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Este texto plantea la situación de las dos culturas elaborada por Charles Percy Snow en su conferencia de 1959 y elabora sobre la noción de la transdisciplinariedad como acercamiento metodológico a la poesía de Clara Janés, haciendo hincapié en la física como su referente analógico más frecuente. Los poemarios de Janés giran en torno a dos alternativas, la física clásica y sus certezas, causalidad y determinismo, por un lado, y la incertidumbre, indeterminismo e irreversibilidad de la física cuántica, por otro, alternativas articuladas en el texto en torno a las figuras de Erwin Schrödinger con el determinismo de su función de onda y Niels Bohr, arquitecto de la cuántica y de su principio de la complementariedad. El recurso poético de esta autora es mantenerse en el estado flotante de la paradoja cuántica para sostener el potencial creativo y evitar el colapso que, como sucede con la observación en la física cuántica, causaría la preferencia por una de las opciones.

En los poemas de Sánchez Robayna asistimos a la experiencia de la percepción situada en el cuerpo presencial de una primera persona que atentamente mira el mundo para determinar lo que es la cosa, analizar cómo se manifiesta, cómo se produce la experiencia perceptiva y cómo se relaciona con la propia subjetividad. Se trata de dilucidar las leyes que rigen la experiencia de la percepción con el fin de constituir un mundo que tenga sentido. Si la percepción conlleva el intelecto para este poeta en una conexión “orgánica”, el entorno se manifiesta como una compleja red de relaciones cuyo sentido se mantiene opaco pues la palabra, que es conocimiento, es también desconocimiento, sonido y silencio, significante e interioridad. En esos intersticios vertiginosos se producen conjunciones perceptivas donde se borran los límites de las cosas dando paso a las percepciones de elementos entrecruzados y superpuestos de los «teatros ardientes» que la realidad es para este poeta. In Sánchez Robayna’s poems we witness the experience of perception situated and embodied in a first person subject who attentively looks at the world to determine what is the thing observed, how it manifests itself, how perception occurs and how it relates to the observer’s subjectivity. The goal is to elucidate the laws ruling perception in order to construct a meaningful world. If perception for this poet implies intellect in a sort of “organic” connection, the surrounding space reveals itself as a complex network of relations whose meaning remains opaque because the word, which is knowledge, sound and signifier, is also ignorance, silence, and interiority. In these vertiginous interstices perceptual conjunctions take place where borderlines among things become blurred leading to perception of the mixed and overlapping elements that “burning theatres” that are reality for this poet.

espanolEl presente ensayo explora notables coincidencias en la poetica de Juan Larrea con algunos puntos centrales de la fisica cuantica, a saber, la correlacion entre su busqueda en la interioridad y las investigaciones sobre el atomo en las primeras decadas del siglo XX, entre el abandono de la subjetividad monolitica en favor de un Espiritu universal y colectivo y el observador en la fisica moderna «enredado» en la trama cosmica, objeto de su observacion y, en particular, el papel del idioma frances en tratar el conflicto con los binarismos occidentales y su posible resolucion en la complementariedad de Bohr, paralelo de la teoria del tercero secretamente incluido de Basarab Nicolescu. EnglishThis essay explores notable coincidences in Juan Larrea’s poetics with some central points in quantum physics, such as, the correlation between the search in his inner self and the investigations on the atom taking place during the first decades of the twentiethcentury, between leaving aside the monolithic subjectivity in favor of a universal and collective Spirit and the «entangled» observer in the cosmic web, object of his/her observation, in modern physics, and, particularly, the role of the French language in dealing with the conflict with Western dualisms and their possible resolution in Bohr’s principle of complementarity, a parallel of Basarab Nicolescu’s theory of the hidden third. francaisCet essai explore les coincidences remarquables dans la poetique de Juan Larrea avec certains points centraux de la physique quantique, tels que la correlation entre la recherche dans son etre interieur et les recherches sur l'atome menees au cours des premieres decennies du XXe siecle, entre la subjectivite monolithique en faveur de l'Esprit universel et collectif et de l'observateur « enchevetre » dans la toile cosmique, objet de son observation, en physique moderne et, en particulier, le role de la langue francaise dans le traitement du conflit avec les dualismes occidentaux et leur resolution possible dans le principe de complementarite de Bohr, parallele a la theorie du tiers cache de Basarab Nicolescu.

