Aesthetics of Equilibrium

Bruce Dean Willis received his M.A. in 1992 and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 1996. He teaches Spanish American Literature and Cultures on Portuguese languages at the University of Tulsa. He has published articles and chapters on poets and edited Essays on Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literature and Film in Memory of Dr. Howard M. Fraser.

Choice February 2007 Humanities \ Language & Literature \ Romance Willis, Bruce Dean. The vanguard poetics of Vicente Huidobro and Mario de Andrade. Purdue, 2006. 236p bibl index afp (Purdue studies in romance literatures, 36) ISBN 1-55753-422-5, $43.95; ISBN 9781557534224, $43.95. Reviewed in 2007feb CHOICE. Huidobro and Andrade belong to the Latin American vanguardist movement, which flourished between WW I and WW II. Of the period's many isms, Chilean Huidobro is identified most with creacionismo and Andrade with Brazilian modernismo. Despite these authors' achievements in poetry and fiction, Willis (Univ. of Tulsa) devotes this challenging and, in places, dense study to their theoretical writings, as they search for balance in their new poetics and aesthetics through the tradition of change. Though influenced by French symbolism and European cosmopolitanism, both sought to differentiate themselves from surrealism (Huidobro) and futurism (Andrade). Willis divides this study into two parts: "Poetry as Orientation of the Creative Self" (on Huidobro) and "Poetry as Contraband from the Unconscious" (on Andrade). The first comprises three chapters devoted to Huidobro's early manifestos on poetic imagery, two later manifestos on orientation and trajectory, and final manifestos on the concept of the poet as God. Part 2 (also three chapters) looks at Andrade's "Prefacio Interessantissimo" as mock manifesto, the loss of purity and solidarity in Andrade's poetics, and Andrade's struggle to define aesthetic simultaneity in A escrava que no e Isaura. The conclusion summarizes this search for a poetics of equilibrium in the face of avant-garde extremism. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. -- J. Walker, Queen's University at Kingston