The Modern, the Postmodern, and the Fact of Transition

Through an inventive re-visitation of Kuhn's theory of the paradigm shift, Simon makes two unusual yet brave and commendable decisions when it comes to scholarly books: one is to study (with a poet's detailed, loving eye) how poetry influences, reflects, and explains contemporary society in the Iberian Peninsula; the other is to address the culture of Portugal and Spain comparatively and unapologetically-as the 'sister countries' that they undeniably are, despite their obvious differences. -Dr. Antonio Ladeira, associate professor of Portuguese and Spanish, Texas Tech University ...An insightful study...Simon successfully argues that both the thematic content and reader reception of poetry were subject to such paradigm shifts as a result of the transformations that took place in Spanish and Portuguese societies...show[ing] through his study how poetry during this period transitioned from earlier modernist tendencies to a postmodern expression of theme, coinciding with the socio-political transformations that took place in Iberia during the second half of the twentieth century...Simon's work serves to advance the study of contemporary Peninsular poetry and our understanding of the evolution of postmodernist thought. -Dr. Erik Ladner, assistant professor of Spanish, Central College

This book applies Kuhn’s paradigm shift theory to the evolution of Spanish and Portuguese societies from the 1950s to the end of the twentieth century, from the perspective of a similar shift in poetry. The paradigm in question is the “postmodern” social (and thus, literary) paradigm popularized during the 1990s.The Modern, the Postmodern, and the Fact of Transition defines the basic parameters of Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm shift theory as applied to the evolution of Spanish and Portuguese societies from the 1950s to the end of the twentieth century, from the perspective of a similar shift in poetry. Kuhn’s theory states that a paradigm shift must happen in three phases: the crisis phase, the transition phase, and the adoption phase. The paradigm in question is the “postmodern” social (and thus, literary) paradigm made popular in criticism and social discourse during the 1990s. This shift in the Iberian context, therefore, will be analyzed in three phases: the first, from 1955 to 1975; and the latter two, from 1975 to 2000. This approximation provides a template for a vision of Iberian societies’ evolution as ongoing and fraught with contradictory notions of centralization and deconstruction as simultaneous and somehow complimentary.