My working title is Lorca's Shattered Subjectivities
That title works with my first chapter, on the persons of the verb; and with a Vallejo chapter, and with the Beckett material.
The other chapter was on avant-garde Lorcas, That fits with the idea of making him an avant-garde rather than neopopular poet, even in his neopopular works.
A very simple idea, that the biographical construction of Lorca as a unified autobiographical subject just doesn't work. It's a way of unifying something that isn't capable of being unified.
One of the sections of the first chapter will be on interpellations, second person addresses. Another will be on third person objectifications, distancing effects of converting the I to a he / she / it.
I'm thinking of a shorter book, an extended essay rather than a series of discrete chapters.
6 comments:
Will you look at any biographies?
I've read the biographies. The question is to get away from biography, though, or to interpret biography differently where it does come up. The problem is that the main biographer is Ian Gibson.
I was thinking that, obviously, biographies will be problematic (because lives aren't unified, and the genre is defective, and the Lorca cult), and wondering if the problematicity would be interesting. Maybe not.
1. Good.
2. No hay tal yo de conjunto. (JLB)
3. Ian Gibson. Discuss.
Also: can *anyone* be constructed in a unified way, or is there something specific going on with Lorca and Vallejo, or is it that people have tried particularly hard to unify *them,* or what?
NB my Vallejo paper is moved from our panel to Alan's, but it is from an old old blog post, really.
Title:
Reading Vallejo against the grain of identity
Abstract:
Taking as its point of departure not only the poetic subject in Vallejo as primordially fractured but the intimations in his prose works that like his contemporary Borges (“La nadería de la personalidad,” 1925) he eschewed the idea of a unified self, this presesentation will interrogate the biographical paradigms that have often been brought to bear on readings of Vallejo. Despite advances in scholarship in recent years, such paradigms still inform much of his critical tradition. How have expectations that Vallejo’s work perform Peruvian, Indian, or other identities in particular ways hamper its reading? What is gained by insisting on his mestizo roots, or by declaring his poetry mestizo? What effect has the emphasis on the meagreness of his Parisian circumstances and his allegedly mournful and martyred character had on the interpretation of his poetry? I will argue that it is useful to formulate alternative views of Vallejo not for purposes of better elucidating his work but so as to lift the interpretive shadow the traditional view of his personality has cast over his texts.
Borges is a good addition to the conversation. See my next post.
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