1st day of sabbatical

Between now and January I hope to complete a book with the title What Lorca Knew: Spanish Poetics and Intellectual History. I will be free of teaching responsibilities in this period. You can follow my progress on this book on this blog, and read excerpts on Bemsha Swing as I post them.

I have parts of nine months to complete this project. What's left of May, June through December, and January before school starts again. The main tools I will use are the Seinfeld chain and the pomodoro session, in other words, continuous stretches of writing every day, and short concentrated bursts of effort.

Preface

PART ONE: Genealogies

1. Introduction: Spanish Exceptionalism and Intellectual History

2. The Grain of the Voice: Lorca’s “Play and Theory of the Duende”

3. María Zambrano and the Genealogy of Late Modernism

4. Declining Fortunes: Jorge Guillén and Luis Cernuda

PART TWO: Continuities

5. Fragments of a Late Modernity: Samuel Beckett and José Ángel Valente

6. Antonio Gamoneda and the Persistence of Memory

7. What Claudio Knew: From Pragmaticism to Mysticism

PART THREE: Extensions

8. Verse and Prose (From Juan Ramón Jiménez to Olvido García Valdés)

9. Aphorism and Poetic Thought (From Antonio Machado to Jorge Riechmann)

10. Blanca Varela and Eduardo Milán: The Spanish American Connection

11. The Uses of Lorca: From Modernism to Kitsch

The parts I still have to complete are the preface and introduction, chapters 7, 9, and 11. So I have lots of time, but I cannot waste too much time either. The preface should fall into place once everything else is written, so there are four major tasks. Chapter 7 is almost done, so I really have to concentrate on 3 major tasks.