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Imaginative Mimesis: Childhood Experience In Rafael Alberti's La Arboleda Perdida And José Gomes Ferreira's Calçada Do Sol, Emily Oliveira

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

This essay examines how two twentieth-century memoirs––the Spanish poet Rafael Alberti’s La Arboleda Perdida and the Portuguese poet José Gomes Ferreira’s Calçada do Sol––attempt to access the structurally lost experience of childhood rather than to represent realities contemporaneous with childhood. This structural loss is defined according to the triangulation of experience, imagination, and knowledge present in Agamben’s critique of modern epistemology. For the child-protagonists, imagination, a cognitive tool by which the child acquires knowledge, is embedded in their experience of the world. Both the adult “characters” within these texts and the two memoirists suffer from the modern attitude that …