Encounter of modernities: Poetics, Baroque, and intertextuality in Jose Lezama Lima and Stephane Mallarme

This dissertation explores the historical, critical, intertextual, and theoretical relationships between the works of the Cuban writer Jose Lezama Lima (1910--1976) and the French poet Stephane Mallarme (1842--1898). The general context for this study stems from the ways in which late modern French poetry became one of the major non-Hispanic traditions informing the work of Lezama Lima and other members of the Origenes group. I argue that Lezama's neobaroque poetics emerges from the encounter and appropriation of the mechanisms of reinvention of the tradition that Lezama identifies in the New World baroque, and of certain critical and aesthetic concepts associated to the literary modernity represented by the work of Mallarme.Through the play of allusion, intertextuality, and translation, Lezama transforms the modern topos of authorial death in Mallarme into an eschatology in which author and text "resurrect" (borrowing Lezama's term) as they are re-created and re-invented through their historic and spatial circulation across diverse interpretative communities. Lezama's theory of history and culture stems from the transposition of this symbolic eschatology into the realm of history. I show how Lezama's theory of history is related to the concepts of Musique and Lettres in Mallarme's poetics, and to the theorization of the New World Baroque. Another central topic of modern poetics explored in this dissertation is the breakdown of mimesis. Upon studying Lezama's critique of the Aristotelian notion of metaphor, I examine how Narcissism and re-writing in Mallarme and Lezama operate respectively as a strategy that destabilizes identity and mimesis, and as an allegorical model of Lezama's symbolic eschatology.These tropes and theoretical concepts are mobilized in Lezama's essays on Mallarme. These texts constitute an example of a "neobaroque" reading and rewriting of the French poet, as well as a reflection of Lezama's own writing practices. Lezama stages a simulacrum of Mallarme that illustrates how the canonical French poet is read from the island---the space in which history and culture are re-invented according to Lezama's concept of the "espacio gnostico americano."...