Carnero, Guillermo 1947–

PERSONAL: Born May 7, 1947, in Valencia, Spain; son of Guillermo (a financier) and Teresa (a housewife; maiden name, Arbat) Carnero; children: Guillermo Carnero Garrido. Ethnicity: "White." Education: Attended University of Barcelona, 1964–1975, and University of Valencia, 1971–72; received Ph.D., 1977. Hobbies and other interests: Literature, art, music, literary criticism and theory, history of religions, anthropology.

ADDRESSES: Home—Berenguer de Marquina 18, Alicante 03004, Spain. Office—Department of Spanish, University of Alicante, Campus de San Vicente, Aptdo. Correos 99, Alicante 03080, Spain. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain, associate professor, 1976–79; University of Alicante, Alicante, Spain, assistant professor, 1980–85, professor, 1986–.

MEMBER: International Society for Eighteenth Century Studies, Spanish Society for Eighteenth Century Studies, Real Academia de Cultura Valenciana.

AWARDS, HONORS: Premio Nacional de la Crítica, 2000, Premio Nacional de Literatura, 2000, and Premio Fastenrath, Real Academia Española, 2002, all for Verano Inglés; Premio de la Crítica Valenciana, 2003, for Espejo de gran niebla.

WRITINGS:

POETRY

Dibujo de la Muerte, El Guadalhorce (Malaga, Spain), 1967, 2nd edition, Ocnos (Barcelona, Spain), 1971.

El sueño de Escipión, Visor (Madrid, Spain), 1971.

Variaciones y figuras sobre un tema de La Bruyère, Visor (Madrid, Spain), 1974.

El azar objetivo, Trece de Nieve (Madrid, Spain), 1975.

Ensayo de una teoría de la visión: Poesía, 1966–1977, Hiperión (Madrid, Spain), 1979, 2nd edition, 1983.

Música para fuegos de artificio, Hiperión (Madrid, Spain), 1989.

Divisibilidad indefinida, Renacimiento (Seville, Spain), 1990.

Dibujo de la muerte. Obra poética completa, edited by Ignacio-Javier López, Cátedra (Madrid, Spain), 1998.

Verano Inglés, Tusquets (Barcelona, Spain), 1999, 2nd edition, 2000.

Espejo de gran niebla, Tusquets Editores (Barcelona, Spain), 2002.

Poemas arqueológicos, Cuadernos del Noroeste (Leon, Spain), 2003.

Pensil de nobles doncellas, Centro de la Generación del 27 (Malaga, Spain), 2005.

Fuente de Médicis, Visor (Madrid, Spain), 2005.

Work represented in anthologies, including Sepulcros y jardines, Institucion Alfonso el Magnanimo (Valencia, Spain), 2001; and Un pictura poesis, CajaSur (Cordoba, Spain), 2001.

ESSAYS

El grupo "Cántico" de Córdoba. Un episodio clave de la historia de la poesía española de posguerra, Editora Nacional (Madrid, Spain), 1976.

Los orígenes del Romanticismo reaccionario español: el matrimonio Böhl de Faber, Universidad (Valencia, Spain), 1978.

La cara oscura del Siglo de las Luces, Cátedra (Madrid, Spain), 1983.

Las Armas Abisinias. Estudios sobre arte y literature del siglo XX, Anthropos (Barcelona, Spain), 1989.

Estudios sobre teatro español del siglo XVIII, Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza (Zaragoza, Spain), 1997.

Espronceda, Espasa-Calpe (Madrid, Spain), 1999.

Poética y poesía, Fundación Juan March (Madrid, Spain), 2004.

EDITOR

Vicente Martínez Colomer, El Valdemaro, Instituto Juan Gil-Albert (Alicante, Spain), 1985.

Actas del Congreso Internacional sobre el Modernismo Espańol e Hispanoamericano, Diputación Provincial (Cordoba, Spain), 1985.

Pedro Montengón, La Eudoxia. El Rodrigo. Selección de Odas, two volumes, Institute Juan Gil-Albert (Alicante, Spain), 1990.

Ignacio de Luzán, Obras raras y desconocidas, Institución Fernando el Católico (Zaragoza, Spain), Volume 1: Traducción de los epigramas latinos de Christoph Weigel. Carta latina de Ignacio Philathes. Plan de una Academia de Ciencias y Artes. Informe sobre Casas de Moneda. Informe sobre las cartas de Van Hoey, 1990, Volume 2: Discurso apologético de Don Íñigo de Lanuza, 2003.

Gaspar Zavala y Zamora, Obras, Volume 1: Obra narrativa. La Eumenia. Oderay, Sirmio (Barcelona, Spain), 1990.

Juan Gil-Albert, Antología poética, Consejo Valenciano de Cultura (Valencia, Spain), 1993.

Ignacio García Malo, Voz de la naturaleza, Tamesis (London, England), 1995.

Historia de la Literatura Española Volumes 6-8, Espasa Calpe (Madrid, Spain), 1995–96.

