Georgetown University

Washington, D.C. – Tania Gentic, assistant professor in the Spanish and Portuguese department at Georgetown University, will present her paper “‘Cuba: Mi secreto’: The Poetics of Space in María Zambrano and José Lezama Lima,” on Dec. 28 at the Modern Language Association annual convention, held this year in San Francisco.

Gentic’s paper explores the relationship between the poetic theory of Lezama and that of Spanish philosopher María Zambrano, who established a close friendship with the Cuban writer during her exile from Spain in the 1930’s. She maintained their friendship until his death in 1976 and contributed a number of articles to “Orígenes,” a journal founded by Lezama in 1944.

Although recent publications have concentrated on Zambrano and Lezama’s correspondence and personal relationship, Gentic studies the poetic theories of the two writers together, particularly with respect to how they figure space and subjectivity in their works. Gentic’s paper originates from a line in Zambrano’s essay, “La Cuba secreta,” which was published in “Orígenes” in 1948: “In this way, I felt Cuba poetically, not qualitatively, but as a substance itself. Cuba: now a visible poetic substance. Cuba: my secret,” Zambrano wrote.

“Even as the text critically rethinks the poetics of writers like Lezama and Virgilio Piñera, it also offers Zambrano’s own philosophy of spatial poetics as a subjective experience of feeling that challenges traditional philosophical emphasis on reason,” said Gentic.

Gentic analyzes the ways Zambrano uses metaphors of space to present “sentimental reason” as the foundation of the modern subject. Using Zambrano’s notion of Cuba as simultaneously space, subjectivity and substance, Gentic offers a unique counterpoint to Lezama’s “La expresión americana” in which by focusing on the imago, an idealized mental image of another person or the self, he offers a Baroque conceptualization of American identity rooted in aesthetic form rather than substance. Gentic suggests that reading the two spatial poetics together may allow new theories of how to think about trans-Atlantic literature in terms other than those figured by traditional logics of reason to emerge.

Her presentation is part of a panel that she co-organized to shed light on José Lezama Lima’s work by looking at significant poetic, mythic and sexual spaces, both inside and outside of “America in his writings and others.

Tania Gentic is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, with a focus on contemporary Transatlantic studies. She is currently working on a book-length project that explores theories of ideology, ethics, and affect in newspaper crónicas in Spain and Latin America. She teaches courses on 19th-21st century Peninsular and Latin American literature.

About the Modern Language Association

The Modern Language Association, the largest and one of the oldest American learned societies in the humanities (est. 1883), promotes the advancement of literary and linguistic studies. The 30,000 members of the association come from all fifty states and the District of Columbia, as well as from Canada, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. PMLA, the association’s journal of literary scholarship, has published distinguished scholarly articles for over one hundred years. Approximately 9,500 members of the MLA and its allied and affiliate organizations attend the association’s annual convention each December. The MLA is a constituent of the American Council of Learned Societies and the International Federation for Modern Languages and Literatures.

About Georgetown University

Georgetown University is the oldest and largest Catholic and Jesuit university in America, founded in 1789 by Archbishop John Carroll. Georgetown today is a major student-centered, international, research university offering respected undergraduate, graduate and professional programs in Washington, DC, Doha, Qatar and around the world. For more information about Georgetown University, visit www.georgetown.edu.