Poetics of Hispanism

Cathy L. Jrade, Christina Karageorgou-Bastea (ed.)

The authors of this book participated in two interdependent colloquia that aimed to answer a two-fold question, namely, ‘what is Hispanic poetry’s destiny today and what part in its fate do critics play?’ As a result Poetics of Hispanism covers a broad array of subjects: the relation of form to issues of context, values, and influence; alterity as the ground on which the voice realizes the need to sing; or issues of pedagogy and literary history –as in the history and actuality of the romance. An exciting conceptual thread in most of the contributions in this volume, a thematic undercurrent, might be the relationship between the intimate and the political, the personal and the historical. The different essays touch upon poetry as the discursive link between the subject and the world, the voice and its others, always in a relation with normative social restrictions. For some of the authors, intimacy is a critical perspective; in other cases, it informs their analysis thematically. Intimacy involves an interpellation, not a mere reading that joins together the text and the reader; finally, as the other face of history, poetic intimacy reveals the complexities of enthusiasm and resentment as social affects.

Cathy L. Jrade is Chancellor’s Professor of Spanish and Chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. She has published several scholarly books on Spanish American modernismo including Rubén Darío and the Romantic Search for Unity: The Modernist Recourse to Esoteric Tradition (1983, 1986), as well as Modernismo, Modernity, and the Development of Spanish American Literature (1998) and Delmira Agustini, Sexual Seduction, and Vampiric Conquest (2012). In addition, she has contributed studies on modernismo to the Cambridge History of Latin American Literature (1998) and the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (4th ed., 2012).

Christina Karageorgou-Bastea is Associate Professor of Spanish at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Arquitectónica de voces: Federico García Lorca y el Poema del cante jondo (2008). Her research focuses on ethics and aesthetics with a special emphasis on poetry and Transatlantic literature in the Hispanic context. She has written a number of articles on Spanish and Latin American authors such as Valle-Inclán, Lorca, Salinas, Cernuda, Peri-Rossi, Neruda, Villaurrutia. She is the editor of the Vanderbilt e-Journal of Luso-Hispanic Studies.