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Sensing A Way Out Of René Char's "Historian's Hovel", Jennifer Pap

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

René Char, like many other twentieth-century writers, faced the dilemma of how to write adequately about historical atrocity, and key moments in his writing about violence display this. In the context of post-World War I disillusionment, rising Fascism, and post-World War II calculations of those who vied for power, he also criticized bad faith iterations of History. However, a number of texts in his Feuillets d’Hypnos ('Leaves of Hypnos,') published in 1946 and written during his participation in the Resistance, assert an alternative history in which aesthetic, ethical, and political experience were linked. With the post-war return to …

Guido Mazzoni. On Modern Poetry. Translated By Zakiya Hanafi. Belknap Press, 2022., Anthony Degenaro

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Guido Mazzoni. On Modern Poetry. Translated by Zakiya Hanafi. Belknap Press, 2022. 294 pp.

Candelas Gala. Clara Janés: La Poética Cuántica O La Física De La Poesía. Csic, 2021., Nicolás Fernández-Medina

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Candelas Gala. Clara Janés: La poética cuántica o la física de la poesía. CSIC, 2021. 203 pp.

Exhuming Labor: Alienation And Rural Affiliation In Spanish Migrant Poetry, Carlos Varón González

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

One of the consequences of the 2008 financial crisis was that many young college graduates from the Spanish state left the country, faced with unemployment rates over 40% at home. Whereas Spanish economic growth before the crisis had pushed the narrative that a young generation was predisposed to transnational circulation, the experience of migration challenged the identification of large transnational cities as sites of emancipatory modernization. Fruela Instead, Fruela Fernández’s Una paz europea (A European Peace) and Lara Dopazo Ruibal’s ovella (sheep) point to them as the background to vulnerable, animalized, racialized, alienated bodies. The transnational city is not the …

Dissident Poetry In Post-Crisis Spain: A Challenge To Fluidity, Olga Bezhanova

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The global economic crisis of 2008-9 had an especially severe impact on Spain and resulted in the publication of many works of literature that address the effects and the causes of the crisis. Daniel Macías Díaz and Antonio Rómar, two contemporary Spanish poets, belong to different artistic generations, yet their response to the devastation caused by the economic collapse centers on a rejection of the neoliberal worldview that inspired the creation of the current economic system. The poets question the rhetoric of fluidity and mobility that accompanies the implantation of the neoliberal world order and call for the creation of …

Soldier-Poet Or Écrivain-Combattant: How The French Trenches Of World War I Defined Witnessing, Nichole T. Gleisner

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This paper explores how the French trenches of WWI defined the act of witnessing. An examination of Third Republic grammar textbooks by Claude Augé shows how soldiers were predisposed to be receptive to trench newspapers' exhortations to become witnesses to the war experience. An analysis of these pedagogic reforms, paired with a close reading of trench newspapers, show why the broader term écrivain-combattant emerged in France, as opposed to soldier-poet in the British literary context.

“La Cara De Luna De Mi Madre”: Nuria Amat’S Revolution In Poetic Language In “Casa De Verano” (1999), David Richter

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Nuria Amat’s 1999 short story “Casa de verano” ‘Summer House’ presents the reader with a sensorial collage of unsettling language and violent images that effectively portray domestic abuse and the difficulty of escaping oppressive environments. The Barcelona writer’s text crosses the generic boundaries of narrative and poetry as her discourse flows freely and irrationally by employing a wide variety of charged poetic devices such as metaphor, metonymy, and antithesis. The story focuses on three orphan children who are prohibited from speaking about their subversive bisexual mother, from reading the few remaining books in the summer house, or from playing with …

The Incertitude Of Language And Life In The Poetry Of Olvido García Valdés, Sharon Keefe Ugalde

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Two of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s formulations serve as guideposts for the analysis of the poetry of García Valdés: the concept of language-game and the Creation Mystic Experience, or seeing the world as a miracle. The paper first considers the language-game in terms of “unbound” or exempt language. The poet, recognizing the metamorphic nature of language, frees it from predetermined cultural content and, most notably, from grammatical rigidity, toying with ambiguity and fluidity through such techniques as juxtaposition, pronoun vagueness and ellipsis. The second part of the study considers the poet’s exploration of the ineffable, which embraces both the astonishment of being …

