The Dilemma of Modernity

‘The Dilemma of Modernity’ is a study of the evolution of Ramón Gómez de la Serna's narrative fiction within the context of European Modernism. At a time when Joyce, Kafka, Proust, and Woolfe were experimenting with prose fiction, very little is known about Spain's contribution to the novel. Despite his years in Paris, when it was still considered the cultural capital of Europe, and his championing of the avant-garde in Spain in the 1920s through his literary salon ‘Pombo,’ which attracted figures such as Borges, Picasso, Huidobro, Buñuel and Lorca, Ramón Gómez de la Serna's work has suffered from critical neglect. ‘The Dilemma of Modernity’ sets Gómez de la Serna's work within the cultural and historical context of the time and traces his evolution from aesthete to promoter of the avant-garde, modernist, and existentialist.