors here at Rutgers who have influenced my thinking and continue to help develop my focus around these subjects. I am currently working with professors Marcy Schwartz and Karen Bishop from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and Nicola Behrmann from the German Department.
With respect to the Mellon Summer Study Grant proposal, both Karen Bishop and Andrew Parker offered very helpful advice on how best to communicate my project. Proposal writing can be a dramatic shift from other academic styles of writing, so their input and experience were instrumental in helping me clarify my goals efficiently and effectively. A warm and sincere thank you to them for all their help!