UC Berkeley

Baroque Poetics and the Logic of Hispanic Exceptionalism

by Allen Young

In this dissertation I study the how the baroque is used to understand aesthetic modernity in twentieth-century Spain and Latin America. My argument is that the baroque, in contemporary Hispanic and Latin American studies, functions as a myth of cultural exceptionalism, letting critics recast avant-garde and postmodern innovation as fidelity to a timeless essence or identity. That is, by viewing much contemporary Spanish-language as a return to a culturally specific baroque tradition -- and not in light of international trends -- critics in effect justify the exclusion of Spain and Latin America from broader discussions of modern literature. Against this widespread view, this dissertation proposes an alternative vision drawn from the work of Gerardo Diego, José Lezama Lima and Severo Sarduy. These authors see the baroque not as an ahistorical, fundamentally Hispanic sensibility located outside the modern, but as an active dialogue with the wider world. In very different ways, they use the baroque to place the Hispanic world decidedly inside global aesthetic modernity.

In contrast to most contemporary scholarship on the topic, I do not take the baroque to be a predefined aesthetic practice, readily identifiable in seventeenth- or twentieth-century authors. Rather, I see it as a conceptual tool that can be, and has been, put to an array of different uses -- among other things, it can be used to situate Spain and Latin America in relationship to the rest of the world. My approach thus highlights the term's ideological valence, focusing on what it does instead of what it designates. The baroque's current function, as a way to sideline the Hispanic world from a larger understanding of international aesthetic modernity, came about slowly and in response to political events (particularly the Spanish Civil War and the Cuban Revolution). Other formulations of the baroque -- other uses of this tool -- offer more compelling models of cultural dialogue and inclusion. These other formulations are what I find in the work of Diego, Lezama and Sarduy.

In chapter one I examine contemporary criticism and underline the contradictions inherent in viewing the baroque as an alternative, regional modernity. In the second chapter I trace the concept's genealogy from nineteenth-century art history to contemporary Iberian and Latin American studies, in order to explore how the baroque was invented, and how it came to acquire its current cluster of meanings and functions. Gerardo Diego and the 1927 group form the basis of the third chapter, in which I consider the baroque as a site of struggle over the meaning of Spain's cultural legacy, both before and after the Spanish Civil War. In chapter four I read Lezama Lima's baroque in light of his teleological, future-oriented poetics, while in the fifth and final chapter I study how Sarduy theorized the baroque as aesthetics of epistemic groundlessness, and argue that it became for him -- and for many later critics -- a literary or cultural substitute for revolution. These three writers present visions of the baroque that do not exclude the Hispanic world but make it an integral part of what it means to be modern.