Federico García Lorca, Essay, and Literary Text Analysis
Federico García Lorca
Great poet and playwright. His topics include love, frustration, and tragic destiny. His theater is a poetic drama with a single theme: the confrontation between the individual and his environment. Works of note include the avant-garde plays, written over five years and presented to the public, and tragedies such as Blood Wedding, Yerma, and The House of Bernarda Alba.
Poetry
Lorca’s poetry is dramatic, theatrical, and tragic. The poet often expresses himself through characters, as in his theater, reflecting fatalism, as he presents humans fighting against evil destiny. Themes include tragic destiny, frustration, and impossible desire. His work can be divided into two stages:
Two Stages of Poetry
- 1st Stage (up to 1928): Merges popular and high culture, tradition and modernity. Gypsy Ballads exalts the dignity of the marginalized Roma, doomed to a dismal fate. It offers a vision of a tragic and mythic Andalusia, employing a style that combines tradition and renewal.
- 2nd Stage: Surrealist influence. Characterized by audacious, irrational images, reflecting an attitude of rebellion and protest. Poet in New York appears as a symbol of materialistic, mechanized civilization, a world that destroys humanity, freedom, and contact with nature and with people. The book combines evidence of the enslavement of man by machine with deeply personal subject matter.
The Essay
An essay is a text written in prose with a brief general purpose of explanation or interpretation, in which the writer gives us a personal and subjective vision on specific issues, in a careful and pleasant style. The essay is a literary genre, like the novel or comedy.
Typology and Structure
The essay is a genre very open in its structure compared to other genres that start from a stated organization beforehand. The dominant typologies are the expository essay and especially the argumentative essay. The development of the subject tends to follow an analytical or deductive order, from the general to the particular. This implies greater order and ease of exposition compared to the inductive or synthetic approach, which goes from particular to general. The overall structure follows the scheme of introduction, development, and conclusion. The most characteristic feature of the essay is its freedom of structure.
The Literary Text
Literary language has been defined by the requirements that make a text literary. The most decisive of these definitions takes into account the peculiar communication process that occurs in literature.
In literary communication, the poetic function dominates because language is used in a special way to attract attention to itself. It is important not only what is said but also how it is said. The poetic function pursues an aesthetic object, making language maximally expressive to create beauty. Connotative language predominates.
However, the referential function has a purely informative nature and therefore denotation predominates. It only aims to transmit information and an objective structure.
Characteristics and Functions
- Rhetorical Goal: To play with language to lure the receiver through beauty, humor, wit, etc.
- Poetic Function: Dominant in literary texts, focuses on the form and aesthetic qualities of language.
- Referential Function: Present but secondary, provides information.
- Language: Predominantly connotative, highly expressive.
Structure and Genres
A literary text can have a very diverse structure, resulting from tradition and experimentation, which we call genres like the novel, poem, essay, comedy, etc. One must take into account the specific structure of the textual typology combined with the rhetorical text. Thus, the internal structure of a novel or a play is usually tripartite: exposition, development, and denouement, characteristic of the proper narrative type.