The engagement after the engagement. Poetry, democracy and globalization (1980-2005) (Extract)

Abstract

In the poetic scenery at the turn of the 20th century, a nourished group of voices has started to interrogate again about the sense of the duality literature-commitment, reopening the debate surrounding an issue that seemed cancelled by the democratic achievements and the skeptical condition of postmodernism. It involves a set of proposals that, from esthetical approaches that sometimes clash with each other, collaborates in the elaboration of answers, or even of uncomfortable questions, against the urgencies of public space originated by the new scenario of globalization, the contradictions of postindustrial capitalism and the reviewing pressures of contemporary society. In the light of a significant corpus of poetics, that postulate different ways of facing the relationships between poetry, history, ideology or politics, this paper pretends to refine the meaning and the nuances that the historical-literary notion of commitment has developed between the centuries. A notion that, on one hand, it incarnates in rhetorically heterogeneous poetical speeches; and on the other hand, shows a visible renovation of its theorical fundamentals, and of its formal and thematic ideals, which authorizes to talk about a commitment after the commitment, since it breaks with some of its most rooted keys and establishes a collapse with the most emblematic historic models.