Adrian Kane, a professor of Spanish, recently presented his paper, “Jaime Torres Bodet’s Margarita de niebla (1927) in Dialogue with José Ortega Gasset,” as part of a session dedicated to trans-Atlantic dialogues in avant-garde movements at the Latin American Studies Association Congress in Boston.
In his paper, Kane argues that the Mexican novel “Margarita de niebla” can be read as an artistic response to Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset’s 1925 essays, La deshumanización del arte and Ideas sobre la novela. He suggests that by creating what ultimately might be described as an anti-novel, Torres Bodet’s text rejects several of Ortega y Gasset’s assertions about what he viewed as the essence of the novelistic genre.