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Vallejo's Venus de Milo and the Ruins of Language

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Christiane Von Buelow
Christiane Von Buelow*
Affiliation:
University of California, Irvine
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Abstract

The critical reception demanded by an avant-garde artwork recapitulates in intensified form the hermeneutical problem of literary study, the relation of criticizing to criticized text. Walter Benjamin's dialectical concept of allegory, rooted in the interpretive practice of “critical decomposition,” provides a singularly productive model for analyzing the notorious difficulties inherent in an avant-garde text by the preeminent Peruvian poet, César Vallejo (1892–1938). In Trilce, Vallejo depicts Venus de Milo, the celebrated symbol of Romantic, symbolist, and modernista aesthetic perfection, but only to dismember the sculpture's self-sufficient totality and to propel it into a temporalizing linguistic fragmentation, into an allegorical mode of signifying.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 104 , Issue 1 , January 1989 , pp. 41 - 52
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1989

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