| A groundbreaking literary movement, Hispanic modernismo initially provoked conflictive critical reactions on the part of literary specialists. Specifically, the aesthetics proposed by this school of thought was interpreted as a direct attack to many tenets valued in late 19th and early 20 th century Spanish letters. It is in this context that a controversy arouse concerning the chromatic effects emphasized by some modernist writers because their representation of color was viewed as excessive and abusive. As a result, the preoccupation with color associated with the aforementioned authors is the conerstone of this dissertation.; Modernist poetics are perfectly exemplified by the works of Ramón del Valle-Inclán (Spain 1866–1936) and, specifically, in the three seminal texts under careful scrutiny in this dissertation: La lámpara maravillosa (an aesthetic treatise; 1916), La medianoche (a somewhat authobiographical narrative; 1917) and Tirano Banderas (an ubiquitous novel; 1927). In them we witness the collapse of the concept of mimesis as previously interpreted by, among others, the realists. In Valle-Inclán's works language is no longer supposed to be a tool to apprehend a concrete referent. Instead, the written word, the very act of writing, is treated as an indepent phenomenon with the ability to create its own paradigms through the use of color and other techniques.; The modernists' resulting emphasis on the textuality and artificiality of the literary creation marks not only the origin and development of modernismo but also the birth of the avant-garde artistic movements. As a result, in the works of Valle-Inclán we are able to discern the steps linking the many manifestations of Modernism (i.e., Symbolism, Hispanic modernismo, the so-called avant-garde, etc.). |
