Silogísticas del sobresalto : resonancias científicas en la obra de José Lezama Lima

My dissertation is an interdisciplinary work dealing with the intersection of the work of the Cuban poet, essayist, novelist, editor and cultural promoter José Lezama Lima (La Habana, Cuba, 1910-1976) with some of the main Western scientific developments and discoveries of the first half of the twentieth century. Even when a considerable number of canonical studies have mapped Lezama's place in the cartographies of modern and postmodern thought, what I do is completely new in this field. In my work I combine methods and insights from Cuban intellectual history and cultural studies, about the impact of new development in physics and mathematics on the discourse of the humanities and the literary and popular imagination, to do a new type of close reading of Lezama's texts, one that reveals the important role that key elements that he "appropriated" from Riemann geometry, relativity theory, quantum physics, and thermodynamics play in the fashioning of his ambitious "poetic system of the world." Although this type of analysis has successfully been applied to other authors such as James Joyce and Jorge Luis Borges, no attempt has been made to study Lezama Lima’s work from this perspective. I argue that examining the structural and organic relationships of Lezama with the work of scientists such as Albert Einstein provides a unique and effective framework for understanding the "chaos-like" and "fractal-like" theoretical and temporal complexities displayed by the Cuban author in his work.