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Full-Text Articles in Spanish Literature
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …