The unveiled city: Hyperrealism, Posthumanism, and Determinism in Federico García Lorca's Poeta en Nueva York

Main Article Content

Mª Jesús Perea Villena

Abstract

On the ninetieth anniversary of his death, the present study proposes a new reading of Poet in New York (1940) through the lens of hyperrealist visuality and the dehumanisation of the modern metropolis, establishing a dialogue between Federico García Lorca’s poetry and certain strategies associated with Hyperrealism. Drawing on poems such as “Dawn,” “New York (Office and Denunciation),” and “Murder (Two Voices at Dawn on Riverside Drive),” the study analyses how the city ceases to function as a mere setting and becomes an autonomous structure that absorbs and fragments human experience. This representation can be brought into dialogue with Georg Simmel’s reflections on the metropolis and with Richard Estes’s urban landscapes, in which the human presence is displaced by surfaces, and reflections. In parallel, poems such as “Dance of Death,” “Ode to the King of Harlem,” and “Ruins” develop an aesthetics of visual saturation based on the accumulation of bodies and material residues. It is thus argued that this hypertrophy of the visible anticipates concerns that would later be explored by Baudrillard and Jameson in relation to hyperreality and the crisis of representation

Article Details

Section

Artículos

How to Cite

The unveiled city: Hyperrealism, Posthumanism, and Determinism in Federico García Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York. (2026). VERBEIA. Revista De Estudios Filológicos. Journal of English and Spanish Studies, 11, 108-127. https://doi.org/10.57087/Verbeia.2026.5271

References

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation).” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, translated by Ben Brewster, Monthly Review Press, 1971, pp. 127–86.

Anderson, Andrew A. Federico García Lorca. Routledge, 1988.

Anderson, Andrew A. Lorca: A Life. Oxford UP, 2021.

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser, University of Michigan Press, 1994.

Baudrillard Jean. Symbolic Exchange and Death. Translated by Iain Hamilton Grant, Sage, 1993.

Baudrillard Jean. The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. Translated by Chris Turner. Sage, 1998.

Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Polity Press, 2013.

Cañadas Rodríguez, Emilio, and María Jesús Perea Villena. 2025. “Elementos hiperrealistas y metaficcionales en Todas las almas de Javier Marías.” In Efectos de la narrativa escrita y su enseñanza en lo social, edited by Ana María Botella Nicolás, Guillem Escorihuela Carbonell and Antonio Rafael Fernández Paradas. Peter Lang, 105-118.

Chase, Linda. Hyperrealism. Academy Editions, 1975.

Craige, Betty Jean. Lorca's Poet in New York: The Fall into Consciousness. University Press of Kentucky, 1977.

Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality. Translated by William Weaver, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986.

García Lorca, Federico. Poeta en Nueva York. Penguin Clásicos, 2015.

García-Posada, Miguel. Lorca: Interpretación de “Poeta en Nueva York”.Akal, 1981.

Gibson, Ian, editor. Poeta en Nueva York. Galaxia Gutenberg, 2016.

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke UP, 1991.

Letze, Otto, editor. Hiperrealismo 1967–2012. Fundación Colección Thyssen-Bornemisza, 2013.

Lipovetsky, Gilles, and Serroy, Jean. La estetización del mundo: Vivir en la época del capitalismo artístico. Anagrama, 2015.

Maurer, Christopher, editor. Poeta en Nueva York y otras obras. Cátedra, 2000.

Millán, María Clementa. Estudios sobre la modernidad y la marginalidad en Poeta en Nueva York. Iberoamericana, 2013.

Monegal, Antonio. En los límites de la diferencia: Poesía e imagen en las vanguardias hispánicas. Tecnos, 1998.

Neira, Julio. Historia poética de Nueva York en la España contemporánea. Cátedra, 2012.

Perea Villena, María Jesús. “Place, Spatiality and Textuality in the Hyperrealist Vision of the City in Peter Ackroyd’s The Lambs of London.” Spatiality in Contemporary Anglophone Literatures: Crossings, Transgressions and Transitions, edited by Petr Chalupský and Tereza Topolovská, Routledge, 2026, pp. 100–114.

Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” The Sociology of Georg Simmel, edited and translated by Kurt H. Wolff, Free Press, 1950, pp. 409-24.

Wolfe, Cary. What Is Posthumanism? University of Minnesota Press, 2010.