Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s greguerías: futurist aesthetics and the re-emergence of the fragment

Abstract

Ramón Gómez is known for his innovative short form of prose poetry, denominated “Greguerías.” Greguería could be described best as a certain kind of aphorism, a one-liner comic joke; also similar to wordplay, and occasionally, to mini philosophical annotations on life. Furthermore, De la Serna is considered the father of the Greguería, since he used it for the very first time at the beginning of 1910. After its appearance, this literary form became very popular and spread as a rhetorical and stylistic device within Spanish and Latin American literature. The Greguería nurtures a cult for the image; specifically, a witty and surprising image. De la Serna’s literary preference was the avant-garde. His book Ismos (1931) is dedicated to this movement and it introduced a new term in Spanish dictionary. In it, he defends artistic autonomy and freedom of words. De la Serna found himself at a literary crossroads with regards to the literary currents of his time, but in terms of style, experimentation and narrative technique, the model he chose to work with in Greguerías is obviously very close to contemporary short-short stories.