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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Cernuda In Current Spanish Poetry, Salvador J. Fajardo
Cernuda In Current Spanish Poetry, Salvador J. Fajardo
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
The poet Luis Cernuda (Spain, 1902-Mexico, 1963) has left his mark on much of the poetry written in Spain since the sixties. First rediscovered in the Peninsula in the late fifties and early sixties by, among others, Francisco Brines, José Angel Valente, and Jaime Gil de Biedma, his influence became pervasive both through the work of these poets, and, through the reading of Cernuda’s poetry itself, available since 1975 in Harris and Maristany edition. Referring in particular to Biedma, whose impact on younger poets has been significant, this paper examines the presence of Cernuda in certain approaches to language and …
The Song Of Disappearance: Memory, History, And Testimony In The Poetry Of Antonio Gamoneda, Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza
The Song Of Disappearance: Memory, History, And Testimony In The Poetry Of Antonio Gamoneda, Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
This essay explores Antonio Gamoneda’s poetry as an Adornian form of testimony. With its enigmatic foregrounding of lies, the book-length poem Descripción de la mentira ‘Description of the Lie’ can be read as a “contradictory testimony” in which the act and memory of witnessing go, as it were, underground—only to resurface, rife with loss, years after Spain’s transition from dictatorship to democracy. Yet the abstruse character of this poetic writing prevents readers from drawing straightforward political truths about Spanish history from the poem. Losses are inscribed in the text catachrestically, as they truly are: losses. Gamoneda’s poetry has been read …
Symptoms Of Spanish Fantasies: Africa As The Sign Of The Other In Angel Ganivet's Idearium Español And La Conquista Del Reino De Maya , Yaw Agawu-Kakraba
Symptoms Of Spanish Fantasies: Africa As The Sign Of The Other In Angel Ganivet's Idearium Español And La Conquista Del Reino De Maya , Yaw Agawu-Kakraba
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Angel Ganivet's La conquista del reino de Maya (1897, The Conquest of the Realm of Maya) elucidates the aggressive impulse embedded within modern self-consciousness, one that precipitates the need for journeys—linguistic and artistic, as well as authentically colonial—to either the "dark continent" or to the "heart of darkness" to find the irrational Other of the rational modern man. This impulse, however, is not only at the service of individual subjective experience, elevating the ego in relation to a declining awareness of objective or synchronous outside reality. That modernity also precipitated the creation of modern nations, often in conjunction with imperial …
Modernity, Postmodernity, And Transgression In Sábato's Esthetics: Poetic Dissemination, Defeat Of Utopias, Returning Bodies , María Rosa Lojo
Modernity, Postmodernity, And Transgression In Sábato's Esthetics: Poetic Dissemination, Defeat Of Utopias, Returning Bodies , María Rosa Lojo
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
After defining the problematic term "Postmodernity" and its possible application to Latin America, the position of Ernesto Sábato as an essayist and narrator is discussed in light of Modernity (questioned by him as the rationalist and enlightened canon, but applauded as romantic and surrealistic rebellion), and Postmodernity with which it connects from diverse axis: the poetic of desire and that of transgression (vanguard movements related to Foucault, Bataille and Derrida), the theory of reality as "fragment" and "simulacrum" and the suppression of oppositions in the paroxysm of "symbolic exchange." Sábato would transcend from the central proposition of his writing, the …
Subject To Instability , Karen Bouwer
Subject To Instability , Karen Bouwer
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
For Plantier, language constitutes reality and is male dominated. Readers of texts, she says, are at a disadvantage because the author imposes a logic that we must accept in order to understand the text. The discourses shaping our social reality have the same effect. Plantier has struggled against individual voices, discourses, and the very fabric of language informed by these discourses. "Subject to Instability" examines the impact on her generic evolution of a changing sense of self, of who her interlocutors are, and of those for whom she is speaking. I argue that her increasing attempt to juggle many different …
Identifying Jews: The Legacy Of The 1941 Exhibition, "Le Juif Et La France" , Raymond Bach
Identifying Jews: The Legacy Of The 1941 Exhibition, "Le Juif Et La France" , Raymond Bach
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
During the Occupation there was a two-pronged effort to separate the Jews from the rest of the French population...
