The Routes of Modernity: Spanish American Poetry from the Early Eighteenth to the Mid-Nineteenth Century (review)

Arizona fournal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 269 and LaPolla's Grammar of Role and Reference (1997) and Gui tart's Theory of Theme, Cause and Locus (1998) to look at causation in both the Spanish and Yaqui languages. Fernando Rubio also uses Guitart, this time to demonstrate how his ideas are applied to "prepositional verbs." Pablo Pastrana takes a multifaceted look at lexical, morphosyntactic and orthographic change in Spanish from 1521-1770 using Clamades y Cbrmonda as a textual yardstick. With its varied subject matter, concise and insightful presentation and text-based analyses, Convergencias Hispánicas offers something for everyone . Benjamin Russell Fraser The University of Arizona The Routes of Modernity: Spanish American Poetry from the Early Eighteenth to the MidNineteenth Century Bucknell University Press, 2002 By Andrew Bush This study represents an ambitious attempt to locate the beginnings of modern Spanish American poetry and to trace the intertextual paths it took during the approximately 150 years referred to in the book's title. It is a carefully researched and tightly argued response to the position taken by Octavio Paz in The Children of the Mire regarding Hispanic culture's supposedly late arrival to the "modern tradition," that is, to the tradition characterized by criticism and rupture. Clearly, this project was written with the expert in mind, for it never steps back from its use of highly specialized language nor does it provide the type of background that would assist the general reader. Yet those willing to enter into dialogue with this work will be rewarded with a revealing presentation of Spanish American poetry that is embedded in underappreciated events, texts, and tropes. Bush's breakthroughs stem from three major points. First, he shows that the originality, openness , and critical perspective linked to modernity (and previously believed to be absent from the poetic production of the period) are present in works generally overlooked by literary scholarship, most notably, in pieces by minor poets, in popular poetry, and in the poetry of mestizos, mulattos, and Indians. Second, he replaces Paz's central concept of "criticism," which focuses on the relation of the present to the future and its ability to facilitate social change, with that of historical consciousness, which focuses on the relation of the present to the past. Historical consciousness is examined through the lens of mourning, melancholy, and the ties diat survivors maintain with the past. Modernity comes to Spanish America as it struggles with melancholy, seeks detachment and separation from the past, and begins the creative formation of national history. Third, Bush traces what he calls an internal commerce of letters which come to form an independent Spanish American network of intertextuality. This "dialogue of poems" becomes the foundation of modern Spanish American poetry, a Spanish American poetry that is not, as Paz believed, a weak Spanish American reflection of a Spanish reflection of European literary responses to modern life. Part I of the book consists of two chapters and deals with the period in which poetry is not yet predominantly a form of print culture. The first chapter explores the ongoing conquest during the years 1700-1778, and the second traces the road toward literary independence through the manuscripts of the Mopox expedition to Cuba at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This international expedition opens discussion of center and periphery and die early, if limited, appearance of the latter in Olmedos "Victoria de Junin." The manuscripts of the Mopox expedition also allow Bush to examine the Enlightenment reevaluation and re-envisioning of the land that become crucial in the landscape poetry of the nineteenth century and in the creation of a voice for the overthrow of metropolitan hegemony. Part II opens with Chapter 3, "Constitutional Dialogues, ca. 1823," which begins the story of the ascendency of print culture in Spanish America and die concomitant rise of prose debates about the nation and citizenship. If this type of dialogue becomes essential to the political fiction of America, it is the critical dialogue of poems that make Spanish American poetry original and 270 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies modern. Chapter 4, "Hesitant Step, Counter-Sublime : Bello and Heredia, 1823-1832" follows up with the dialogue between Bello...