An important collection of around 500 aphorisms (greguer�as), which are a landmark of innovative literary technique akin to that of Futurism. Ram�n G�mez de la Serna introduced Spain to European avant-garde literature with this new genre, presented here in a stunningly thorough representation of an influential form and including an in-depth analysis by the translator. The book also includes a list of other works by G�mez de la Serna in English translation, two brief bibliographies, and a keyword index.
"The first English-language history published in the United States to examine the sweep of modern Spanish verse. Debicki, more importantly, is the first to situate Spanish poetry in the context of European modernity, to trace its trajectory from the symbolists to the post-modernists. See other books in the series Studies in Romance Languages.
A celebrity in his own day, who gave lectures dressed as Napoleon or seated on the back of an elephant, Ramón Gómez de la Serna is the most representative writer of the interwar Spanish avant-garde. This book explores Gómez de la Serna's art and his quest to break down the barriers between literature and life, addressing two elements - already present in his work - of radical relevance in today's cultural debates: the relation of humans to the material world and the reduction of all experience to a singular individuality. Bringing Gómez de la Serna to an Anglophone audience, it reveals him to be the embodiment of a new kind of art on both sides of the Atlantic.
Twentieth-century Spanish poetry has received comparatively little attention from critics writing in English. Andrew Debicki now presents the first English-language history published in the United States to examine the sweep of modern Spanish verse. More important, he is the first to situate Spanish poetry in the context of European modernity, to trace its trajectory from the symbolists to the postmodernists. Avoiding the rigid generational schemes and catalogs of names found in traditional Hispanic literary histories, Debicki offers detailed discussions of salient books and texts to construct an original and compelling view of his subject. He demonstrates that contemporary Spanish verse is rooted in the modem tradition and poetics that see the text as a unique embodiment of complex experiences. He then traces the evolution of that tradition in the early decades of the century and its gradual disintegration from the 1950s to the present as Spanish poetry came to reflect features of the postmodern, especially the poetics of text as process rather than as product. By centering his study on major periods and examining within each the work of poets of different ages, Debicki develops novel perspectives. The late 1960s and early 1970s, for example, were not merely the setting for a new aestheticist generation but an era of exceptional creativity in which both established and new writers engendered a profound, intertextual, and often self-referential lyricism. This book will be essential reading for specialists in modern Spanish letters, for advanced students, and for readers inter-ested in comparative literature.
A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes recognizes that change is a driving force in all the arts. It covers major trends in music, dance, theater, film, visual art, sculpture, and performance art--as well as architecture, science, and culture.
The marriage of philosophy and fiction in the first third of Spain's twentieth century was a fertile one. It produced some truly notable offspring—novels that cross genre boundaries to find innovative forms, and treatises that fuse literature and philosophy in new ways. In her illuminating interdisciplinary study of Spanish fiction of the "Silver Age," Roberta Johnson places this important body of Spanish literature in context through a synthesis of social, literary, and philosophical history. Her examination of the work of Miguel de Unamuno, Pio Baroja, Azorin, Ramon Perez de Ayala, Juan Ramon Jimenez, Gabriel Miro, Pedro Salinas, Rosa Chacel, and Benjamin Jarnes brings to light philosophical frictions and debates and opens new interpersonal and intertextual perspectives on many of the period's most canonical novels. Johnson reformulates the traditional discussion of generations and "isms" by viewing the period as an intergenerational complex in which writers with similar philosophical and personal interests constituted dynamic groupings that interacted and constantly defined and redefined one another. Current narratological theories, including those of Todorov, Genette, Bakhtin, and Martinez Bonati, assist in teasing out the intertextual maneuvers and philosophical conflicts embedded in the novels of the period, while the sociological and biographical material bridges the philosophical and literary analyses. The result, solidly grounded in original archival research, is a convincingly complete picture of Spain's intellectual world in the first thirty years of this century. Crossfire should revolutionize thinking about the Generation of '98 and the Generation of '14 by identifying the heterogeneous philosophical sources of each and the writers' reactions to them in fiction.
