Poetry Criticism | Parra, Nicanor - Adelaida Lopez Mejia (essay date 1990)

Adelaida Lopez Mejia (essay date 1990)

SOURCE: Mejia, Adelaida Lopez. “Nicanor Parra and the Question of Authority.” Latin American Literary Review 18, no. 36 (July-December 1990): 59-77.

[In the following essay, Mejia discusses Parra's work after 1968 in the context of the transition from surrealism to postmodernism in Latin American poetry.]

In the years between 1954 and 1968, Nicanor Parra published various poems that refer to the humorous, aggressive, and deliberately mundane nature of his own “antipoetry”.¹ During that same period many European and North American artists were gravitating towards what is currently termed a postmodern aesthetic, in what Fredric Jameson describes as a reaction “against the established forms of high modernism”.² In Spanish American literary criticism, “high modernism” proves a confusing and awkward term. Parra's “antipoetry” came as an exasperated...

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:

eNotes Pass