Gazing Backwards in Fernando Vallejo

Authors

  • Juanita Cristina Aristizábal Catholic University of America

Keywords:

Fernando Vallego, Generación de 1972

Abstract

This chapter examines the Generation of '72's take on global cultural and political projects by way of the group’s enfant terrible, Fernando Vallejo.  Focusing on the contrast Vallejo strikes between his dandy narrator and the actually lived cityscapes of Medellin, Aristizábal shows how the painter of modern life in Colombia would come to view the modernist destruction with which he is readily associated as quaint.  Covering Vallejo's life works, Aristizábal furthers this critical take on universal modernisms in highlighting the plurality of popular voices that Vallejo captures.  As the vox populi upends the Colombian lettered city, for Aristizábal, we witness a simultaneous trivializing of global cultural standards and a subtly idealist chronicling of life in post-Violencia Colombia.

Author Biography

Juanita Cristina Aristizábal, Catholic University of America

Juanita Aristizábal (PhD Yale University, 2011) is Assistant Professor of Spanish at The Catholic University of America, where she teaches nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first-century Latin American literature and culture Her research focuses on comparative approaches to the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries from the perspective of the discourses of modernization, modernity, decadence, marginality, religion, and national identity. Her current book project explores Fernando Vallejo’s dialogue with the modernista tradition in Spanish America. She has published articles on Vallejo, Machado de Assis and female autobiography in nineteenth-century Colombia.

Published

2012-10-15

How to Cite

Aristizábal, J. C. (2012). Gazing Backwards in Fernando Vallejo. A Contracorriente: Una Revista De Estudios Latinoamericanos, 10(1), 147–170. Retrieved from https://acontracorriente.chass.ncsu.edu/index.php/acontracorriente/article/view/621

Issue

Section

Dossier: Poesía e imagen