Beyond The Pale: “Poesía Postpoética” In Agustín Fernández Mallo’S Joan Fontaine Odisea, W. Michael Mudrovic

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In a recent article defining his concept of “poesía postpoética,” Agustín Fernández Mallo chides and challenges his contemporaries for being behind the times. While not completely eschewing more traditional techniques of intertextuality and imagery, Fernández Mallo does stress the need to incorporate scientific and mathematical imagery. His book-length poem, Joan Fontaine Odisea (mi deconstrucción) (2005), exemplifies his “poesía postpoética” in its use of allusions to high and popular culture, and scientific concepts, along different types of discourse, to disrupt the commonplace perception of a unified poetic voice. This article will focus on Joan Fontaine Odisea as a modern poetic sequence …

Migration And The Foreign In Contemporary Spanish Poetry: El Sueño De Dakhla (Poemas De Umar Abass) By Manuel Moya, Debra Faszer-Mcmahon

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Many critical studies have addressed the issue of immigration in contemporary Spanish narrative and film, but far fewer have analyzed this topic within the context of poetry. The representation of immigrant experience in poetic texts is significant not only because poetic works have received less attention, but also because of the significance of poetry within North African and Islamic culture. Manuel Moya’s recent award-winning collection places the question of North African immigration as a central concern. The text purports to offer a compilation of poetry produced by the Western Saharan immigrant Umar Abass, who currently resides in Madrid. The work …

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 …

Poetry Wars, Sylvia R. Sherno

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The status of poetry in Spain over the last several decades has provided fodder for a surprisingly contentious dispute, perhaps particularly remarkable for devotees and critics on these shores, where poetry has a limited readership…

“No Es Mi Madre La Tierra” ‘The Earth Is Not My Mother’: Ecology In Gloria Fuertes’S Last Poetry, Douglas K. Benson

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Since the 1930s, Gloria Fuertes’s poetry has attracted listeners and readers to her unique combination of verbal play, witty juxtapositions of erudite and popular sources, and uncanny linguistic virtuosity. Thirteen years after her death in 1998, her popularity continues to grow as new printings of her best-selling books and new editions of her early poetry appear in print. The last book over which she had editorial control, Mujer de verso en pecho (1995) ‘Woman with Verse on her Chest,’ is her most provocative, expanding considerably the thematic range to which she applied her unconventional poetic strategies. One previous thematic element …

Reading Sara Pujol Russell’S Poetry Of Contemplation And Connection, Anita M. Hart

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Sara Pujol Russell’s poetry captures a process of expanding consciousness and personal renewal. Through contemplation and attention to nature, the poet-speaker in her works generates a sense of connection that moves her beyond daily concerns. Pujol’s poetry is both metaphysical and also different in that it resists easy classification and is not representative of mainstream trends. This essay approaches the distinctiveness of Pujol’s work by studying selected poems from her third book of poetry in Spanish, Para decir sí a la carencia, sí a la naranja, al azafrán en el pan (2004) ‘To Say Yes to Lack, Yes to the …

In The Heideggerian Tradition: Acontecimiento By Concha García, Martha Lafollette Miller

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Critics Sharon Keefe Ugalde and Tina Escaja have called the poetry of Concha García “enigmatic,” “unique,” and “avant-garde.” Studies of her work to date tend to attribute the fragmentation and discontinuity of her poetic discourse to her rejection of phallologocentric language. While one of her work’s chief concerns is indeed her speaker’s sense of a radical difference and alienation based on gender, her poetry at the same time directs her reader’s attention to more general ontological considerations. Rather than clearly recounting the events of the life of her poetic protagonist, she rejects the distillations and simplifications that linear narration presupposes …

Syntactically Silent Subjects: Luis Muñoz And The Poetry Of Ellipsis, Judith Nantell

