1. The key document in this dialogue is Torres Bodet's 1928 critical essay appropriately entitled "La deshumanización del arte" (in Contemporáneos: Notas de crítica ), a critique of Ortega's landmark work.

2. See also Jorge Olivares's thoughtful study La novela decadente en Venezuela, in which he highlights features of the decadent novel—one type of modernista novel—that I would argue point directly toward portraits of the artist in the vanguardist novels of the 1920s: the deformation of the self, a tension between artists' ideals and quotidian realities, and the portrayal of the engaged intellectual as a possible alternative to the suffering aesthete. Significant connections (not specifically focused on fictional artist figures) between the prose fiction of Spanish American modernismo and that of the vanguards are also drawn by Ivan Schulman in "Las genealogías secretas de la narrativa: Del modernismo a la vanguardia."

3. See, for example, New Perspective in Brazilian Literary Studies: Symbolism Today, ed. Darlene J. Sadlier, in particular the study by K. David Jackson, "Hallucinated Bahia: Prefigurations of Modernism in Pedro Kilkerry" (36-46). Although to my knowledge there is no in-depth book-length study of Brazilian symbolist prose comparable to the work of Aníbal González on Spanish American modernismo, the Brazilian novel Mocidade morta by Gonzaga Duque raises similar issues on the artist's role identified by González in modernista prose.

4. For a detailed analysis of vision imagery in Altazor, see George Yúdice, Vicente Huidobro y la motivación del lenguaje, 149-211.

5. Vallejo's contemporary Mariátegui observed that, even in his most radical experiments, Vallejo felt "all of humanity's pain" ( OC 2: 313).

6. Christiane von Buelow, for example, notes in her reading of Trilce number xxxvi that "ruined fragmentation is represented interchangeably in the pocftc ego and in the artwork" ("Vallejo's Venus de Milo " 49).

7. Mignolo's historical definition of the vanguards is broader than mine and includes, for example, the work of Octavio Paz.

8. I have differed from the Weinberger translation here. He renders Huidobro's "En el siglo / En que moría el cristianismo" as "In the century/ When Christianity died." I prefer "was dying" to maintain the imperfect verb tense moría .

9. Authors of these poetic compositions include, respectively, Manuel Maples Arce (Mexico), A. Brandan Caraffa (Argentina), Luis de la Jara (Peru), Rosamel del Valle (Chile), Juan Florit (Chile), Eduardo González Lanuza (Argentina), Alberto Hidalgo (Peru/Argentina), Juan Marín (Chile), Carlos Pellicer (Mexico), and José Juan Tablada (Mexico). For a discussion of the technological focus in Latin America's vanguards, see Klaus Müller-Bergh's comprehensive piece, "El hombre y la técnica: Contribución al conocimiento de corrientes vanguardistas hispanoamericanas."

10. For an in-depth study of vanguardism's urban mode in the work of Oliverio Girondo and Oswald de Andrade, see Jorge Schwartz's Vanguarda e cosmopolitismo na década de 20: Oliverio Girondo e Oswald de Andrade .

11. See, respectively, Rita Gnutzmann's introductory study to the 1985 Cátedra edition of El juguete rabioso (30-72); Christopher Towne Leland's "Treason and Transformation: Roberto Arlt's El juguete rabioso, " chapter seven of his Last Happy Men: The Generation of 1922, Fiction, and the Argentine Reality (95-117); and "El final del orden: El fracaso del yo," chapter seven of Francine Masiello's Lenguaje e ideología: Las escuelas argentines de vanguardia, in particular, the sections on Arlt (210-29). Also pertinent to my own reading are Alan Pauls's "Arlt: La máquina literaria" and the section on El juguete rabioso in Aden W. Hayes's Roberto Arlt: La estrategia de su ficción (11-39). Hayes examines the novel as a product of the transformation of Silvio the protagonist into Silvio the writer, "creator and inventor of his life, of his fame, of his own identity" (39). Other important studies less directly pertinent to my concerns here include, on the major novels, Beatriz Pastor, Roberto Arlt y la rebelión alienada and Noé Jitrik, "Entre el dinero y el ser (lectura de El juguete rabioso de Roberto Arlt)."

12. My conception of the Bildungsroman here is based on Marianne Hirsch's "The Novel of Formation as Genre: Between Great Expectations and Lost Illusions" and on Mikhail Bakhtin's "Discourse in the Novel" and "The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel)."

13. For a description of the new writers' ambivalent relationship with Lugones, see Leland (36-37).

14. In Roberto Arlt: La estrategia de su ficción, Hayes traces the relationship between Silvio's movement through Buenos Aires neighborhoods and his developing characterization (29-30).

15. See also the Real Academia Española's facsimile edition of the Diccionario de Autoridades, which provides the identical example.

16. There are points of contact between Bürger's concept of the nonorganic, especially as I have applied it here to character, and Gustavo Pérez Firmat's idea of "decharacterization" in the Hispanic vanguard novel, a process he examines specifically in Torres Bodet's Margarita de niebla (81-95).