Un libro tan conocido y estudiado como es Poeta en Nueva York de Garcia Lorca recibe en este ensayo una lectura nueva e informada interdisciplinariamente a partir de las ciencias: la biologia, con las teorias de Darwin sobre la evolucion y seleccion natural; la fisica, con Prigogine y su teoria del caos; y la ecologia. Denuncia el olvido a que ha sido relegada la ecologia en los estudios de critica literaria para favorecer un acercamiento textual y simbolico en el que se descartan problemas tan acuciantes como es el desastre ecologico, y hace hincapie en la importancia del marco referencial en este libro. Este acercamiento permite fijarse en lo que para Garcia Lorca fue central, especialmente en esta coleccion pero tambien en toda su obra anterior, es decir, la interaccion del hablante como organismo vivo y fisico con su entorno igualmente fisico. No se trata de suplantar un tipo de vocabulario, el literario, por otro de tipo cientifico, sino senalar que las propiedades halladas en esos sistemas cientificos—asi en la teoria de la complejidad y el enfoque en la naturaleza tanto viva como construida—tambien se encuentran en este libro.

Le dialogue inter-semiotique entre les poemes de Sanchez Robayna et les dessins de Tapies dans Sur une confidence de la mer grecque (2005) souscrit a l’idee de la «modernite inachevee» de Habermas. Entendant l’art comme un processus de raisonnement critique sur la realite, leurs œuvres se fondent sur la correlation entre l’epiphanie qui surgit de l’attention portee a des objets a premiere vue insignifiants et l’elegie inscrite dans leur nature evanescente.

Rafael Alberti's Sobre los angeles has been read as the expression of the poet's personal and religious crisis and as a manifestation of the crisis of modernism and the social and political upheavals affecting Europe and Spain in the early decades of the twentieth century. While taking into consideration these valid approaches, this paper approaches Alberti's book by establishing an analogy with chaos theory, not simply as another discourse or vocabulary but because the properties found in the physics theory of complexity are also found in Sobre los angeles. Like others in his generation, Alberti articulates his crisis in images from physical, material reality. Radical changes were taking place in physics, and relativity, electromagnetism and thermodynamics were being discussed widely at the time of this book's composition. Prigogine's theory of creative chaos serves as framework for Alberti and his creation out of the ashes of youthful romantic constructions.Sobre los angeles de Rafael Alberti se ha leid...

This essay explores the role of language in Tirso's El burlador de Sevilla as the major system of social mediation. Placing its validity on the level of the divine, the play's social order centers on the non-arbitrary value of words. Don Juan's language of direct reference to life and nature contrasts with the societal discourse of those representing officialdom, as it shows total disregard for the social agreement about the binding power of words. Both sides, however, maintain an interchange, which defines them, not as opposite poles of the life-society spectrum, but as mirror images vis-a-vis societal rules and conventions. Don Juan and his society model each other's desires and, in the process, they each exhibit the lack in their core.

Critics have acknowledged the innovative spirit of the avant-garde in Suites, but little has been done on the possible impact of Cubist and scientific tenets on the conception of these poems. This essay proposes a reading of Suites from the perspective of the avant-garde spirit, as it affected the arts and sciences at the time when this collection was being written. Cubist preoccupations about form, space, dimension, colour, simultaneity, multiple planes, and its disregard for the anecdotal in favor of the fragmentary and the discontinuous paralleled and responded to the new scientific discoveries. While remaining faithful to his belief in mystery and the limitations of reason, Lorca visited many of the tenets in Cubism and the sciences; the self-reflexive character of the Suites is informed by Lorca's awareness of those tenets, which he adopts as a way to understand and speak the language of the universe.La critica ha reconocido el caracter vanguardista de las Suites lorquianas, pero poco se ha escrito s...

