Vicente Núñez on the Margins of Canon: From Mid-Century to Postmodernity

Abstract

Vicente Núñez’s verse conveys feelings of intimate uneasiness, the most prominent of which is his anxiety for a form of sensuality echoing Cernuda and in conflict with Francoist morals. He was initially involved with the group Cántico, and on account of the dates of publication of his first works, he could be included in the Generación del 50. Nevertheless, when he returns to the literary world after twenty years of absence, his texts acquire postmodern traits: lying as a rhetorical game and a metapoetical theme, the expression of a subject in crisis, fragmentariness, the determination to break with traditional language and, more importantly, his identification with queer theory and its vision of identity as an alternative to generic cultural constructs. Núñez, therefore, shapes a subversive style based on silence, with the aim to shatter preconceptions and dogmas, in order to propose a new paradigm for interpreting reality, and indeed the subject.