Poetics

Our research interests focus on 20th-century literatures in English, Modernist studies, poetry and poetics, gender, psychoanalysis, memory studies, comparative literature (English, Spanish, French), and critical and cultural theory. Central to our research is the problem of representation in literature and the visual arts from 1890 until today. We are also interested in the contemporary debates on: the transformations of the individual and of kinship, trauma (Trauma Studies), ethics and alterity (mostly from a gendered perspective), exile and diaspora, and environmental issues in current writing.

Our research revolves around the avant-gardes and modernism, in all their richness and diversity, from "high modernism" up to its non-hegemonic versions (peripheral, sapphic, non-western modernisms). Psychoanalysis, in itself a modernist phenomenon "par excellence," has occupied an important part of our work, starting with Freud and, from the period that opened with the "Controversial Discussions," the British school of object relations (Melanie Klein, W. Bion, H. Segal) and its transnational reach, especially in Latin America. Main issues in this field have been: symbolization, fantasy (unconscious, and its relations with fantasy in literature), melancholia, fetish, masquerade, psychosis, identification and empathy. <br />Most of our work in "memory studies," has focused on the poetry of the Auden group (esp. Auden and Spender) and cultural memory around issues such as the obliteration of the fallen from official history and the work of mourning. <br />In the domain of poetry and poetics in the 20th and 21st centuries, we devote most of our work to women poets, and to poetry in its different locations, languages (English, Spanish, French, mostly) and politics. All genres and formats: from print to digital formats, con- and co-textually, looking into tradition, experimentation and performance. Transdisciplinarity and hybridity across genres also occupies an important part of our work. <br /><br />