Vallejo Abstract

This is archived in JSTOR but I cannot find the article. I want it. The quotation marks are around JSTOR/LoC key words.

“César Vallejo (1892-1938)” is, without doubt, one of the most enigmatic figures of “Contemporary Spanish-American literature”; there are a number of unsolved mysteries with regard to his work and life that this essay sets out to review. Several themes have been proposed as central to Vallejo’s work (“pain,” “religiosity,” “the absurd,” and “politics”), but I suggest that these be seen as subplots in the narrative of a life and work shot through with “Otherness.” Some previous studies have touched on the issue of the double, but to date there has been no substantive treatment of this issue as a methodological tool to assess Vallejo’s work. The essay focuses in particular on four aspects of this Otherness: the Otherness of Vallejo the man, Vallejo as the critic’s Other, the Self as Other in his poetry, and Vallejo as cultural Other.

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5 Responses to Vallejo Abstract

  1. Z says:

    And on Vallejo, and on everything, I have to get Elaine Scarry, _The Body in Pain_.

  2. Z says:

    An anonymous review on Scarry:

    Elaine Scarry’s central argument is that pain is a state which defies reduction to language, and her remarkable book defies summation outside its own terms. Like all profoundly original works, the book creates its own idiom (making, unmaking) to discuss and compicate the issues it raises — first, in a brilliant and moving phenomenological analysis of torture and its relation to language, ultimately moving on to a profound and unforgiving commentary on the Judeo-Christian scriptures and those writings’ subtle (though, as Scarry explains it, it seems remarkable that one did not notice before) inversions of the given circumstances of human embodiment and the subject’s relation to made-things in both in the material world and the imagined one. There is no literary critic (and indeed few novelists) who have provided such goosebump-inducing insights on why human beings should make things (books, statues, laws, gods) at all; and then unmake them just as fervently in acts of unmaking (war, torture).

  3. Unless I’m mistaken, that abstract seems to belong to this:
    Stephen M. Hart, “Vallejo’s ‘Other’: Versions of Otherness in the Work of César Vallejo” in Modern Language Review Vol. 93 Pt 3 (1998), http://www.jstor.org/stable/3736492
    I’m guessing you can get that (or was your point that you could not?) but if not, a suitable e-mail address to mention that to would be my forename dot my surname at queens dot ox dot ac uk.

    • Z says:

      THANK YOU! It’s got to be Stephen Hart. I think I have a paper copy of it in archives. We don’t have all of JSTOR anymore due to budget cuts, so I thought I was going to have to go to New Orleans/Houston/Austin to chase this down. More to come. See? Who said blogging wasn’t research?

  4. Hattie says:

    I’ve downloaded a sample of *The Body in Pain* and can see right away how brilliant it is, so I’m buying it.

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