📚 Lunch & Learn: “Forms of Comparison: British Romanticism and Spanish American Modernismo”

How can we compare on equal terms seemingly unrelated literary movements, such as British Romanticism (1780-1830) and Spanish American Modernismo (1880-1920), from different periods, regions, languages, and cultures? In this talk, guided by Diego Alegría,  we will explore a form of comparison based not on a logic of themes, influence, subgenres, chronology or center/periphery relations, but on poetic experimentation through syntactic figures, or ambiguous word combination strategies. By contrasting the poems “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and “Salutación a Leonardo” with selected passages from grammar books and rhetorical manuals, we will examine how parenthesis as a syntactic figure and a punctuation mark undermines the grammatical, logical, and typographic nature of the well-formed sentence, a unit consecrated by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century grammarians and rhetoricians.

This free, in-person event is open to faculty, undergraduates, and graduate students.

Registration required.

Lunch provided!