Aesthetics of Equilibrium is the first book-length comparative analysis of the theoretical prose by two major Latin American vanguardist contemporaries, Vicente Huidobro (Chile, 1893–1948) and Mário de Andrade (Brazil, 1893–1945). After an introduction to the transatlantic and regional dynamics of vanguardist tendencies and appropriations in Latin America, Willis offers a comparative study of two allegorical texts, Huidobro’s “Non serviam” and Mário’s “Parábola d’A escrava que não é Isaura.” The analysis exposes the fundamental nature of these parables in establishing a common theoretical background for the authors’ call for balance in the face of avant-garde extremes.

Willis’s analysis of Huidobro’s Manifiestos centers on the creation of a mythos regarding the poet’s orientation in an autonomous artistic realm. The ontological focus on poet and poem, as de€ned against chaos, unites the stylistically varied manifestos and reveals the poet’s conscious need for synthesis in order to create. Mário’s “Prefácio Interessantíssimo” and treatise A escrava que não é Isaura demonstrate the breadth of his theoretical knowledge (including familiarity with Huidobro’s ideas) while advancing his understanding of poetic composition as an equilibrium between the unconscious lyric impulse and its conscious expression. Both authors promote equilibrium through graphic, semantic, and symbolic elements of their poetics. The concluding chapter explores their aesthetics of equilibrium within the temporal anxieties of avant-garde theory.

“This book will be of interest to many across a broad spectrum of our discipline: students of the avant-garde, of modernism, as well as those interested in Pan-American movements that bridge the gulf between Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking countries.”
—Ricardo da Silveira Lobo Sternberg, University of Toronto

"Willis's book successfully captures the gusto and commitment of two writers whose texts about poetics, often poems in and of themselves, capture their authors' faith in the importance of words and the inner life of the artist."—Sophia Beal, Brasil/Brazil no. 35 (2007): 109-11.

For further reviews, see
Reference and Research Book News May 2007.

Bruce Dean Willis, University of Tulsa, focuses his research on Latin American poetry, poetics, and performance. He has published articles and chapters on poets Vicente Huidobro, Mário de Andrade, Pablo Neruda, Manuel Bandeira, and José Carlos Limeira. He edited Essays on Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literature and Film in Memory of Dr. Howard M. Fraser. Presently he is working on a study of representations of the body in early twentieth-century Brazilian literature.

ISBN-13: 978-1-55753-422-4; ISBN-10: 1-55753-422-5
2006. Vol. 36. xxvi, 236 pp. Paper $43.95

Display case in Stanley Coulter Hall, West Lafayette, Indiana.

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