Palimpsestos modernistas. Apropriación simbolista en Rubén Darío, T. S. Eliot, Pere Gimferrer y Luis Antonio de Villena

Abstract

This dissertation explores both the Hispanic and Anglo-American modernist traditions from the common standpoint of the palimpsest. Central to the diverse body of modernist writings is the appropriation of French symbolism, the rewriting of tradition, and the adaptation of these factors as a space for identity construction. My project involves a comparative study of the trope of the palimpsest in the poetics of R. Darío (1867-1916), T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), P. Gimferrer (b. 1945), and L. A. de Villena (b. 1951), and examines how these poets engage in a modernist and neo-modernist rewriting of a vast and universal literary heritage. By adapting the symbolist model of the revalidation of tradition, these poets articulate strong critiques of national and international culture during the tumultuous turn-of-the-century period and, later, during the 1970s in Francoist Spain. They create a kind of literature and a type of intellectual that emerges from the literary and cultural conformism that defines the artistic and social movements that surround them, reflecting on modernist modes of aesthetic production that defy the limitations of post-romanticism and socio-realistic poetry. In my dissertation, I assert that the articulation of (neo)modernist poetics of the appropriation of tradition and symbolism is central to the development of a culture of aesthetic alternative and its resistance against exhausted modes of artistic representation. By reading a variety of poetic texts and essays, Modernist Palimpsests contributes to an understanding of the role played by overwriting and identity construction in the formation of global modernisms’ multidisciplinary landscape.