17. In Idle Fictions, Pérez Firmat focuses primarily on Spanish peninsular novels and deals mainly with only one kind of Latin American vanguardist prose, the subjectivist and lyric mode characteristic of Jaime Torres Bodet and other members of the Mexican Contemporáncos group. My own analysis addresses a broader range of vanguardist prose, though I find points of contact with Pérez Firmat.

18. Torres Bodet's phrase "triumph over the human" is taken directly from La deshumanización del arte (65). Although he later suggested in his autobiographical Tiempo de arena (1955) that he had been unfair in holding Ortega responsible for a phenomenon he had simply been describing, Torres Bodet remained steadfast in the aversion to Ortega's terminology: "And he even came to coin phrases like this one, with which I will never agree: 'Aesthetic pleasure emanates from the triumph over the human'" (316). Contemporary critics, in turn, have often noted Ortega's unfortunate selection of the word dehumanized to characterize modern art. Robert C. Spires, for example, observes that the word was "probably one of his more infelicitous word choices," not only because it obscured Ortega's sharp perceptions about contemporary art but also because it led to the subsequent indiscriminate application of the phrase to any nonmimetic art of the period ( Transparent Simulacra 166).

19. Pérez Firmat's study of La educación sentimental is the most extensive, but other critics had previously noted the work's innovative qualities and poematic prose. See Sonja Karsen, Jaime Torres Bodet (69-73) and Merlin H. Forster, "La obra novelística de Jaime Torres Bodet" (61-62). More recently, Susan Nagel has studied Jean Giraudoux's influence on Hispanic vanguard novels. Although she does not analyze La educación sentimental, she notes Torres Bodet's disagreement with Ortega on art's humanity (63) and addresses the dialogue with Ortega undertaken by Margarita de niebla .

20. In his study of the Spanish American novel, John S. Brushwood notes the ambiguous situation for the reader created in La educación sentimental by the "editor-narrator-protagonist arrangement" and by inconsistencies of narrative attitude in the body of the diary-narration (77).

21. González also notes the modernistas ' employment of sculptural metaphors to refer to their own artistic style (26), metaphors similar in kind to the architectural ones employed by the narrator in La educación sentimental to describe Alejandro's voice.

22. For a detailed discussion of the vanguards' challenge to the notion of a hierarchical historical succession of styles, see chapter 4 of Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde, "The Avant-Gardiste Work of Art" (55-82).

23. My use of the metaphor-metonymy contrast here is derived in part from David Lodge's The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature .

24. Pérez Firmat also identifies the "anticipatory" or "embryonic" quality as typical of vanguardist fiction ( Idle Fictions 57).

25. In "El artista como tema," a chapter in Lo trágico y su consuelo: Estudio de la obra de Martín Adán, Kinsella, examining the relationship between the artist portrait in La casa de cartón and in Adán's poetry, concludcs that the prose work portrays an artist who has opted for a life of detached contemplation. My own analysis suggests greater tension between observation and engagement.

26. On the connection between the narrator and Ramón, Mirko Lauer notes that "Ramón's diary is an undisguised prolongation of the narrator who is not Ramón simply because he has chosen not to be" (28).

27. The translation of these lines is my own. Adán's text employs the verb ensartar, to string or link (spools, ideas), for both the girl's and the narrator's activity. The Silverman translation inverts this process, so that the youngster "inserts a rope into naked spools of thread," a rendition that eliminates the metaphoric link with the text's narrative flow.

28. The "spectacled poetry of the windows" is my own translation, again to maintain the metaphoric links that I believe Adán's text is establishing.

29. I have slightly altered the Silver translation here. She correctly renders "taquigrafía" as shorthand, but I prefer the alternative (and, in English, more archaic) "tachygraphy" offered by Simon and Schuster's International Dictionary because it maintains the original's etymological connotations of a tradition of writing.

30. See Rita Gnutzmann, Roberto Arlt o el arte del calidoscopio .

31. I use the term "heteroglossic" in the Bakhtinian sense to refer to the interaction of normative (centripetal) and decentralizing (centrifugal) forces in language, manifested in the conflicting (social, cultural, historical) worldviews embodied in varied linguistic and literary forms. (See The Dialogic Imagination .)

32. See Cândido's "Estouro e libertação," de Campos's "Serafim: Um grande não-livro" (translated as "Seraphim: A Great Nonbook"); and Jackson's A prosa vanguardista na literatura brasileira: Oswald de Andrade, "Vanguardist Prose in Oswald de Andrade,'' and "Vanguardist Prose in Brazilian Modernism, 1912-1929." The first of these three works by Jackson is a Portuguese version of the second. To avoid back-and-forth translation from English to Portuguese, I cite here the English version even though, as a dissertation, it remains unpublished.

33. See Jackson's "Vanguardist Prose in Oswald de Andrade" (175). Haroldo de Campos also explores parallels with Joyce in "Miramar na Mira," but, although he mentions A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, he finds many more connections with Ulysses .

34. For a detailed analysis of Mariátegui's views on the modern artist, see my "Mariátegui's Aesthetic Thought: A Critical Reading of the Avant-Gardes."