Becoming-Baroque: Folding European Forms into the New World Baroque with Alejo Carpentier

Abstract

HOW TO ACCOUNT FOR THE NEOBAROQUE THE RETURN TO THE Baroque by twentieth-century intellectuals, writers, and artists? The twentieth-century resuscitation of the Baroque after having been vilified in the nineteenth century as decadent art informed by a retrograde ideology is both a European and a trans-American phenomenon : it begins with the arthistorical studies of Heinrich Wolfflin; from there it spreads in nonlinear rhizomatic fashion across borders between national languages and literatures, disciplines, and continents. Thus, the movement implicates universalist historians of ideas of the 1920s and 1930s, such as Spengler, Worringer, and Catalan philosopher Eugenio ďOrs; writers of the historical avant-garde of the 1920s, such as novelists William Faulkner and Djuna Barnes, poets T. S. Eliot and Octavio Paz, and Brazilian writer Oswald de Andrade; Cuban essayists and writers of the mid-century Alejo Carpentier, Jose Lezama Lima, and Severo Sarduy ; French philosophers Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze; and contemporary writercritics such as Mexican Carlos Fuentes, Martinican Edouard Glissant, and Brazilian Haroldo de Campos. (I should add that this list, though long, remains reductive.)1