Susan G. Polansky

Freedom to Experiment: The Coherence and Complexity of Federico García Lorca's Puppet Theater

Federico García Lorca’s appropriation of the puppet play genre reveals that at the same time he was reaching into deep roots of popular tradition, he also was seeking opportunity to innovate and break free from limitations imposed by the commercial theater scene of the first decades of the twentieth century. Tracing the trajectory of Lorca’s puppet plays reveals that, while his puppet works contain recurring story lines, actions, and characters, they display an increasing complexity. Through metatheatrical devices such as narrator figures, Lorca takes a more self-reflective stance to communicate his aesthetic preoccupations and perspectives on puppet theater.

Mail and Blackmail: Pedro Salinas's Cartas de amor a Margarita and El chantajista

Salinas articulated in many literary works his affinity for letter writing and his preoccupation with the role of the poet and love. In his Cartas de amor a Margarita, 1912-1915, Salinas began the discourse of a poet epistler cultivating a love relationship and planted a definition of his aesthetic that came full circle and into full bloom in his final dramatic work, El cantajista (1947). His reconstruction in El chantajita of places, interior spaces, and voices from the letters to Margarita represents a most vividly autobiographical and nos- talgic transplanting, which reinforces the authors consistent ideal of encountering a highly authentic, poetic, spiritual realm that transcends ordinary, everyday reality.