Modernism in Spanish-American Literature

Influences

A) Hispanic Roots: Literary modernism was born in Latin America with authors like José Martí and Rubén Darío.

B) The Influence of Parnassianism and Symbolism:

• Parnassianism: Parnassians sought, above all, the formal perfection of the literary work. It represents an attempt to escape from the reality of their time through the creation of an artificial reality where only beauty matters.
• Symbolism: Symbolism is an art form against which reality is merely represented. Symbolists intend to go beyond what can be perceived by the senses. Their mission is to find those other realities that exist behind the apparent reality and struggle with language to suggest them to the reader through the musicality of the text (literary resources).

C) Spanish Influence: The influence of authors like Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer.

Themes

Expression of the External Sensitive World

Beauty of the outside world. The literature of the senses.

Expression of Intimacy

Feelings of loneliness, melancholy, sadness, and uprooting from society. Pessimism. The passage of time. Death.

Evasion

The writer is immersed in a reality that he dislikes and has to manifest his dissatisfaction in some way. Temporary evasion to a supposedly more beautiful and free space. Evasion to other more exotic cultures (mostly Asian) where they find what is lacking in Western civilization.

Cosmopolitanism

An aristocratic environment away from mediocrity. Devotion to the big city. Paris and the bohemian life.

The Feeling of Love

The idealization of love and the woman understood as impossible and unattainable love. Love will be associated with feelings such as sadness, loneliness, and melancholy - a vital conception of love. Eroticism. This attitude must be related to the modernist desire to revolt against all established norms.

The Search for Roots

The Spanish American modernists will address:

• The pre-Columbian past and its myths to assert themselves against the Spanish tradition.
• In the second stage, however, Hispanic American authors embrace the Hispanic tradition as an act of assertion against the economic, political, military, and cultural pressure of the United States.

Language of Modernism

The search for beauty is what we call aestheticism. Some of the defining characteristics of modernist aesthetics may be the attempt to capture through words the beauty of the external world (auditory, visual, olfactory sensations, etc.)

Phonic Level

• Highlight the sound. Express the musicality.
• Phonic resources (alliteration, paronomasia, proparoxytone) that are useful for achieving the musicality of the verse.
• Metric: composed verses (dodecasyllabic, Alexandrine). Rhythms, very marked. Rhyme. Alteration of free verse and traditional verse, Alexandrine sonnets, serventesios, sharp sextets...

Lexical-Semantic Level

• Lexical richness by the introduction of cultisms and neologisms.
• Abundant adjectives, and in many cases, ornamental. Description of environments.
• Chromatic adjectives.
• Mythological place names and anthroponyms.
• Use of synesthesia.
• Metaphors and original and dazzling images.
• Symbols: afternoon, autumn, swan...
• Pomposity, metaphors.

Modernist Authors

Rubén Darío (1867-1916)

Books:

• Azul (1888)
• Prosas Profanas (1896)
• Cantos de Vida y Esperanza (1905)

Spanish Modernists:

• Antonio Machado: Soledades (1903)
• Juan Ramón Jiménez: Platero y yo, Diario de un poeta recién casado, Eternidades
• Ramón del Valle-Inclán: Sonatas (1902-1905)