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Luis Muñoz (1966) is one of contemporary Spain’s most salient poets. His work has been described as demonstrating a discourse of ellipsis; yet no study has examined in detail his masterful use of syntactic and figurative omission. In fact, even though Muñoz’s published collections to date span two centuries, no single study has been devoted to his decidedly innovative expressivity. His work has been commented on in various panoramic essays considering contemporary poetry published in Spain at this temporal intersection and a number of his poems have been gathered into noteworthy anthologies of this same era. His poetry has been …

Poetic Vision And (In)Visible Pain In Antonio Méndez Rubio’S Trasluz, Paul Cahill

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Since the 1980s, visibility has played a key role in debates surrounding Spanish poetry. Novísimo ‘very new’ poets have highlighted and explored the instability and uncertainty of the gaze, while poetas de la experiencia ‘poets of experience’ have more readily accepted the visible without questioning it or the mechanisms used to construct it. Poets who entered the literary scene in the mid to late 1990s have also entered this discussion. Antonio Méndez Rubio, the author of twelve poetry collections and numerous critical and theoretical works, is a poet whose work does not fit easily within the categories usually employed to …

Tristan Tzara’S Poetical Visions: Ironic, Oneiric, Heroic, Ruth Caldwell

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Tristan Tzara is most often associated with Dada, a movement whose influence has often been overlooked. However, Tzara stands out among his peers because of his extensive production of poetical works associated not only with Dada but surrealism and beyond. In all of these texts we see a constant refusal to be complacent about artistic endeavor or the world around us. His Dada texts launch an attack on language by the use of irony and a tension of the text against itself. This internal tension becomes the struggle depicted in his surrealistic epic, L’Homme approximatif, an unfulfilled search for …

The Significance Of Birds In The Works Of Augusto Roa Bastos, Helene C. Weldt-Basson

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Birds have occupied a central role in the works of the Paraguayan writer, Augusto Roa Bastos (1917-2005), from the beginning of his literary career. In texts ranging from his early poetry to his complete short stories, compiled in 2003, the bird motif repeatedly resurfaces, raising the question of the relevance of birds in Roa Bastos’s oeuvre. This article argues that birds are used symbolically throughout Roa Bastos’s poetry and prose works, by drawing upon their significance within Guarani myths and literature. The article focuses on several symbolic associations for birds in Guarani culture, including their relationship to oral language, …

Texts Of Light And Shadow: Dickens And Lautréamont In Alejandra Pizarnik's Sombra Poems , Beth Zeiss

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In her poetry, the Argentinean Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-72) persistently explores the transformations that the poetic subject undergoes in language. She articulates a cycle wherein the subject's desire to (re)create herself as a presence in language is followed by the desire for death, the absence of the self, when her desire becomes frustrated by language's inadequacies. As yet, the importance of the theme of the fluctuating self in language as developed by Pizarnik in a series of poems protagonized by Sombra, has not been analyzed. The character Sombra appears in six fragment-like poems published posthumously in Textos de Sombra (1982) and …

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 …

Personalized And Depersonalized Discourses: Irony And Self-Consciousness In Bécquer's Rimas , Cecile West-Settle

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer's Rimas have long been read as a prelude to the later twentieth-century texts of Juan Ramón Jiménez and Jorge Guillén. This established reading of the Rimas emphasizes the romantic idealism of Bécquer's poetry and identifies Bécquer as a proto-symbolist poet whose work anticipates "pure" poetry in Spain. An alternate view of the Rimas, one that recognizes the ironic impulses of this poetry, reminds us that Bécquer's poetry and poetics are, rather than single-minded, grounded in paradox and concerned with one of art's central problems, that is to say, with representing what the limitless imagination produces within the …

Dismantling Romantic Utopias: María Beneyto's Poetry Between Tradition And Protest , Candelas S. Gala

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Despite the fact that Vicente Aleixandre considered her one of the best young authors of the generation of social poets of the 1950s, María Beneyto's writings have been disregarded by critics. While sharing the social concerns of the other poets of her generation, Beneyto's poetry also reveals the dilemma of the woman author facing a cultural tradition that espouses pre-established models for her conduct and identity patterned mostly in accordance with tenets of Romanticism. Beneyto resorts to those models as projections of herself as she seeks to articulate her own identity as woman and author. The objective of this essay …

