Volume 45 Number 1

Lorca, Buñuel, Dalí: Art and Theory

Manuel Delgado Morales and Alice J. Poust (Eds.)

2001
206 pages
ISBN 0838755089
Bucknell Review

This volume of essays commemorates and celebrates the creative works of Federico García Lorca, Salvadór Dalí, and Luis Buñuel. While these giants of twentieth-century Spanish literature, film, and art are more known for their creativity than for their theorizing, the essays in this volume suggest that the artistic creations of Lorca, Dalí, and Buñuel feature theoretical ideas on (their) contemporary art in general, as well as on their particular art forms. Miriam Balboa Echeverría focuses on the figure of the female servant in the plays of Lorca, situating Lorca's treatment of this character vis-á-vis Spanish Golden Age theater, and providing evidence that Lorca's dramatic use of the character of the female servant prefigures that of French dramatist Jean Genet. In "Embroiderers of Freedom and Desire in Lorca's Poetry and Theater," Manuel Delgado Morales studies the portrayal of women engaged in needlework, and its theoretical implications, in the work of Lorca. Sidney Donnell's essay juxtaposes films by Buñuel and Pedro Almodóvar and examines each cinematographer's use of objects against the aesthetic theories of his day. Luis Fernández Cifuentes presents the argument that Lorca's book, Impresiones y paisajes, is a generational turning point in that Lorca both pays tribute to the cartography of the Generation of '98 and also rebels against the older generation's preference for certain geographical, cultural, and aesthetic values. Candelas Gala explores the ways in which Lorca pokes fun at stereotypical attitudes about sex and artistic anxiety as he also exemplifies the artistic awareness of Modernism. Virginia Higginbotham's study focuses on the ways in which surrealism, as a system of signification, and film, as a narrative device, both represented in the cinema of Buñuel, resonate in recent works by one of Spain's leading writers, Juan Goytisolo. Michael Iarocci analyzes the role of necromantic rhetoric in Lorca's Libro de poemas, arguing that this Lorguian work thematizes a break with romantic metaphysics. Lorca's tendency to have his male characters die in his theatrical works or to be invisible onstage is the focus of Robert Lima's essay. He conjectures that Lorca might have eliminated heterosexual males completely from his dramaturgy, had he lived to write more works. In his study of the artistic exchanges among Lorca, Dalí, and Buñuel Antonio Monegal affirms that, notwithstanding the general compenetration of poetry, painting, and film in avant-garde movements, these three contemporaries made poetry the common denominator of their art forms. Pithamber R. Polsani explores the role of a theoretical paradigm called Paranoiac-Critical Activity, developed by Dalí himself, in the artist's works from the 1930s, demonstrating how each element of this activity relates to Lacan's reading of paranoiac delirium. In her study Alice J. Poust traces parallels between the cultural ideas modeled by Lorca's work and the theory of culture formulated by Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West. C. Christopher Soufas Jr. presents a comparative study of the theatrical theories and practices of Lorca and his contemporary Antonin Artaud.

Contributors: Miriam Balboa Echevarría, Manuel Delgado Morales, Sidney Donnell, Luis Fernández Cifuentes, Candelas Gala, Virginia Higginbotham, Michael Iarocci, Robert Lima, Antonio Monegal, Pithamber R. Polsani, Alice J. Poust, and C. Christopher Soufas Fr.

About the editors:

Manuel Delgado Morales is a professor of Spanish at Bucknell University.

Alice J. Poust is an associate professor of Spanish and Chair of the Spanish Department at Bucknell University.