Lacan approach to identity and language represents a most critical revision of Western metaphysics and Cartesian certainties. His works have also ignited a number of heated responses from feminist critics. Lacan controversial theories offer much to consider for the analysis proposed in this paper, which is a reading of Céspedes Quaderno proibito and Maraini Donna in guerra using Lacan theoretical frame as the critical tool. Valeria and Vanna, the female characters in de Céspedes and Maraini novels, exemplify problems that arise from holding on to a sense of security that reasonableness and social propriety promise at the expense of one own desire. For both, the awareness of such conflict emerges through the process of writing a diary. Their diary entries reflect a gradual realization of the distance between what they discover about themselves and what the outside order tells them to be. Lacan explanation of reality through the orders of the Imaginary, Symbolic and Real, and his understanding of truth, lack and desire, clarify the areas of concerns that these authors raise regarding identity and gender difference.

While on the island of Sardinia with a woman companion, the narrator in Nocilla Lab (2009), one of the novels in Agustin Fernandez Mallo’s “Nocilla” trilogy, recalls the time seven years earlier when he was feeling mentally stagnated and she prepared for him a piece of bread with Nocilla [Nutella].1 The experience of savoring this spread had a radical effect in him: Toda esa pastosidad que se hormigoneaba en mi boca, toda la antimetafisica que recorria aquella masa sin centro de gravedad definido en mi boca, toda aquella cosa marron que solo era espesa piel en una rebanada, superficie, apariencia, simulacro […] y que era tambien residuo, excremento, conservantes y saborizantes que, por pura paradoja, generan vida, fue asi, gracias a una rebanada de Nocilla, como llegue a renegar de la metafisica, como lle-gue a mi salto evolutivo, el verdadero salto, porque nuestros actos parecen analogicos, y probablemente lo sean, pero a efectos practicos son digitales, van a golpes, a saltos de vinetas de comic, de silencios que vamos dejando en medio para poder interpretarlos. (42) [all that doughy mass turning into concrete inside my mouth, all the metaphysics traversing that dough devoid of a gravity center, all that brown stuff which was just a thick skin on a piece of bread, surface, appearance, simulacrum […] that was also residue, excrement, preservatives and flavoring substances which, by mere paradox, generate life, it was like that, thanks to a Nutella bread toast, that I was able to deny metaphysics, that I made my evolutionary jump, the true jump, because our actions seem analogical, and they probably are, but for practical purposes they are digital, with abrupt motions, like jumping from panel to panel in a comic strip, with silences we leave in between in order to interpret them.]

In the art of Maruja Mallo, and specifically in her series Naturalezas vivas [Living Still Lifes] (1941–1944), elements usually considered as polar opposites—nature and art, subject and object, and imagination and geometry—become integrated in structures characterized by unstable balances, ongoing transformations, and the upturning of conventions. Not only is the title, Naturalezas vivas, a departure from the naturalezas muertas [still lifes] genre (although the focus of this series is not on living things, but on still, inert objects: seashells, starfish, crabs, snails), but the treatment of these objects also injects them with mobility, becoming, in their own stillness, images of the ever-going motion of life.1 As an artist who said that she holds her brain in her hand (“El surrealismo” 120), Maruja Mallo’s creative state exhibits a harmonious fusion of imagination and measure. Shells are the image to express her understanding of creativity as the blending of imagination and the body with carefully thought out calculations.

Jorge Guillen’s verses quoted above could easily be considered as the poetic version of one of the most relevant cores in Baruch Spinoza’s (1632–1677) philosophy: the conatus or self-conscious desire that, identified with virtue, is the effort to secure happiness and increase the potential for action (Ethics III, VI–VII). Conatus is synonymous with persevering in life and acting according to reason, and it involves acquiring what is required for knowledge (Deleuze 101–102, 103). Guillen’s verses point out that the spiritual conatus, identified with poetry, does not stem from some original point or aim at some teleology, but happens in a space in between, as an insertion in an ongoing process. It is identified with poetry because it is spiritual, which differentiates it from desire understood in a carnal way. Poetry emerges when “intuitions, visions, feeling,” which the lines contrast with “pure abstraction,” insert themselves in between “words and the spirit.”1

