Our urban interiors: recovering use value in the prose poems of Luis García Montero's Una forma de resistencia (2012)
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Benjamin Fraser [1]
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[1] East Carolina University
East Carolina University
Township of Greenville, Estados Unidos
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- Localización: Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, ISSN 1463-6204, ISSN-e 1469-9818, Vol. 16, Nº. 3, 2015, págs. 275-291
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
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Resumen
Starting from Luis García Montero's own characterization of his work as constituting “una poesía urbana”, this article approaches his recent book Una forma de resistencia (2012) through an urban lens. While previous work that labels his artistic production as the “poetry of experience” is not wholly irrelevant here, it is through theories of the everyday urban experience that we can best appreciate this series of prose poems on everyday objects by a renowned left-leaning author and critic. Thus while García Montero clearly draws inspiration from Baudelaire here, the ideas of Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord, Manuel Delgado Ruiz, Andy Merrifield, Marshall Berman and David Harvey are also relevant to understanding these narrations of a contemporary indoor flâneur. Ultimately, the poet centers the work around an urban form of resistance that is just as material as it is inmaterial – one that recovers the notion of use value within a postwar capitalistic everyday life that has been colonized. For the famed prose poet, to resist in this context is to use the personal scale of the everyday as a point of entry into the battle between use value and exchange value that characterizes contemporary urban life and that links our interior and exterior worlds.
