From Modernism to Neobaroque

About this book

"From Modernism to Neobaroque: Joyce and Lezama Lima examines the historical and intertextual relationships between the aesthetics of European modernism and contemporary Latin American literature in the neobaroque mode by means of a comparative analysis of the works of Jose Lezama Lima and James Joyce. Revising concepts such as influence, imitation, and appropriation, this work portrays "modernism" as a postcolonial "World" aesthetic rather than as a European-centered movement. Contrasting Lezama's reading of Joyce to those by Borges, Pound, Eliot, and Stuart Gilbert, From Modernism to Neobaroque studies the systematic "refraction" of principles taken from Joyce - aesthetic epiphany, stasis, the use of neologisms, the "technic of the labyrinth," the "mythical method," and the fictional appropriation of Vico's New Science - in Lezama's novels. At the same time, the book discusses different issues in Hispanic cultural history that influenced Lezama's reading of Joyce, describing a period of Joycean enthusiasm that arose in Hispanic American letters on the publication of the first Spanish translation of Ulysses."--BOOK JACKET.