Gómez de la Serna, Ramón

Gómez de la Serna, Ramón

Gómez de la Serna, Ramón (rämōnˈ gōˈmāth dā lä sĕrˈnä), 1888–1963, Spanish novelist, biographer, and critic, b. Madrid. One of the most prolific and imaginative of modern Spanish writers, Gómez de la Serna was a precursor of surrealism. He sought to express the subconscious and portrayed modern man as a mannequin. He invented the greguería, a kind of surrealist metaphor in epigram form combining humor and poetic insight. Two collections of these are his Flor de greguerías (1933) and Some Greguerías (tr. 1944). Gómez de la Serna is known simply as Ramón, and his mode of literary expression as ramonismo. Among his many works are an autobiography (1948), lives of El Greco and Goya, and the novels El doctor inverosímil (1921) and El torero Caracho (1926). Antología (1955) and Obras completas (1956) are later collections of his works.

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The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Gómez de la Serna, Ramon

 

Born July 3. 1888. in Madrid; died January 1963, in Buenos Aires. Spanish writer who lived in Argentina from 1936.

In his book Cubism and All Isms (1920; second edition entitled Isms, 1931) and in his other books Gómez propagandized the avant-garde current. In his collections of aphorisms Absurdities (1922) and Six Imitation Novellas (1927) he made use of a grotesque-humorous transformation of real facts, striving for a paradoxical and aphoristic form of expression. In his collections of novellas The Unusual Doctor (1921; Russian translation, 1927) and the novel Movieland (1924; Russian translation, 1927) one senses an attempt at a critical representation of bourgeois reality. He was the author of a series of artistic biographies.

WORKS

Obras completas. Barcelona, 1956.
Biografías completas. Madrid, 1959.

REFERENCES

Sofovich, L. Ramón Gómez de la Serna. [Buenos Aires, 1962.]
Granjel, L. S. Retráto de Ramón: Vida y obra de Ramón Gomez de la Serna. Madrid [1963.]
Ponce, F. Ramón Gómez de la Serna. [Bilbao and others, 1968.]

V. K. IASNYI

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.