Forms of transculturation: The cultural aesthetics of modernist/vanguard poetry of the Americas (Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Vicente Huidobro, Chile, Mario de Andrade, Brazil)

This dissertation establishes a framework for inter-American literary comparison in readings of modernist and vanguardista poetry from Spanish-America, Brazil, and the United States. In tracing the process by which modern poetic forms materialize in print publications, this study examines how poetry relates to social constructions of the “American” in textual and cultural contexts. Such an approach calls attention to the dynamic interactions between immanent poetic structures and “external” historical, sociocultural, and editorial conditions in Ezra Pound's The Cantos of Ezra Pound , Vicente Huidobro's Altazor, Mario de Andrade's Paulicéia Desvairada, and William Carlos Williams' Spring and All.; While these texts do not discuss inter-Americanism per se, each in its way suggests the possibility of forging a “new,” “New World,” and distinctly “American” language out of the multiple languages and cultures that have migrated to the hemisphere. Latin American critical theories of transculturation (transculturación) therefore become central to the notions of Americanism raised in this dissertation. Transcultural processes are in turn analyzed in readings that utilize formalist and structuralist methods, historicism and culture-critique, deconstruction, and social-construction textual theory. Thus, in building critical connections between “developed” and “underdeveloped” regions of the hemisphere, transculturation is not merely a principle thematic of literatures of the Americas; inter-Americanism also necessitates the transcultural encounter of Latin American and Anglo American critical traditions, and of the variegated critical theories and methods available to contemporary literary/cultural scholars.