Abstract

This dissertation studies the way in which the poetry of Cesar Vallejo questions how we conceptualize pain. Vallejo's poetry challenges the efficacy of philosophy and poetry to comprehend human pain as something that while vital, defies representation. To date, no study has fully explored the uniqueness and universality of Vallejo's depiction of pain. ;The first chapter examines the epistemology of pain through history and politics. It reviews how the conceptualization of pain as a social and scientific construct led to its medicalization, and the formation of cultural assumptions based on the Cartesian mind/body model. The chapter reviews how such conceptualizations justified inhuman practices like genocide, torture, and slavery by reenforcing the belief that pain has neither meaning nor social value outside the limits of its clinical definition. Additionally, it explores the meaning that cultural thinkers attributed to pain during Vallejo's time. Finally, it reviews how previous critics relied on Vallejo's cultural identities,, to explain the salience of pain in his work. ;The second chapter studies Vallejo's intellectual formation in Peru and how the ideas and works of the Peruvian intellectuals Gonzalez Prada, Valdelomar, Orrego, and Mariategui helped him develop and elaborate his own body of thought. It further reveals how their questioning of traditional aesthetics allowed Vallejo to poetically question the limits of representation. ;The third chapter deals with the problem of representation. Based on an alternative reading of Nietzschean nihilism, this chapter examines how Vallejo's work incorporates this thinking to challenge Western thought. It additionally broadens Deleuze's explanation of the mechanisms of representation based on identities of concepts in order to show how Vallejo's depiction of pain escapes these mechanisms. ;In the final chapter and conclusion, the analysis of key poems illustrates how Vallejo questions political, medical, philosophical, religious, and cultural representations and explanations of pain. It shows, furthermore how Vallejo breaks with rhetoric to create a language to express that which can only be felt: intensity.