An aesthetics of genius: art, literature and modernism in Carlos Vaz Ferreira

Abstract

In contrast with the utilitarian criteria that prevailed in the positivist thought of the late nineteenth century, at the beginning of the twentieth century the Uruguayan thinker Carlos Vaz Ferreira conceives the beauty as a useless expense that opens the subject to a new experience. Within this framework, literature is explained as a creative use of language that, through known words, must create an unknown reality. Vaz Ferreira claims for an open critique of these inventions and is cautious in front of eventual innovations that are not, as is shown by his ambivalent position about literary modernism.