Review
"... invites a quiet reexamination of [the] certainties about what surrealism is, or what it sounds like." - Prof. Patrick O'Connor Oberlin College "... conveys with new depth the international language of surrealism and the originality and richness of Mexican poetry at the time." - Prof. Anke Birkenmaier Columbia University"
Product Description
One of the first of its kind, this study investigates how Mexican literature and culture interact with surrealist aesthetics. The work demonstrates that Mexican surrealist poetry pursues a reconciliation of opposites. This also work demonstrates how Mexican Surrealist poetry from the 1930s to the 1960s pursues a reconciliation of opposites. Drawing on scholarly theories and the work of Luis Mario Schneider, Michael Riffaterre, James Valender, Anthony Stanton, Manuel Ulacia, Paul Friederich, Eichenbaum and Shklovsky, this book analyzes how Villaurrutia, Paz, and Cernuda employed surrealist metaphors to bring together antithetical or complementary states: dream and vigil, life and death, past and present, writing and erotic desire.Whereas Villaurrutia's penumbral surrealism draws on marginal exponents of the movement such as Jean Cocteau, or precursors such as Giorgio de Chirico, Paz resurrects the surrealistic dualism of ancient gods already present in Cantares de los antiguos mexicanos. For his part, the Spaniard Luis Cernuda a poet from the Generation of 27, exiled in Mexico, reveals oneiric aspects of the Mexican landscape, defamiliarizing the image in a style suggestive of Louis Aragon in "Le Paysan de Paris".