The Fictions Of Surrealism, Walter A. Strauss

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Surrealism is an attitude toward life, even more than a literary and artistic movement. It aspired to no less than the remaking of man and the world by reintroducing "everyday" magic and a new idealization of the Female. In many respects, its goal was spiritual renewal. This enterprise was most prominently successful in the domain of poetry and painting. The major spokesman for the movement, Andre Breton, disliked the novel. Nevertheless, the members of the movement and their associates made numerous ventures into prose fiction, with notable results. Four types of fiction are delineated: the neo-Gothic romance; the adventure diary …

The Stone And Its Images: The Poetry Of Nancy Morejón, Alan West

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The essay explores the roots of Nancy Morejón's poetry within the context of a transculturated afro-Cuban identity. Beginning by an examination of the poems that directly deal with the orishas of santería, the essay moves on to some of her more lyric poetry. Morejón's relationship to Dulce María Loynaz provides particular interest in how both writers treat the metaphor of the house in two important poems. This is followed by a discussion of some of Morejón's overtly feminist poetry, placed both within a Cuban context of the history of its revolution, and the displacement of exile (in dialogue with Cuban …

Questioning The Postmodern: Deguy, Jabès And Pleynet, Joan Brandt

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Theorists of the postmodern tend to see the postmodernist literary text as that which disrupts modernism's inclusive and coherent structures. As opposed to the modernist text, which is characterized as centered, ordered, self-reflexive and autonomous, the postmodernist text is seen as decentered and indeterminate; it blurs the boundaries separating the text from other cultural spheres and questions radically the metaphysics of presence, of the subject, of identity and coherence. This study questions the tendency to see postmodernism in terms of its opposition to modernism. Through an analysis of three contemporary French poets, Michel Deguy, Edmond Jabès and Marcelin Pleynet, it …

Rhythm And Meter In The Early Juan Ramón Jiménez: The Case Of "¡Silencio!" Of Estío, Vialla Hartfield-Méndez

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The literary trajectory of Juan Ramón Jiménez is commonly divided into two periods, though this division is also generally recognized as an oversimplification of a very complex process in which the poet moves from the use of more traditional poetic forms, and a more concrete reference to reality, to the practice of free verse and more metaphysical expressions of man's relationship to his surroundings. "¡Silencio!," the last poem of Estío (1915), was written just prior to Diario de un poeta reciéncasado, the book with which it is considered that Juan Ramón began the second stage of his literary trajectory. …

From Exile To Affirmation: The Poetry Of Joseph Brodsky, David Patterson

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article examines the relation between the exile of the poet from his homeland and the "exile of the word." The notion of the exile of the word pertains to the poet's problem of re-introducing meaning to the word—an excess of meaning that conveys more than the word can normally convey—through his poetry. Showing how the poet in exile becomes a poet of exile, the article examines what poetry has to do with a larger difficulty of exile and homelessness in human life. Brodsky's poetry, the article argues, addresses this very difficulty. The article concludes that the human capacity to …

Fifty Years Of Contemporary Spanish Poetry (1939-1989), José Olivio Jiménez

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Fifty Years of Contemporary Spanish Poetry (1939-1989)

Culturalism And The "New" Poetry. A Poem By Pedro Gimferrer: "Cascabeles" From Arde El Mar (1966), Guillermo Carnero

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The study deals with the group of Spanish poets commonly called the "novisimos" or "promocion de 1970," using as a base a poem by Pedro Gimferrer published in 1966. It studies the aesthetic break-through achieved by this generation, highlighting the concept of "culturalism" that critics used to define it twenty years ago. It examines the equivocal uses to which this concept can be put, and describes its correct meaning in the light of the aesthetic to which it refers. It then studies the mechanisms implicit in the writing of this non-confessional lyric poetry, centering it on two complementary procedures: the …