Góngora's Soledades and the Problem of Modernity

by Crystal Chemris

Description
Contents
Author
Reviews

Góngora's Soledades, the major lyric poem of the Spanish Baroque.

Combining philological rigor with a capacity to engage the most contemporary transatlantic and comparatist concerns, this work situates Luis de Góngora's Soledades within the problematic evolution of Hispanic modernity.
As well as offering an insightful analysis of the Soledades as an expression of the Baroque crisis in all its facets -epistemological, ontological, cultural and historical - the author reads the fragmented lyric subject of Gongorist poetics back against Renaissance precursors [Rojas' Celestina and the poetry of Boscán and Garcilaso] and in anticipation of the truncated and isolated subject of modernity. The study concludes with an examination of the interaction between the legacies of Gongorism and French Symbolism in the work of selected poets of the Latin American Vanguard [Gorostiza, Paz and Vallejo].

CRYSTAL ANNE CHEMRIS is Visiting Assistant Professorof Spanish at the University of Iowa.

Introduction: Renaissance Solitude
Crisis and Form
Violence, Eros and Lyric Emotion
Self and World: the Crisis of Perception in the Soledades
Time, Space and Apocalypse: the Falconry Scene as Disruption of Prophecy
Góngora and the Modern: "New Poetry"?
Works Cited
Index

CRYSTAL ANNE CHEMRIS is Lecturer in Spanish at 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).

"For scholars in early modern peninsular baroque poetry, Chemris's published articles on violence and the erotic in the Soledades, and in Soledad segunda in particular, have transformed critical discussion of the poem. In light of current critical attention to baroque and neo-baroque in Latin American literature, however, this lucidly written study is certain to become essential reading for a much wider audience." BULLETIN OF HISPANIC STUDIES