The Dilemma of Modernity

The Dilemma of Modernity is a study of the evolution of Ramon Gomez de la Sema'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, Bunuel and Lorca, Ramon Gomez de la Sema's work has suffered from critical neglect. The Dilemma of Modernity sets Gomez de la Sema's work within the cultural and historical context of the time and traces his evolution from aesthete to the promoter of the avant-garde, modernist, and existentialist.