- Title Information
- Title
- Borges and the Avant-garde: A Transatlantic Foundational Exchange, 1919-1923
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Decker, Polina Krylova
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- creator
- Origin Information
- Copyright Date
- 2013
- Physical Description
- Extent
- vi, 234 p.
- digitalOrigin
- born digital
- Note
- Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2013)
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Ortega, Julio
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- Director
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Mazzucchelli, Aldo
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- Reader
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Valis, Noel
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- Reader
- Name:
Corporate
- Name Part
- Brown University. Hispanic Studies
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- sponsor
- Genre (aat)
- theses
- Abstract
- Jorge Luis Borges' participation in the Spanish literary vanguard of the 1920s constitutes a formative and prolific segment of his career, largely underappreciated within the critical study of his oeuvre. A young Argentine poet visiting Spain with his family, Borges emerges as one of the intellectual leaders of Spanish Ultraism, contributing actively to its campaign for linguistic and thematic renovation of poetic expression. This dissertation examines Borges' poetry published in Spanish literary magazines between 1919 and 1923, viewing it in dialogue with germane, primarily Ultraist, poetic selections, so as to illuminate the crystallization of the Borgesian aesthetic and the overarching unity of his canon. A telling microcosm of Borges' multifaceted poetics, these experimental poems espouse the avant-garde paradigm in their concision, innovative purpose, and reliance on metaphor; yet, they are as eclectic and intimately authentic as Borges' mature poetry, insofar as themes of the author-reader dialectic, poverty of language, and metaphysical speculation take root in these early works and prefigure the trajectory of Borges' poetic project. Analysis of these poems as points of transatlantic contact, then, aims to fill a lacuna in the scholarship on Borges' Ultraist poetry, while seeking to advance the critical discussion of his literary formation in Europe. This dissertation establishes and further contextualizes several of Borges' earliest influences, zeroing in on his (periphrastic) translations of the German Expressionist poets into Spanish and a (mis)reading of Walt Whitman evident in the narrative structure and grandiloquence of Borges' first published poem in Spain. As Borges' voice aligns with the Ultraist vision, his poetry repudiates anecdotalism and confessionalism; rather, he achieves the ethereal ultra-reality through visual-sensory metaphor, amalgamation of disparate images, and a dehumanized, prismatic first-person speaker. The publication of Fervor de Buenos Aires in 1923 marks the end of Borges' experimentation with purely European vanguardist technique and themes, encouraging an almost complete refashioning of his voice. And yet, as Borges eschews the linguistic constraints imposed by the Ultraist tenets, the spirit of the European literary avant-garde subtly permeates his later writing, underlying his lifelong search for poetic authenticity.
- Subject
- Topic
- Jorge Luis Borges
- Subject
- Topic
- influence
- Subject
- Topic
- Spanish Ultraism
- Subject
- Topic
- German Expressionism
- Subject
- Topic
- Transatlantic avant-garde
- Subject (FAST)
(authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/1423828")
- Topic
- Poetry
- Subject (FAST)
(authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/1423791")
- Topic
- Translations
- Subject (FAST)
(authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/30252")
- Name
- Name Part
- Borges, Jorge Luis
- Name Part:
Date
- 1899-1986
- Record Information
- Record Content Source (marcorg)
- RPB
- Record Creation Date
(encoding="iso8601")
- 20131219
- Language
- Language Term:
Code (ISO639-2B)
- eng
- Language Term:
Text
- English
- Identifier:
DOI
- 10.7301/Z0X065D5
- Access Condition:
rights statement
(href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/")
- In Copyright
- Access Condition:
restriction on access
- All rights reserved. Collection is open to the Brown community for research.
- Type of Resource (primo)
- dissertations