Joyce and Lezama Lima

2001
265 pages
$43.50
ISBN 0-8387-5420-1
LC 00-028930
Bucknell Studies in Latin American Literature and Theory

From Modernism to Neobaroque: Joyce and Lezama Lima examines the historical and intertextual relationships between the aesthetics of European modernism and contemporary Latin American literature in the neobaroque mode by means of a comparative analysis of the works of José Lezama Lima and James Joyce. Revising concepts such as influence, imitation, and appropriation, this work portrays "modernism" as a postcolonial "World" aesthetic rather than as a European-centered movement. Contrasting Lezama's reading of Joyce to those by Borges, Pound, Eliot, and Stuart Gilbert, From Modernism to Neobaroque studies the systematic "refraction" of principles taken from Joyce-aesthetic epiphany, stasis, the use of neologisms, the "technic of the labyrinth," the "mythical method," and the fictional appropriation of Vico's New Science-in Lezama's novels. At the same time, the book discusses different issues in Hispanic cultural history that influenced Lezama's reading of Joyce, describing a period of Joycean enthusiasm that arose in Hispanic American letters on the publication of the first Spanish translation of Ulysses.

From Modernism to Neobaroque is the first thorough book-length exploration of the Lezama-Joyce relation, a study that deals with how one great writer read another from a different culture. Not only does Salgado's study identify how Lezama's writing ponders and reformulates some central Joycean themes-the interplay between the Homeric and the Orphic, orthodoxy and heterodoxy, death and resurrection-but it is itself a highly readable tour-de-force of linguistic, critical, and cultural translation.