The Spanish Baroque and Latin American Literary Modernity: Writing in Constellation

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. CRYSTAL ANNE CHEMRIS is Lecturer in Spanishat the University of Virginia and Courtesy Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Oregon. She is author of Góngora's Soledades and the Problem of Modernity (Tamesis, 2008).