El conflicto entre la realidad y el deseo en la poesía surrealista de la Generación del 27

In my dissertation, “El conflicto entre la realidad y el deseo en la poesía surrealista de la Generación del 27”, I examine the tension between reality and desire as a central theme in the surrealist poetry of four major poets of the Generation of 1927: Vicente Aleixandre, Luis Cernuda, Rafael Alberti, and Federico García Lorca. The discordance between what is and what should be can be located in the development of three central topics: love/dislike (with homosexuality bearing special attention), the elaboration of the theme of "the double" (identity and homosexuality) and the tension between man and the city (the dehumanization of society and the search for a lost paradise). My analysis of these three topics and their development in works of each poet will foreground the similarities and differences in their uses of surrealist techniques. I discuss Surrealism as a movement and the Spanish use of surrealist visual (Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí, Oscar Domínguez, etc.) and verbal imagery. I analyze the characteristics that define surrealist art and its connection with the European avant-garde, the differences between French surrealism and Spanish surrealism and draw new conclusions about the Spanish contribution to surrealism. I propose that the methods and techniques utilized by these authors in their treatment of the theme of reality and desire are what define their work as surrealist. I also establish a theoretical approach to the surrealists' deconstruction of logical language and syntax (Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Antonio García-Barrio) and to the intertextual nature of Spanish Surrealism (Julia Kristeva). It is this theoretical approach that brings critical analysis of Surrealism up to date and represents my contribution to the body of knowledge of surrealism.