I first analyzed Lorca's duende as a manifestation of his own poetics. That is fine; that is what every other Lorca scholar tries to do as well.
But the lecture on the duende is also an exceptionalist theory of Spanish cultural expression. I broke off that part of my analysis into a separate chapter.
But then all the parts that don't seem fit in with the reading of the duende as a theory of Spanish exceptionalism, end up supporting this second reading. All the syncretic and universalizing ideas that make it so much more than a theory of Spain, end up being typical of theories of cultural exceptionalism after all. I am on the verge of a break-through here.
Modernist theories of exceptionalism are never monolithic, always syncretic, because they need to synthesize various elements. They also need to universalize, even when they are based on a minoritizing impulse.
Poetics, in terms of a poet's ideas about poetry, and poetics, as a system of thought based on a series of tropes, come together.
3 comments:
I like this distinction. I'm trying to develop a "poetics of industrial organization", for example. The primary meaning of that is "a system of thought based on a series of tropes", but there's also a sense in which it is actually Ezra Pound's poetics (something Tony Tost's PhD dissertation on "machine poetics" has helped to clarify for me, btw). And, I suppose, my own. That is, poetry can be approached as an articulation of how we are organized socially, which is to say, emotionally, for work and, of course, (apropos duende) play.
The link between these two conceptions iis in romanticism.
Very interesting. Watching closely.
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