Twilight of the Avant-Garde: Spanish Poetry, 1980-2000 »

Jonathan Mayhew is professor of Spanish at the University of Kansas and the author of Claudio Rodríguez and the Language of Poetic Vision, among other titles.

Twilight of the Avant-Garde addresses the central problem of contemporary Spanish poetry: the attempt to preserve the scope and ambition of modernist poetry at the end of the twentieth century. Offering a critical analysis of Luis Garcìa Montero’s “poetry of experience,” and the work of José Angel Valente and Antonio Gamoneda, among others, Mayhew challenges received notions about the value of poetic language in relation to the society and culture at large. Ultimately championing the survival of more challenging and ambitious modes of poetic writing in the postmodern age, this volume argues that the cultural ambition of modernist poetics remains alive and well in our age of cynicism.

Acknowledgments

Preface

Part One: The Avant-Garde and its Discontents: The Place of Poetry in Contemporary Spanish Culture

1    Aesthetic Conservatism in Recent Spanish Poetry

2    Three Apologies for Poetry

3    Poetry, Politics, and Power

Part Two: Valente, Gamoneda, and the "Generation of the 1950s"

4    In Search of Ordinary Language: Revisiting the "Generation of the 1950s"

5    José Angel Valente's Lectura de Paul Celan: Translation and the Heideggerian Tradition in Spain

6    Antonio Gamoneda's Libro de los venenos: The Limits of Genre

Part Three: Women Poets of the 1980s and 1990s

7    Gender Under Erasure (Amparo Amorós, Luisa Castro)

8    Desire Deferred: Ana Rossetti's Punto umbrío

9    Concha García: The End of Epiphany

10  Lola Velasco's El movimiento de las flores and the Limits of Criticism

Afterword

Bibliography

Index