Description:

Ramón Gómez de la Serna (1888-1963) was arguably Spain’s most gifted avant-gardist. His influence was profound on modernists and avant-gardists in Spain and across Europe and the Americas. From the moment he began writing as a teenager, readers and commentators have been drawn to his subversive avant-gardism and its ability to uncover the dynamic relations between embodied self and world. His first major work published in 1908 was also his first autobiography: Morbideces. This early “self-reflection” is of singular importance not only in charting his development as an avant-gardist, but also in rethinking how the body’s epistemological authority and representation fundamentally shifted throughout the early twentieth century. In his presentation, Professor Nicolás Fernández-Medina will share how Morbideces outlines with prescient clarity many of the corporeal-aesthetic notions that would revolutionize experimental literature throughout the broader modernist period. Prof. Fernández-Medina is a Full Professor and Department Chair of Romance Studies at Boston University.