Ignacio García Malo, Doña María Pacheco, mujer de Padilla. Tragedia. Cátedra (Madrid, Spain), 1996.

Gaspar M. de Jovellanos, Memoria sobre espectáculos y diversiones públicas. Informe sobre la Ley Agraria, Cátedra (Madrid, Spain), 1997.

Juan Gil-Albert, Las ilusiones, Mondadori (Barcelona, Spain), 1998.

(With Enrique Rubio Cremades and Ignacio-Javier López) Ideas en sus paisajes. Homenage a Russell P. Sebold, Universidad de Alicante (Alicante, Spain), 1999.

Pedro Montengón, El Rodrigo, Cátedra (Madrid, Spain), 2002.

Jorge Guillén, Cienfuegos. Investigación original de la oposición a cátedra de Lengua y Literatura Españolas (1925) y otros inéditos (1925–1939), Fundación Jorge Guillén & Universidad (Valladolid, Spain), 2005.

Luis Rosales, Aril. Segundo Abril & La pasión fria de Luis Rosales, (studio) Ayuntamiento, Imprenta Artesanal (Madrid, Spain), 2005.

SIDELIGHTS: Guillermo Carnero was part of a movement of Spanish poets who, in the 1960s, focused their attention on artistic achievement rather than political or social statement. The period of social poetry in Spain had been at its strongest between 1939 until the mid-1960s. According to playwright Alfonso Sastre, this poetry placed priority on social discourse rather than artistic discourse. In an essay on Carnero's poetry, Ignacio Javier López in the Dictionary of Literary Biography described the latter years of the social poetry movement as consisting of "political diatribe."

Spanish poetry took a different turn in the 1960s and Carnero was at the forefront of the new movement, which considered poetry as artistic creation rather than as a tool for a social agenda. This movement came to view poetry not as "a representation of life and society," López explained, "but as a linguistic construct that has inherited a cultural tradition to which it belongs." López also explained that the movement which Carnero headed chose to look at poetry not as just a representation of the life experience, but as an experience in itself.

According to López, Carnero's first book of poetry, Dibujo de la Muerte, expresses the idea that art is not a substitute for the voids that present themselves in life. The poet also showed that art and life are two distinct phenomena, and elaborates on this contrast further by making it clear that art can only capture life through the use of language, and can only talk about experiences that have already happened. According to López, Carnero's mindset at this point laid the groundwork for the idea he called "metapoetry." López pointed to Carnero's poem "Caprice in Aranjuez," which makes many references to fantasy and deals with "a genre in which reason, like Goya's paintings, has been put to sleep." According to López, the poem is written so that both the reader and the speaker of the poem "contemplate an artistic representation."

According to López, Carnero's poem "Mira el breve minuto de la rosa" is a good example of metapoetry. López pointed out that this poem displays the two levels of metapoetry in the following way: on one level the poem is a meditation on the rose, a metaphor for beauty and art. On the other level, the poem suggests that since there is already knowledge of the use of the rose as this particular metaphor, that the metaphor is not really a new creation of art, only a new repetition of a previous experience. Above all else, according to López, Carnero has been instrumental in pointing out the gaps between art and the representation of art through language.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Castellet, JoséMaría, Nueve novisimos poetas espańoles, Barral (Barcelona, Spain), 1970.

Christie, C.R., Poetry and Doubt in the Work of José Angel Valente and Guillermo Carnero, Associated University Presses (Cranbury, NJ), 1997.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 108: Twentieth-Century Spanish Poets, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1991.

Ferrari, Marta, La coartada metapóetica. José Hierro, Angel González, Guillermo Carnero, Martin (Buenos Ares, Argentina), 2001.

Kruger-Robbins, Jill, Frame of Referents: The Postmodern Poetry of Guillermo Carnero, Bucknell University Press (Lewisburg, PA), 1997.

PERIODICALS

Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, January, 1990.

Hispanic Journal, Volume 7, number 1, 1985, pp. 123-129.

Hispanic Review, Number 54, 1985, pp. 257-277; winter, 1991, Juan Cano Ballesta, review of Las Armas Abisinias. Estudios sobre arte y literature del siglo XX, p. 108; summer, 1993, Juan Cano Ballesta, "Poesía del 27," p. 435; summer, 1999, David T. Gies, review of Estudios sobre teatro español del siglo XVIII, p. 381; winter, 2004, Toni Dorca, review of Ideas en sus paisajes. Homenage a Russell P. Sebold, pp. 185-187.

Ideologies and Literature, Volume 1, numbers 1-2, 1985, pp. 207-217.

Insula, Number 310, 1972, p. 4; Number 408, 1980, pp. 1, 10; Number 505, 1989, pp. 17-18.

Nueva Estafeta, Numbers 9-10, 1979, pp. 148-153.

Papeles de Son Armadans, Number 249, 1976, pp. 249-263.

Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispanicos, Volume 7, number 2, 1983, pp. 297-301.

Zarza Rosa, Revista de Poesia, Number 5, 1985, pp. 37-56.