In a scene filled with evocations of the Garden of Eden, the two lovers in poem XVI, “Yo quiero merendar con Jacinta” [I Want to Have a Picnic with Jacinta] are enjoying a picnic (Jacinta la pelirroja 96).1 Like Eve offering Adam the apple from the tree of Good and Evil, Jacinta, the title protagonist of Moreno Villa’s book, Jacinta la pelirroja (1929), bites a piece of toast and offers the poet the nibbled part. Stretched out on the grass, Jacinta looks like a sea creature, a mermaid, or even a sinuous snake-like woman with her long wavy hair and long legs. There is no Yahweh in this Eden-like scene, but when in the conversation the patriarchal figure of President Lincoln is mentioned “por austero tenaz y politico” [for being austere, tenacious and a politician], Jacinta is moved. The “serious” mood soon changes and Jacinta returns to her coquettish biting: “iJacinta muerde tan bien la cereza! […] muerde una tostada / y me da la parte mordisqueada” [Jacinta bites the cherry so well! / […] / she bites a toast and gives me the nibbled part], exclaims the smitten poet.

In the entry for March 6, 1932, in Orbe (Orb), a sort of intellectual diary that Juan Larrea kept from 1926 to 1932, the poet wrote: “The concept that the two conflicting elements, the personal element and the social element, which I have found in me, fuse forming a new and invulnerable individuality in relation with the partial force of other individualities, presents evidently an essential point of contact with the atomic theory” (128–129). At the time of this writing Larrea was reading an article on atomic disintegration in Lu, a French journal. The combination of positive and negative electric charges in the internal constitution of the atom presented to Larrea a helpful analogy for his own search for the essential in self and art. This is one among many instances in this author’s prose and poetic works where an analogy with science illustrates his personal and artistic search.

In his 1928 lecture “Thoughts on Modern Art” Lorca declared the need for art to advance “just as science does, day after day, into that incredible field which does become real, toward the absurd which does become the pure edge of truth” (135). Lorca admired the impulse to explore unknown, even risky and nonsensical areas that sciences were modeling so dramatically, venturing against established patterns to reach the unconventional nature of truth. The arts, on the other hand, lagged behind under the burden of long-held models. Suites and Canciones (Songs), the two collections that I will discuss in this chapter, were written in the early 1920s during years when Lorca was living at the Residencia, among the innovative and dynamic spirit of the avant-garde.1 They have a predominant focus on the physical world and cosmic phenomena, and on exploring poetic imagery and strategies in consonance with the risk-taking spirit Lorca expounded in his lecture. In connection with some of these poems, Lorca produced a number of drawings that, as he wrote to his friend and art critic Sebastia Gasch, helped him deal with subjects that were too lengthy or contained a “poetically stale emotion”; besides, drawing amused him “extraordinarily” (Epistola-rio II74). I will refer to some of these drawings as they pertain to the poetic works.

Alberti was twice a witness, in 1910 and 1984, to the appearance of Halley’s comet in the sky. To commemorate each occasion he wrote Elegia del cometa Halley (Elegy to Halley’s Comet), included in Marinero en tierra (Sailor on Land 167) and Retornos del cometa Halley (Returns of Halley’s Comet), published with the proceedings of the 1983 Symposium in his honor held at the University of Toulouse-Le-Mirail (Dr. Rafael Alberti).1 Both poems reveal a strong identification between poet and comet: two wanderers appearing near the beginning and the end of the century, orbiting erratically around the sun, searching for the light. Besides the coincidence of poet and comet in time, it is no surprise that Alberti would feel attracted to Halley’s comet (figure 5.1) considering the beauty of this astral body, as captured in photographs: a luminous white body propelling forward and emitting, or surrounded by, a halo of a yellow color turning into an intense, fiery red, against a blue and, further on, black background.

Between 1918 and 1922 Diego wrote Imogen (Image), Limbo (Limbo), and Manual de espumas (Manual of Sea Foams), three books that reflect the atmosphere of change and exploration existing during the times of their composition. They are part of Diego’s “poetry of creation,” which also includes Fabula de X y Z (Fable of X and Z; 1926–1929), Poemas adrede (Poems on Purpose; 1926–1943), Biografia incompleta (Incomplete Biography; 1925–1960), and Biografia continuada (Continued Biography; 1971–1972). In contrast with Diego’s more traditional works, his “poetry of creation” reflects the early twentieth-century atmosphere of renewed attention to the relationship between art and reality. As Diego himself declared, modern poetry was to shift the traditional focus from the subjective to the world of things, or in other words: “Not to look for things in us, but for us in things.”1 In a 1976 interview with Fernando Delgado on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, Diego reiterated his commitment to things, to the point of identifying it as the most fundamental aspect of his poetic credo (“This seems to me to be the fundamental aspect in my poetry” [12]).

