Descripción:
This book aims to develop a broader view of the trajectory of Hispanic modernity, tracing a motif of recurring impasse, first seen in peninsular Baroque texts and continuing into Latin American colonial and modern literature.

Inspired by Walter Benjamin’s notion of constellation, this book draws on theories of Latin American modernity to investigate the Spanish literary Baroque and its repetitions as a historical-cultural predicament in Latin American colonial and modern texts. Inca Garcilaso, Borges, Carpentier, Rulfo, Darío and a range of Latin American ‘Post-Symbolist’ poets (Agustini, Pizarnik, Sosa, Lienlaf and Huinao) are juxtaposed with the Lazarillo, the Quijote, Fuenteovejuna and Góngora’s Soledades to produce original readings on topics of violence, rape, frustrated pilgrimage, and the truncated ambitions of colonized peoples and confessional minorities. In turn, Benjamin is juxtaposed with Mallarmé to recast the aesthetic dynamics of modernity in political terms, in order to understand the Baroque within a more broadly historicized concept of the avant-garde. Generous in scope, this book addresses the community of Spanish and Latin American criticism as well as emerging and pressing theoretical concerns within the field of comparative literature.


CONTENTS:

Introduction: The Baroque, Symbolism and Hispanic Modernity: A Benjaminian Meditation on the Construction of History

Góngora and the Colonial Body Politic: Moriscos, Amerindians and Poetry as Protest

Violence and ‘The Tremulous Private Body’ in Lazarillo de Tormes, Fuenteovejuna, and the Soledades

Trauma, Body and Machine in Don Quijote

Góngora and Darío in Constellation: On the Poetics of Rape, Colonialism and Modernity

Pilgrimage into the Trauma of History: Continuities of Góngora in Carpentier, Rulfo and Vallejo

Signposts in a Genealogy of Post-Symbolism in Latin American Poetry

Afterward
Appendix I: On Mallarmé’s ‘Un Coup de dés’
Appendix II: The Annales School and Maravall’s La cultura del barroco