SOURCE: Rosenberg, John R. “Between Delirium and Luminosity: Larra's Ethical Nightmare.” Hispanic Review 61, no. 3 (summer 1993): 379-89.

In the following essay, Rosenberg explores Larra's difficult ethical position as a practitioner of Spanish romanticism vacillating between self-imposed marginality and engaged participation in contemporary discourse.

In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant proposes an epistemological reversal that reflects a major step in the transformation from neoclassical to romantic ideology. He writes: “It has hitherto been assumed that our cognition must conform to the objects; but all attempts to ascertain anything about these objects a priori, by means of conceptions, and thus to extend the range of our knowledge has been rendered abortive by this assumption. Let us then make the experiment whether we may not be more successful in metaphysics, if we assume that the objects must conform to our cognition” (qtd. in Philosophical Writings 6). This “Copernican turn” (as he called...