The Dilemma of Modernity: Ramon Gomez de la Serna and the Spanish Modernist Novel

The Dilemma of Modernity is a study of the evolution of Ramon Gomez de la Serna’s narrative fiction within the context of European Modernism. At a time when Joyce, Kafka, Proust, and Woolfe were experimenting with prose fiction, very little is known about Spain’s contribution to the novel. Despite his years in Paris, when it was still considered the cultural capital of Europe, and his championing of the avant-garde in Spain in the 1920s through his literary salon Pombo, which attracted figures such as Borges, Picasso, Huidobro, Bunuel and Lorca, Ramon Gomez de la Serna’s work has suffered from critical neglect. The Dilemma of Modernity sets Gomez de la Serna’s work within the cultural and historical context of the time and traces his evolution from aesthete to promoter of the avant-garde, modernist, and existentialist.