There are few better-known figures of Spanish modernism than Miguel de Unamuno. His major works On Casticism (1895), Life of Don Quixote and Sancho (1905), The Tragic Sense of Life (1912), and San Manuel Bueno, Martyr (1930) have won worldwide circulation and influence and been translated into numerous languages. One of the topics that has been central to critical approaches to Unamuno’s oeuvre from the beginning is that of existentialism, particularly as it concerns what the author himself saw was the individual’s personal struggle against nothingness in a potentially Godless world. Strangely, however, the question of embodiment is rarely raised in this existential context even though Unamuno dedicated ample space in his philosophy, fiction, and religious writings to underscore the importance of the lived, sensory, and subjective body in generating the individual’s life-world. Indeed, Unamuno’s reflections on bodily immortality, the possibility of resurrection, and the man of “flesh and bone” that opens The Tragic Sense of Life have been repeated throughout the critical literature for years now, yet seldom are they considered within a range of bodily experiences that Unamuno theorized could produce new knowledge about the world and new ways of understanding concepts such as faith and religious belief. Ultimately, the concept of embodiment in Unamuno’s work remains understudied and would benefit from a fresh examination, particularly from the perspective of the new critical engagements on the body and identity that have emerged in the last decade.

In “El verbo hecho carne: The Embodiment of the Word in Miguel de Unamuno’s On Casticism,” Patrick Newcomb will begin exploring the theme of the embodiment of the Word in Miguel de Unamuno’s volume of national exegesis, On Casticism. Newcomb will contextualize Unamuno’s early Christian beliefs about immortality and resurrection and tie his notion of verbal embodiment—the speech that requires a present, living body—to John 1:14: “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.” Arguing for verbal embodiment’s thematic centrality in On Casticism, Newcomb aims to describe its presence in three crucial moments in Unamuno’s argument: first, his comments on the humanization of Spanish sciences and the assertion that science never comes to us in its pure form; second, his development of the historical ideas of the “eternal tradition” and “intra-history” as mediated through concrete, living bodies; and third, his descriptions of the relationship between the Castilian language and the historical communities that speak it, a topic that was foremost on Unamuno’s mind in the 1890s. Newcomb’s paper will effectively lay out a number of Unamuno’s core religious and existential ideas about the body and life that will be developed in the other papers.

Leslie J. Harkema, whose recent book Spanish Modernism and the Poetics of Youth: From Miguel de Unamuno to La joven literatura (2018) examines the notion of youth and corporeality in Unamuno’s work, will develop the idea of body and resurrection introduced in Newcomb’s paper. In her presentation “Incarnate Immortality: Unamuno’s Poetics of Entrañaand the Resurrection of the Body,” she will examine the importance of incarnation in Unamuno’s representation of life and afterlife in a broader range of texts, including poems from Poesías(1907) and The Christ of Velázquez(1920), as well as a range of early essays and his well-known novella San Manuel Bueno, Martyr(1931). Considering the influence of Unamuno’s early, unorthodox thinking about Christian theology on the development of his understanding of poetry, Harkema will contend that the doctrine of bodily resurrection plays an underacknowledged role in his work. What Harkema underscores in her presentation is that Unamuno’s longing for resurrection hinges upon an embodied approach to immortality in which the mind and the body—its sensations, perception, feelings, etc.—must continue on in a total existential unity. As Harkema will argue through her close readings, Unamuno’s understanding of resurrection is unconventional to say the least, and it involves a provocative notion of embodiment that considers the immortality of not just the soul, but also the body itself.

In “Tula’s Body: Anatomy of a Reactive Force,” Francisco LaRubia-Prado will extend Harkema’s critiques of Unamuno’s fiction and demonstrate how they structure one of the philosopher’s more popular novels: Aunt Tula of 1907. Expanding upon his extensive research into Unamuno’s organicist and existential notions of embodiment, LaRubia Prado will offer a reading of Unamuno’s fiction in which the body is conceived as a field of active and reactive forces competing for dominance. Unamuno’s treatment of the body—whether it be of an individual, or conceived as a community or a society—implies both the rupture of the body-spirit dichotomy and the exposure of the reactive, divisive forces vis-à-vis active and unifying forces. For LaRubia Prado, Tula, the protagonist in Aunt Tula, represents one of Unamuno’s clearest inversions of the organicist paradigm of active, affirming forces and the Self. The triumph of Tula’s worldview and the communal bonds she creates signals the dominance of reactive forces characterized by fear (of men in general), resentment (against individuals who are, or think, differently), and alienation (rejection of social processes). Tula’s final existential disembodiment leads to profound personal regret and to chaos after her death. With Aunt Tula, LaRubia Prado will open a window into Unamuno’s powerful view of nihilism in which active, affirmative, and plural bodily forces are integral to the individual’s dynamic process of existential becoming.

The papers in this MLA special session will add clarity and nuance to Unamuno’s notion of embodiment throughout his philosophy, fiction, and religious writings. They will demonstrate how this notion of embodiment can expand and renew our understanding of the existential dimension of his work.