ABSTRACT

The Generation of 1927 represents, in many senses, the Spanish project of literary modernity, and within it the work and figure of Federico Garcia Lorca stand as eloquent testimony to the violent sundering of that project. The transformation of Lorca to lorquismo, begun during his life, continued and intensified in the 1940s and 1950s, acquiring a life of its own even without his poetry being readily available. The process of assimilation and reproduction of lorquismo in the copla espanola can be understood as the ideological neutralization of Lorca. The language of Lorca's poetics is recodified in the poetics of the copla espanola, desacralizing the "sacred" language of modernism at the same time that it salvages it. The copla rescues Lorca's poetics from oblivion precisely through petrification, reification, and commodification. The song illustrates a postmodern and postdictatorial appropriation of Lorca as one of the icons of modernism, icons become clichés through the mass culture of the Franco years.