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Guido Mazzoni. On Modern Poetry. Translated By Zakiya Hanafi. Belknap Press, 2022., Anthony Degenaro
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
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.
Emil’ Keme. Le Maya Q’Atzij /Our Maya Word: Poetics Of Resistance In Guatemala. U Of Minnesota P, 2021., Rigoberto Guevara
Emil’ Keme. Le Maya Q’Atzij /Our Maya Word: Poetics Of Resistance In Guatemala. U Of Minnesota P, 2021., Rigoberto Guevara
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Review of Emil’ Keme. Le Maya Q’atzij /Our Maya Word: Poetics of Resistance in Guatemala. U of Minnesota P, 2021. 248 pp.
Exhuming Labor: Alienation And Rural Affiliation In Spanish Migrant Poetry, Carlos Varón González
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
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 …
“La Cara De Luna De Mi Madre”: Nuria Amat’S Revolution In Poetic Language In “Casa De Verano” (1999), David Richter
“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
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
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
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
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
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
“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
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 …
Poetic Vision And (In)Visible Pain In Antonio Méndez Rubio’S Trasluz, Paul Cahill
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 …
In The Heideggerian Tradition: Acontecimiento By Concha García, Martha Lafollette Miller
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
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 …
The Significance Of Birds In The Works Of Augusto Roa Bastos, Helene C. Weldt-Basson
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
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
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
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
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 Stone And Its Images: The Poetry Of Nancy Morejón, Alan West
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 …
Rhythm And Meter In The Early Juan Ramón Jiménez: The Case Of "¡Silencio!" Of Estío, Vialla Hartfield-Méndez
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. …
Fifty Years Of Contemporary Spanish Poetry (1939-1989), José Olivio Jiménez
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
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 …
Introduction: Critical Perspectives On Contemporary Spanish Poetry, Andrew P. Debicki
Introduction: Critical Perspectives On Contemporary Spanish Poetry, Andrew P. Debicki
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Introduction to the special issue
Language And Consciousness In The Poetry Of The "Novisimos": Guillermo Carnero's Latest Poetry, Ignacio-Javier López
Language And Consciousness In The Poetry Of The "Novisimos": Guillermo Carnero's Latest Poetry, Ignacio-Javier López
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Guillermo Carnero's latest book of poetry, Divisibilidad indefinida, has recently appeared in Spain. In it, the reader witnesses, on the one hand, the reaffirmation of the poetic of the "novisimos": a self-conscious use of language, the presence of "culturalism," a distancing of language, a doubling of the poetic persona. On the other hand, the book reveals an effort to encompass a more complete perspective of poetic reality. The combative attitude of the first decade of the "novisimos" having been left behind, Carnero now develops his poetry in Divisibilidad indefinida by bringing it nearer to human life, although without renouncing …
The Quest(Ioning) Of Epistemological Ground: The Spanish Generation Of 1956, Judith Nantell
The Quest(Ioning) Of Epistemological Ground: The Spanish Generation Of 1956, Judith Nantell
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Much of the critical literature written about the poetry of the Generation of 1956 asserts that for Claudio Rodriguez, José Angel Valente and Francisco Brines, among other members of this group, writing poetry is a means to knowledge. Knowledge, however, exists in tension with its apparent opposite, ignorance. Because the supplement ruptures the tidy arrangement of the knowledge/ignorance polarity, it is no longer possible to focus on either entity in isolation. If knowledge and ignorance continually imply one another, then Valente's famous dictum, "todo poema es un conocimiento haciéndose" ('every poem is knowledge becoming') which has long served as the …
From Vision To Apocalypse: The Poetic Subject In Recent Mexican Poetry, Norma Klahn
From Vision To Apocalypse: The Poetic Subject In Recent Mexican Poetry, Norma Klahn
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Over the last two decades there have been significant changes in the poetic subject. After the colloquial realism of the fifties and sixties, in which the poetic subject acted as witness to his or her time or spoke as a collective subject, there has emerged, particularly in the poetry of José Emilio Pacheco, a poetry in which the subject assumes an impersonal voice. This poetry questions originality, privileging appropriation, parody and pastiche while becoming increasingly skeptical and apocalyptic.
Retracing The Text: Francisco Brines' Poemas Excluidos, Judith Nantell
Retracing The Text: Francisco Brines' Poemas Excluidos, Judith Nantell
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
In 198S Francisco Brines published Poemas excluidos [Excluded Poems]. In this work he included, ironically and paradoxically (considering the title), various poems that had been excluded from his previously published collections of poetry. This essay investigates the critical activity of reconstructing the text within the included-excluded intertextual context of Brines' poetic production. In particular, as will be shown, Poemas excluidos demonstrates the play of texts and play of meaning that constitute the complex object the literary critic seeks to describe. One aspect of the play of texts evident in this work is that the poem is a symbiont not …