This portrait is paradigmatic of the image that has come down to us of Concha Mendez as an energetic, multitasking woman in close contact with her own body. She was a “modern” woman who practiced sports, who dared to write, and who defied the expectations of her bourgeois family by leaving home and traveling on her own, and by befriending people quite unconventional for her social milieu. Neither in her life nor in her work did Mendez take notice of the distance traditionally established between physical and intellectual activity, the body and the spirit, surface and depth. Similarly she ignored the gender split between the domestic (female) and the public (male). In agreement with the Bergsonian disregard for the old division between mind and matter (Carr 55), she perceived her bodily and mental energy as a whole: what is visible on the surface corresponds to what is experienced in depth.

In Reality and the Poet, Pedro Salinas recounts an anecdote about Garcilaso de la Vega who, attending a social gathering during a visit to Italy, joined his distinguished hostess in lamenting that her servants had destroyed the beauty of the sunset by entering into the room with bright lamps (72–73).1 Like Garcilaso, Salinas would have lamented the destruction of the beauty at sunset, a time in the day when reality seems suspended in a liminal state between light and shadows. The ambiguity of light at the sunset hour invites ways of perception that are less than rational or “normal.” Salinas’s fascination with subtle, unconventional ways of perception runs parallel with his interest in the imponderable side of reality, as made evident in the titles of his first three books, Presagios (Premonitions; 1924), Seguro azar (Certain Chance; 1924–1928), and Fabula y signo (Fable and Sign; 1931). The title Presagios, as Jorge Guillen explains, comes from prae-sagire (to perceive beforehand, to test, to try), suggesting a kind of knowledge predating confirmation or proof; a presasio is a signal of what is to come, an omen or foreboding.2 Seguro azar, his next collection, relates “certainty” to chance, thus, making unpredictability what is sure to happen. Fabula y signo fuses the poet’s fabling or creative perspective with the sign, as the supposedly faithful means to convey it.

For Jorge Guillen the paradigm-altering advances in science brought no estrangement between science and the arts. In El argumento de la obra (The Argument of the Work), the poet recognizes the high level of intensity that poetry has achieved in the last 150 years since romanticism, and contradicts those who predicted an even greater divide between science and the arts (105, 1969 ed.). The traditional split between science and the arts, which in 1959 C. P. Snow called the two cultures, does not find a supporter in Guillen for whom the same creative energy infuses works in both fields. He also finds that there is harmony between imagination and discipline and between rhythm and what he calls mathematics of the image. He even identifies a way of focusing on numbers, which instead of obstructing passion, energizes it. This pasion cifrada (coded passion), as Guillen calls it, has its strongest exponent in his own work Cantico (Canticle).1

Despite the fact that Vicente Aleixandre considered her one of the best young authors of the generation of social poets of the 1950s, María Beneyto's writings have been disregarded by critics. While sharing the social concerns of the other poets of her generation, Beneyto's poetry also reveals the dilemma of the woman author facing a cultural tradition that espouses pre-established models for her conduct and identity patterned mostly in accordance with tenets of Romanticism. Beneyto resorts to those models as projections of herself as she seeks to articulate her own identity as woman and author. The objective of this essay is to explore Beneyto's reflection on her own identity as woman and poet and, through that process, on the nature of poetic language. By adopting the identity of Eve as the embodiment of instinctual and primitive life that culture has suppressed, or by addressing the role of the mother or angel of the hearth, or the identity of Ophelia, George Sand, or Madame Bovary, Beneyto's poetic speaker hopes to make audible their silenced voices and to contest the rigidity that cultural convention imposes on those roles. Beneyto's poetry destabilizes the essentialism of those models and comes to an understanding of female identity and writing as a constant process of redefinition based on the individual woman's exchanges with the surrounding context.