Cities in Ruins : The Politics of Modern Poetics

by Enjuto Rangel, Cecilia

• ISBN13: 9781557535719
• ISBN10: 155753571X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-11-15
• Publisher: Purdue Univ Pr

Summary

The attacks in New York on September 11, 2001, and in Madrid on March 11, 2004, provoked diverse political reactions, but the imminence of the ruins triggered a collective historical awakening. In Cities in Ruins, Cecilia Enjuto Rangel argues that the portrayal in poetry of the modern city as a disintegrated, ruined space is part of a critique of the visions of progress and the historical process of modernization that developed during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. Enjuto Rangel's study investigates the virtually unexplored map of modern ruins in modern poetry. She interprets modern poetry on ruins as a critique of both capitalist definitions of progress and the devastating effects of modern warfare. Furthermore, she argues that the representation of ruins provokes a "historical awakening" that empowers the text, and the reader, with political and historical agency.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
Urban Ruins in Baudelaire's and Cernuda's Poetry	p. 23
The Modern City: From Ruins to Waste	p. 23
Broken Presents: Walking among Ruins in the Modern City	p. 26
The Other Room: The Shattered Dreams of Baudelaire and Cernuda	p. 44
In the Middle of the Street: Revisiting Baudelaire's and Cernuda's Modern Urban Poetics	p. 61
Cernuda's ôRuinsö: The Ultimate Historical Allegory?	p. 75
Cities in Ruins: The Burlesque Baroque in T. S. Eliot and Octavio Paz	p. 89
In Search of Neo-Baroque Pearls	p. 89
Eliot's Donne: ôExpert beyond experienceö	p. 102
Paz's Quevedo: From Love to Ruins, a Parody of Conceits	p. 116
The Neo-Baroque Chiaroscuro of Paz's ôHimno entre ruinasö	p. 125
Among Stones: Eliot's The Waste Land and Paz's ôPetrificada petrificanteö	p. 131
The Spanish Civil War: A Transatlantic Vision	p. 143
ôHay que tener ojos en la nucaö: Toward a Transatlantic Historical Memory of the War	p. 143
The Racial Other: The Transatlantic Poetics of Solidarity of Langston Hughes and Nicolás Guillén	p. 157
The Feminization of Spain and Its Ruins: Antonio and Manuel Machado, Rafael Alberti, César Vallejo, and Miguel Hernández	p. 174
Cernuda's Clouds and Paz's Voices: The Elegies to Spain	p. 205
Pablo Neruda's Cities in Ruins: Poetic Histories from Madrid to Machu Picchu	p. 225
Historicizing Ruins	p. 225
Against the Nostalgic Self	p. 227
Caro's ôItálicaö and the Traces of the Past	p. 234
Spain in Ruins: Neruda's Political Commitment	p. 237
Journey to the Center of the Past: Neruda's Alturas de Macchu Picchu	p. 254
The Effects of the Real: Reading Ruins in Modern Poetry
Notes	p. 281
Bibliography	p. 307
Index	p. 341
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.