Morbidities and “The Concept of The New Literature”
Ramón Gómez de la Serna (Introduction and Translation from Spanish by Nicolás Fernández-Medina)
Ramón Gómez de la Serna (1888-1963) was one of Spain’s most gifted avant-gardists. Oftentimes remembered as the inventor of the greguería—a type of witty and humorous epigram that recasts the commonplace and absurdities of everyday reality—he was a prolific writer and published dozens of novels, essays, short stories, articles, editorials, and biographies throughout his life. Two of his major works—the autobiography Morbidities (1908), and the manifesto “The Concept of the New Literature” (1909)—belong to his earliest period of experimentation. These two early works are of singular importance not only in understanding his development as an avant-gardist, but also in analyzing Spanish literature within the broader framework of European avant-garde culture. With prescient clarity, they highlight many of the aesthetic notions that would revolutionize experimental literature throughout the modernist period. This book offers the first complete English translation of Morbidities and “The Concept of the New Literature,” and it introduces anglophone readers to some of Gómez de la Serna’s most passionate ideas about modernity and “new literature.”
About the Author
Nicolás Fernández-Medina is Professor of Modern Spanish Literature in the Department of Romance Studies at Boston University. He specializes in late eighteenth- to early twentieth-century Spanish literature, philosophy, and culture. His books include Life Embodied: The Promise of Vital Force in Spanish Modernity (2018), Modernism and the Avant-garde Body in Spain and Italy (co-edited, 2016), and The Poetics of Otherness in Antonio Machado’s ‘Proverbios y cantares’ (2011). He is currently working on a monograph titled Raising the Dead: The Science and Literature of Resuscitation in Spain. He is also General Managing Editor of Brill’s A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Iberian Peninsula (4 vols.)
Nicolás Fernández Medina’s edition and translation of Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s Morbidities is timely and rigorous. It will allow the Anglophone reader to enter the fascinating world of “Ramón.” Morbidities shows how the young Gómez de la Serna reflects upon his image as a writer. In addition, this book includes Gómez de la Serna’s manifesto “The Concept of the New Literature,” a text impregnated with a highly vitalistic tone, where he defends modernity to the death and brutally criticizes the burden of tradition for young creators to conceive and develop the new art to come. These two major early works belong to his earliest period of experimentation. They are of singular importance not only in understanding Ramón’s development as an avant-gardist, but also in analyzing Spanish literature within the broader framework of European avant-garde culture.
—Enric Bou, Ca’ Foscari University
Professor Fernández-Medina, a leading expert on the work of Gómez de la Serna, illuminates these texts with clarity and precision in the introduction and preliminary study. Fernández Medina points out the relevance and radical modernity of Gómez de la Serna’s reflection on the interrelation of identity, body and literature of the self, without neglecting gender issues and the political implications of this early works. The translation stands out for its exceptional precision, literary elegance and intellectual rigour. This volume by Fernández-Medina will contribute decisively to the English-language public’s recognition of Gómez de la Serna as one of the great renovators of twentieth-century world literature.
—Ricardo Fernandez Romero, University of St. Andrews
Nicolás Fernández-Medina’s fascinating introduction and exquisite translation into English of Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s Morbidities (1908) and ‘The Concept of the New Literature’ (1909) promise to restore an often-overlooked voice to ongoing debates about European modernism and avant-garde culture. The ‘new literature’ Gómez de la Serna argues for so passionately in his manifesto and exemplifies here in his wildly creative autobiographical life writing set the stage for the author’s life’s work and prefigure the direct, bodily, fully sensorial engagement with everyday modern life that was so urgently expressed during much of the historical avant-garde in Spain.
— Susan Larson, Texas Tech University
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Details
Published: October 2024
Formats
Hardback
ISBN: 9781638040569 PRICE: $150
eBook
ISBN: 9781638040576 PRICE: $150
Subjects
LiteratureModernism
Series
Modernist Constellations