The Complex Epigraph in Agustín Fernández Mallo’s Poetry

Abstract

The epigraph, an undertheorized genre, is a paratextual apparatus that almost always serves as a tool of filiation, a method for asserting a work’s place in a linear, reverential canon. Agustín Fernández Mallo’s abundant epigraphs, then, might seem incoherent or contradictory at the outset of poems and collections explicitly built on an iconoclastic and resolutely anti-linear praxis of sampling, appropriation and decontextualization. This article shows how the recontextualization, remediation and resignification that Fernández Mallo exercises upon the epigraphs in his poetry enact the ‘complex’ poetics he proposes in his Teoría general de la basura and other essays.