Amán Rosales Rodríguez
Romanica Cracoviensia, Tom 19, Numer 4, Tom 19 (2019), s. 257 - 269
https://doi.org/10.4467/20843917RC.19.024.11913Autobiography and corporal self in the essays of Salvador Elizondo. A reading in base of Jean Starobinski
The purpose of this article is to comment on some specific aspects of the literary essay in base of texts by two contemporary authors: the Swiss Jean Starobinski (1920–2019) and the Mexican Salvador Elizondo (1932–2006). What these two writers have in common is a certain conception of the essay modelled after the example of Montaigne: the essay is viewed as the place in which the concrete, corporeal, individual is, so to speak, shown and exposed. It is argued that the essayistic voice emerging from the writings of Starobinski and Elizondo is a reflective voice that expresses most concrete experiences in human life.
Amán Rosales Rodríguez
Romanica Cracoviensia, Tom 15, Numer 4, Tom 15 (2015), s. 298 - 308
https://doi.org/10.4467/20843917RC.15.023.4290
This article presents and confronts two views concerning the link between modernity and
romanticism. On the one hand, the view proposed by the Nobel Prize winner, the Mexican
Octavio Paz in his book Los hijos del limo. Del romanticismo a la vanguardia, and, on the other
hand, the one put forward by the prolific Spanish writer Rafael Argullol in his El Héroe y el
Único. El espíritu trágico del romanticismo. While for O. Paz the romantic movement as a child
of modernity has inspired partially the modern search for the new in itself, for R. Argullol the
romantic spirit is expression above all of a tragic-heroic mood of dissatisfaction with modernity.
Both writers see the paradoxical nature of romanticism –sometimes longing for the past,
sometimes dreaming about the future– as a complex expression of modernity’s self-awareness
and self-criticism.