Poetic Boundaries of Open Cities

The author argues that in order to fruitfully explore the city within the cultural-studies framework one must first accurately define the city as an object of knowledge, which only highlights the problematic nature of the boundaries of the city. The article foregrounds the key role of the cultural heteronomy of the city, which overrides its civilisational heteronomy. Culture, which the Polish culture scholar Stanisław Pietraszko understands as a way of being in accordance with values, is the determining factor in the identity of the city and is manifest in the openness and fluidity of its limits. Central thematic concern lies in literary “prostheses” of cities, which are needed in places inhabited by migrants, the colonized, “the subjects homesick” for “their” cities. Fiction and poetry bear a crucial ontological and axiological city-making responsibility, as demonstrated in the author’s previous studies on Quixotic La Mancha and reconfirmed in this paper on the example of the Latin...

2017

This article, using Cesário Verde as a point of reference, presents diverse strategies of poetic reconstruction of the city via scansion and formal analysis of representative poems: “cidade/city/ cité” by Augusto de Campos, “Ode Triunfal” by Álvaro de Campos (heteronym of Fernando Pessoa), “As Scismas do Destino” by Augusto dos Anjos, “Paisaje de la Juventud que Vomita (Anochecer en Coney Island)” by Federico García Lorca and “O Inferno de Wall Street” by Joaquim de Sousândrade. These poems are taken from Portuguese, Brazilian, Spanish and US-American literature and provide a fertile line of inquiry into urban poetics. *Este artículo, utilizando como punto de referencia a Cesário Verde, busca presentar diversas estrategias de reconstrucción poética de la ciudad, a través de la exploración y el análisis formal de poemas representativos: “cidade/city/cité”, de Augusto de Campos; “Ode triunfal”, de Álvaro de Campos (heterónimo de Fernando Pessoa); “As scismas do destino”, de Augusto dos Anjos; “Paisaje de la juventud que vomita”, de Federico García Lorca, y “O inferno de Wall Street”, de Joaquim de Sousândrade. Estos poemas de la literatura portuguesa, brasileña, española y estadounidense constituyen una fértil línea de investigación sobre la poética urbana.

452F (8), 2013

452ºF. Electronic journal of theory of literature and comparative literature, 8.

Catedral Tomada, 2017

Resumen En este ensayo analizaré la inserción del binomio civilización/barbarie en la literatura de los escritores modernistas. Para ello analizaré brevemente el contexto histórico tras la Independencia de las colonias y el nuevo orden neo-imperialista que, asentado en la ciudad, exigió cambios sociales, económicos y urbanísticos que afectaron a todos los estratos sociales. Seguidamente explicaré cómo se hizo frente a la formación de un nuevo ciudadano que debía seguir ciertas pautas de comportamiento para aislarse de la barbarie y el salvajismo de los lugares alejados de la metrópolis. Justificaré con ello la importancia de la llamada ciudad letrada en la formación de las nuevas naciones modernas y describiré el nacimiento del escritor modernista, autodefinido por su individualidad y por las contradicciones que entraña su escritura. Ejemplificaré mis argumentos con los textos que, nacidos en el proceso de la modernidad, reivindican la tradición negando la sociedad del utilitarismo capitalista en la que se insertan. Abstract In this essay, I examine the inclusion of the civilization/barbarism binary in the literature of modernistas writers. To this end, I will briefly analyze the historic contexts after the independence of the colonies and the new neo-imperialist order that settled in the city and demanded social, economic and urban changes that affected the entire social strata. At the same time, I will explain how the formation of a new citizen was undertaken, as it had to follow certain behavioral guidelines to isolate itself from barbarism and savagery of places far away from the metropolis. With it I will justify the importance of the so-called ciudad letrada (city of letters) in the formation of new modern nations and describe the birth of the

As a result of war and state repression, exile has become one of the most significant and massive process of social and cultural dislocation of the Twentieth Century, producing diasporas of truly nomadic subject with very singular experiences of social space and time, of memory and imagination. Through the use of semiotic phenomenology as a method and the fragmentary and non-linear performance of an auto-ethnographic narrative, this paper attempts to give a situated account of the reconstruction of memory and imagination drawing on my own experience of returning back to Chile after years of exile and self-exile. Sergio Fiedler is Academic Director for the SIT Program: Cultural Identity, Social Justice and Community Development in Chile. He also teaches in the Magister of Cultural Studies in UARCIS. He is currently writing on social movements and gender in the context of the transition to democracy in Chile.

2018

This collection of essays studies the depiction of contemporary urban space in twenty-first century Latin American fiction. The contributors to this volume seek to understand the characteristics that make the representation of the postmodern city in a Latin American context unique. The chapters focus on cities from a wide variety of countries in the region, highlighting the cultural and political effects of neoliberalism and globalization in the contemporary urban scene. Twenty-first century authors share an interest for images of ruins and dystopian landscapes and their view of the damaging effects of the global market in Latin America tends to be pessimistic. As the book demonstrates, however, utopian elements or “spaces of hope” can also be found in these narrations, which suggest the possibility of transforming a capitalist-dominated living space.

2022

The Phalène (moth) or Poetic Act is a mode of poetry as collective action formulated by the poet Godofredo Iommi at the end of the 1950s in Valparaíso, Chile. The poet organised the first Poetic Acts with a group of architects and artists from the PUCV School of Architecture and Design. Iommi continued working on his poetic proposal of the Phalène with a group of European poets and artists in the early 1960s while he lived in Europe. This article examines the Phalène by analysing unpublished documents that register the poetic experiences carried out in France during the 1960s and Ciudad Abierta (Open City) in the 1970s. Through analysing the Phalène, the article provides perspectives about the dialogue between art and the city around the notions of the ephemeral, commonality, and the resignification of the place.