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Reading the Exemplum Right: Fixing the Meaning of El conde Lucanor
Jonathan Burgoyne
Reading the Exemplum Right situates Juan Manuel at the apex the European literary tradition of the exemplum, and demonstrates how the author puts the coercive power and authority of the illustrative tale on display for his audience. Following the medieval modes of reading and writing that structure Juan Manuel’s text, the first chapters uncover a rhetorical lesson woven into the entire five-part Conde Lucanor that lays bare the inherent ambivalence of the exemplum as a narrative sign. The book then traces the earliest response to Juan Manuel’s work as it can be uncovered in the layout, variance, interlineations, and marginalia found in the various late medieval and early modern manuscript witnesses of El Conde Lucanor. The study concludes by testing the hypothesis that a work’s earliest audience can establish a tradition of reading that effectively prevents alternative interpretations, and fixes an orthodox meaning of the text for future generations.
Jonathan Burgoyne is Associate Professor of Spanish at Penn State University.
NCSRLL #
ISBN 978-0-8078-9293-0
The ‘I’ of History; Self-Fashioning and National Consciousness in Jules Michelet
Vivian Kogan
The "I" of History: Self-Fashioning and National Consciousness in Jules Michelet examines the poetics of the historian's self-portraiture as it intersects with the nation and history. History exists because someone tells the story. In Michelet's unique staging and performance of the past, the way the story is told is the story. Long before Charles de Gaulle, Michelet asserted that he was France. His self-representation as the "I" of the nation and the embodiment of history ("moi-histoire") takes form as a rhetorical personification that shapes the historian's writing as it informs his project to use history to construct the nation.
Offering a new multidisciplinary perspective, The "I" of History both exposes Michelet's vision of France, his grand narrative, and it demystifies that narrative in the analysis of Michelet's final text, History of the Nineteenth Century.
Vivian Kogan is Associate Professor of French at Dartmouth College.
NCSRLL #
ISBN 978-0-8078-9290-9
Monstruos que hablan: El discurso de la monstruosidad en Cervantes
Rogelio Miñana
The monster is a key figure in Spanish early-modern cultural production, both literary (Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, Quevedo, Gracián) and artistic (El Greco, Velázquez, Ribera), as it embodies a revolutionary fictional discourse that reflects violence and ugliness, but also freedom and spectacle. Beyond the perverse implications of the abject, the monster has been linked to an excess of imagination and artificial creation from Aristotle to 21st-century cloning. In this study Miñana focuses on three of Miguel de Cervantes’ most representative works: the short novel “El coloquio de los perros” (Novelas ejemplares, 1613), the play El rufián dichoso (Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses, 1615), and the novel Don Quijote de la Mancha (1605, 1615). Employing both close readings and monster theory, he argues that Cervantes’ protagonists (the dogs Cipión and Berganza, Cristóbal Lugo/de la Cruz, and Don Quixote), as well as the very discourse that forges them, are monstrous: extreme, beyond the norm, threatening and threatened, spectacular, and fluid in identity, form and behavior. Cervantes’ pervasive discourse of monstrosity ultimately destabilizes fixed meanings and identities (the cornerstone of absolutist societies) as it interrogates biological, social, legal, religious, and aesthetic orders. As extraordinary beings that test the limits of identity and narrative, Cervantine talking monsters ultimately reveal the interpretive and discursive nature of the modern subject.
Rogelio Miñana is Associate Professor and Chair of Spanish at Mount Holyoke College.
NCSRLL #
ISBN 978-0-8078-9294-7
Bucolic Metaphors: History, Ideology, and Gender in the Early Modern Spanish Pastoral
Rosalie Hernández-Pecoraro
An in-depth examination of the cultural functions of the pastoral in Spain, this study of Montemayor’s La Diana and Cervantes’s pastoral texts moves away from studies that consider this literature as purely escapist and imitative, considerably expands the discussion on the importance of the pastoral genre to early modern Spanish studies, and supplements the ways in which these texts have conventionally been considered by Hispanists. It argues that the representations of society that occur in the pastoral tacitly mediate the widespread problems and anxieties felt throughout Spain, from rural poverty and national bankruptcy to the growing and disquieting influence of women in national and local affairs. Taking account of the immense popularity of the genre, the study demonstrates the relevance of this idealist literature to an understanding of how historical events, economic trends, and cultural shifts were processed and internalized by early modern Spanish society.
Rosalie Hernández-Pecoraro is Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Illinois at Chicago
NCSRLL #
ISBN 978-0-8078-9291-6
