César Vallejo and the vanguard in the frontiers of language

Abstract

The author explores the poetic effect that has the inclusion of foreign words in a literary text in the case of the Peruvian vanguard writers. Since they are unintelligible or barely intelligible words, their usage refers us to the type of aphasia that comes from a disorder in the metaphoric axis, which affects the similarity/difference of language. Lauer reflects on why the vanguard poets resorted to the use of foreign words. In this sense, he is interested in highlighting the overlapping among modernity, “techno terminology” and “foreignicity of discourse”, and between cosmopolitanism and local knowledge. Lauer holds that taking on a word from another language “expresses the desire of severing from the sources of a tradition, and is a criticism to a given sensitivity”. The author reflects about the poetic uses of foreign words from a point of view that focuses on the senses they unfold, as well as the graphic, sound, and communicational aspects.