Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The Baroque, Symbolism and Hispanic Modernity: A Benjaminian Meditation on the Construction of History
- 1 Góngora and the Colonial Body Politic: Moriscos, Amerindians and Poetry as Protest
- 2 Violence and the “Tremulous Private Body” in Lazarillo de Tormes, Fuenteovejuna, and the Soledades
- 3 Trauma, Body and Machine in Don Quijote
- 4 Góngora and Darío in Constellation: On the Poetics of Rape, Colonialism and Modernity
- 5 Pilgrimage into the Trauma of History: Continuities of Góngora in Carpentier, Rulfo and Vallejo
- 6 Signposts in a Genealogy of Post-Symbolism in Latin American Poetry
- Afterword
- Appendix I: On Mallarmé’s “Un Coup de dés”
- Appendix II: The Annales School and Maravall’s La cultura del barroco
- Works Cited
- Index
Introduction: The Baroque, Symbolism and Hispanic Modernity: A Benjaminian Meditation on the Construction of History
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The Baroque, Symbolism and Hispanic Modernity: A Benjaminian Meditation on the Construction of History
- 1 Góngora and the Colonial Body Politic: Moriscos, Amerindians and Poetry as Protest
- 2 Violence and the “Tremulous Private Body” in Lazarillo de Tormes, Fuenteovejuna, and the Soledades
- 3 Trauma, Body and Machine in Don Quijote
- 4 Góngora and Darío in Constellation: On the Poetics of Rape, Colonialism and Modernity
- 5 Pilgrimage into the Trauma of History: Continuities of Góngora in Carpentier, Rulfo and Vallejo
- 6 Signposts in a Genealogy of Post-Symbolism in Latin American Poetry
- Afterword
- Appendix I: On Mallarmé’s “Un Coup de dés”
- Appendix II: The Annales School and Maravall’s La cultura del barroco
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
“par avance retombée”
“beforehand fallen back”
—From Stéphane Mallarmé, “Un Coup de dés” (Trans. Brian Coffey; Caws 107–27)A.
Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of years. A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the “time of the now” which is shot through with chips of Messianic time (263).
—From Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”The trajectory of Hispanic modernity can be seen as one of constellations, parallel moments of conjuncture, in which the origins of the modern come into a kind of synchrony with later turning points. Using this model of historical conjuncture—imaginatively portrayed in the writings of Walter Benjamin—I propose to study literary manifestations of Hispanic modernity in the earliest glimmers of the Baroque and to observe its repeated dynamics in modernismo and in the future expressions of the avant-garde. In so doing, it is my hope to also address the theoretical issues raised by different concepts of history and to develop an approach to literary texts based on a problematic of the body within the Hispanic body politic. The terrain of this book will be transatlantic, with a primary focus on the Peninsular Baroque and its trajectory into the Latin American modern.
Throughout this study I will diverge somewhat from the traditional disciplinary boundaries which define national and generational notions of canon in an effort to develop broader perspectives. For example, while I will take into account the canonical writers of the Neobaroque, my primary focus will not be on what is commonly understood as Neobarroquismo, the cultivation of features of Baroque aesthetics associated with Cuban writers such as Severo Sarduy, Lezama Lima, Alejo Carpentier, and their disciples in the 1960s and 1970s.
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- Information
- The Spanish Baroque and Latin American Literary ModernityWriting in Constellation, pp. 1 - 28Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2021