Introduction, Richard Stamelman
Introduction, Richard Stamelman
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Introduction to the special issue
Words, Names, Nature, Earth: On The Poetry Of Pierre-Albert Jourdan, Yves Bonnefoy
Words, Names, Nature, Earth: On The Poetry Of Pierre-Albert Jourdan, Yves Bonnefoy
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
An ambivalence toward language is present throughout the work of Pierre-Albert Jourdan. Words are associated with the closure of a grey world; they are always arriving late, after the fact; they are veils, masks, dreams detached from truth, knowledge, and immediacy. Yet, words and names hold out the possibility of hope; they can designate the presence of beauty in the world; they can mediate the encounter of self and other. The human word signifies itself through the substance of the world and the communion of beings. At the intersection of natural reality—the center of the real for Jourdan—and of language …
The Syntax Of Assertion In The Poetry Of Claudio Rodriguez, Margaret H. Persin
The Syntax Of Assertion In The Poetry Of Claudio Rodriguez, Margaret H. Persin
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Through his original and unsettling manner of syntactical assertion, Claudio Rodriguez, the contemporary Spanish poet, subverts the conventional usage of language. But, in turn, he captures the transcendental, magical experience of language and all existence in the process of the text. That experience is based on intuition, irrationality and sensorial associations, rather than on logical connections. The reader is thus confronted with texts whose contradictory interpretive paths of signification continually subvert one another. Rodriguez wishes to communicate that it is not the end result but rather the process of the text that is the ultimate meaning. The reader's task is …
Construction And Deconstruction: The Theme Of Fleetingness In Poems By Juan Ramón Jiménez, And Pedro Salinas, Andrew P. Debicki
Construction And Deconstruction: The Theme Of Fleetingness In Poems By Juan Ramón Jiménez, And Pedro Salinas, Andrew P. Debicki
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Both Juan Ramón Jiménez and Salinas reveal in their poems a striving to capture the essences of things, continuing in this quest a tradition coming to them from symbolist poetry. By examining several poems written by them, however, we discover a basic difference in their way of embodying this striving. Juan Ramón, concerned with the perfection of form, remains within a logocentric tradition in which the poem attempts to embody its meanings objectively; Salinas, on the other hand, writes poems the meanings of which evolve with successive readings and reflect the theme of reality's fleetingness. A close analysis of the …
Sensationalism, Jean-Jacques Thomas
Sensationalism, Jean-Jacques Thomas
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Roland Barthes's fascination with discourse is usually considered a glorification of intellectual exchanges, the parade of a virtuoso eager to display his unalloyed dedication to logocentrism. As a consequence, scholars tend to rely on his writings as if they were principally a catalogue for the functional concepts of modernity.
The purpose of this article is to show through a close reading of Barthes's latter-day texts that his exhilarating verbal brio is first and foremost a sensuous relationship between the speaking subject and the verbal substance. In his case, this particular relationship generates a discourse akin to physical heroism, thanks to …
Evembe's Sur La Terre En Passant And The Poetics Of Shame, Richard Bjornson
Evembe's Sur La Terre En Passant And The Poetics Of Shame, Richard Bjornson
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
In Sur ta terre en passant, Evembe fashions a poetics of shame from the ordinary experiences of life in a large African city (Yaounde). He does it in such a way that the hallucinatory qualities and scabrous details of one individual's state of consciousness mirror the malaise which characterizes the larger social reality. The protagonist Iyoni (whose name means «shame» in the dialect of Evembe's native Kribi) experiences both misery and social respectability in an environment where traditional values have been lost, only to be replaced by artificial, dehumanizing hierarchies and an attitude of materialistic acquisitiveness. Despite the mysterious …