*Lorca anticipates the Américo Castro cultural theory [quotes to support that]. That is why he can become multicultural hero for US poetics.
*Modernity is the big problem in Spanish cultural history, yet a special issue of a journal about "recalcitrant modernities" slights modernist writing itself. The only major writer who appears is Blasco Ibáñez, with all due respect not a modernist at at all. There is a huge gap in relating modernity to modernism. Jo Labanyi's and Helen Graham's Spanish Cultural Studies: The Struggle for Modernity barely touches on poetry at all. That is where Spanish writers were most modern, and most successfully. Of course I can understand studying things outside the canon, but hello, is the modern of modernity related at all to the modern of modernism? I think so. You have to go beyond Ortega y Gasset, who thought Andalusian culture was just backward, vegetative.
*The modernity debate takes place in the field of 19th century literature and culture, much more than in my own field (20th). That is because prose fiction is so dominant in that period.
*The romanticism of Lorca himself explains why the response to him in the US is also romantic. Ginsberg and Duncan are just big romantic poets. This is obvious, like most of what I'm saying.
*Modernism can be traced to
a) romanticism
b) French symbolism and Flaubert
c) historical avant-garde
A lot depends on this particular choice. Of course, I favor the layered approach myself. I like shifting the perspective whenever it needs shifting.
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