El destello insaciableEstéticas de la brevedad en las vanguardias poéticas en Hispanoamérica

Resumen

This doctoral thesis, titled The Insatiable Flash: The Aesthetics of Brevity in Latin American Poetic Avant-gardes, explores the way in which minimalist poetics came to the fore during the period of the isms that emerged in the first decades of the twentieth century. With an analytical approach to the main textual typologies that coexisted in said moment –such as the proverb, the aphorism, the epigram, the haiku and short forms in popular poetry– this thesis addresses the verbal worlds of five representative voices of the Latin American avant-garde. The five books to be studied are: Un día… poemas sintéticos (1919; ‘A Day… Synthetic Poems’) by José Juan Tablada, Vientos contrarios (1926; ‘Contrary Winds’) by Vicente Huidobro, Membretes (1924-1926; ‘Letterheads’) by Oliverio Girondo, Cosmos indio (1938; ‘Indian Cosmos’) by Flavio Herrera and Microgramas (1940; ‘Micrograms’) by Jorge Carrera Andrade. Together, these five collections from five Latin American countries (Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Guatemala and Ecuador) span a period of twenty-one years.Structured over four chapters, this research project traces in equal measure the antecedents of the short form and its extensive diffusion beyond the period of the historical avant-garde, in particular towards the end of last century. With the concept of ‘poetic synthesis’ as the common denominator, both the historical avant-gardes and those which arose in the New Continent, wove links, not only between each other but also with the short forms in the literature of the Far East, so creating a heterogenous mosaic of these literary genres. These pages give an overview of these general parameters before focussing on a concrete analysis of the selected corpus. In addition to the aforementioned works, the thesis concludes with a brief study of Artefactos (1972; ‘Artifacts’) by Chilean poet Nicanor Parra and El canto de las moscas [Versión de los acontecimientos] (1998; ‘Song of the Flies [Version of the Events]’) by Colombian poet María Mercedes Carranza, to demonstrate the way in which the aesthetics of brevity has continued its course, feeding and metamorphosing in diverse ways, living on beyond the end of the avant-garde movements...