Date Available
4-22-2014
Year of Publication
2014
Document Type
Doctoral Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
College
Arts and Sciences
Department/School/Program
Hispanic Studies
Advisor
Dr. Enrico Mario Santí
Abstract
The most common approaches to arranged Poetic Collection are the chronological and the bibliographical orders, that is, the ones that privileges a book that normally would be called an anthology: the arrangements of poems following the order of the compositions of the poems (chronological), or the order of previous publications (bibliographical). "El corazón del instante" (The Heart of the Instant, 1998) by the Mexican poet Alberto Blanco (Mexico City, 1951) is a collection of twelve books of poems in one volume. The books in the collection --or the “chapters”, as Alberto Blanco call them in his “Introductory Note” of the book --are presented not in a bibliographical or chronological order, but in accordance to an order that the poet imposed to the book himself. The structural proposal of the book contradicts the definition of any “normal” anthology. In order to approach a book of such nature, we would use and apply the concept of “contextural poetics”, introduced by Neil Fraistat in his book "Poems in Their Place (The Intertextuality and Order of Poetic Collections)", published in 1986. This approach suggest that a PoetryCollection or a simple Book of Poems should be able to be read as one long and single poem. Some of the key concepts of my investigation are already listed in the subtitle of the book: “Intertextuality” and “Order”, and we would like to add “Context”. The concept of “contextural poetics” is explain by Fraistat as the resultant of the context of the book where the poems are reunited, the interaction among poems, and the “contexture” that derives from that interaction. Many critics claim that in every long poem has to exist some kind of narrative, idea that brings other important concepts that we have to approach, like long poem, poetic sequences and poetic series that would complement our study. We believe that the book "Libertad bajo Palabra [1935-1957]" by Octavio Paz, in the critical edition of Enrico Mario Santí, is the implicit model of "El corazón del instante". Our goal is to try to determine what is "El corazón del instante", because in the “Introductory Note” the poets claim that the book is not an anthology, but a “complete cycle of poems”. That is what we would try to find out: what is “a complete cycle of poems”.
Recommended Citation
Zamora-Zapata, Carlos, "Crítica Contextural: El corazón del instante de Alberto Blanco: Ensayo de un Método" (2014). Theses and Dissertations--Hispanic Studies. 14.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/hisp_etds/14
