Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures - Böcker

Michel Tournier, member of the Acadimie Goncourt and one of the most influential French writers of the post-Nouveau roman period, stresses the crucial interrelationship that exists between myth and literature. It is the writer's duty, he states, to keep myths alive by continually renewing and transforming them, re-releasing them in an ever changing social context. Written in French, this study considers the Tournier novel as the story of a voyage in a literal and figurative sense. Jonathan Krell uses the term "elementary" to characterize this voyage through the universe of Tournier's imagination, which is dominated by the four primordial element&--earth, water, air, and fire. Building on a foundation of Western culture's rudimentary myths, such as the ogre, twinship, and the Biblical stories of creation and the magi, Tournier performs a radical and disturbing transformation. Professor Krell shows how the transformation is made.

Long recognized as one of the greatest medieval philosophical theologians, John Duns Scotus made his most innovative theoretical contributions in the area of metaphysics. A careful and detailed study of his argument for the existence of God and the theory of knowledge that makes this possible provides the most direct access to his basic ideas. Unlike the Five Ways of Thomas Aquinas or Anselm's famous Proslogion argument, Scotus's proof is of another order of complexity and amounts to a little summa of his metaphysics. Among those theologians to accept Aristotle's scientific theory, Scotus is perhaps the first to realize fully its negative consequences if the philosophical doctrines of divine illumination and the analogical concept of being interact. His treatment of the God-question is distinguished for its deliberatively holistic approach to what was conventionally a series of unrelated topics.

Drawing on the groundbreaking Spanish scholarship and editions of earlier generations and relying on research conducted in Spanish archives, this pioneering group of English-speaking scholars offers a new treatment of familiar material. The editors yoke together widely varying critical practices, including incisive New Critical readings and far-reaching explorations that draw on the most current European critical thought. In addition to these more strictly literary studies, there are interdisciplinary essays focusing on seventeenth- and twentieth-century reception and the social makeup of the comedia audience. The whole thus presents a balanced picture of the many ways in which the comedia can be viewed, and the contributors complement each other's work in often surprising ways, illuminating the same corpus from a number of perspectives.

Pedro Calderon de la Barca (1600-1681) is generally acknowledged to be the master author of autos sacramentales, one-act pageant plays that usually dramatize the myths of the Fall and Redemption. Since the auto was supervised by both the church and the state, it is typically held to be an art form that serves theology and the dominant powers of the time. Basing her examination of Calderon's autos on modern theories of allegory, Viviana Diaz Balsera focuses on the seductive power of the dramatic, visible level of the allegorical auto and questions the widely held assumption that Calderon's autos harmonize the dramatic and religious discourses that constitute them. In her readings of Los encantos de la Culpa, Eljardin de Falerina, La nave del Mercador, La vida es sueflo, and Lo que va del Hombre a Dios, she instead finds a disjunction between the literal, poetic level and the religious, theological meaning. With its splendid scenes, poetic fables, and elaborate music, the auto ironically has the potential to reproduce the seductive function it frequently attributes to the Devil and/or the forces of evil. Rather than the dogmatic champion of the Catholic Church, the auto emerges as conflictive, ambivalent, and moving, participating in the very dangers of sensual pleasures it seeks to warn against.

According to Rogers, the nineteenth century was incapable of managing the feminine question and preferred to mythicize it. Everything that was related to it, especially feminine sexuality, was transformed into fiction. Thus women were saddled with the role of scapegoat.

Through the analysis of six Spanish novels, one for each decade from the 1940s through the 1990s, Rodríguez proposes a new concept of the novel of feminine development and emphasizes the importance of the voicing of women's sentiments, passions, desires, and opinions that have not been expressed before in the literature of Spain. The study begins with Nada by Carmen Laforet, and continues with La playa de los locos by Elena Soriano, La plaça del Diamant by Mercè Rodoreda, two stories from Te dejo el mar by Carme Riera, Los perros de Hécate by Carmen Gómez Ojea, and Efectos secundarios by Luisa Etxenike.

One of contemporary Italy's best-known writers, Dacia Maraini has often been a figure of controversy as author and as cultural critic. Though she is recipient of numerous literary awards, Maraini's work has not received the sustained critical attention commensurable with its stature. Working and creating "dalla parte delle donne" (on the side of women), she had been effectively excluded from the Italian critical canon. The Pleasure of Writing is opened with Maraini's own analysis of women's writing. There follow 14 essays by an international group of Italianists, utilizing a wide spectrum of interpretive perspectives, form semiotics to psychoanalysis, to treat the full range of Maraini's production as novelist, playwright, poet, and filmmaker.

This book constitutes an attempt to theorize the process of the emergence, in eighteenth-century New Spain, of a position of intellectual subjectivity differentiated from that established by the regime of Spanish imperial authority. The principal concern has been to trace how certain groups of criollo intellectuals try to construct such discourses, paradoxically, out of the framework of available European systems of knowledge and representation. In this fashion, it was sought to discern the outline of an ideological program for criollo political and cultural hegemony in the eighteenth century

Falsehood Disguised analyzes La Rochefoucauld's ideas on truth and falsehood in the context of his views on self-love, on the passions, and on vice and virtue. It also explores his views on the subject in relation to what he sees as the extremely fragile foundations of the social contract. It examines these thorny ethical problems first in the context of the Baroque culture that directly influenced his thought and then in the light of the work of other moralists, including Gracian, Daniel Dyke, Descartes, and the Jansenists Blaise Pascal and Pierre Nicole.Through close textual analysis of La Rochefoucauld's writings, Richard Hodgson studies the moralist's use of metaphors such as the mask as well as his very personal concept of what constitutes an etre vrai, or genuine person. The study then traces the impact of La Rochefoucauld's ideas on thinkers from Vauvenargues and Chamfort to Nietzsche, Lautreamont, and Lacan. It concludes by suggesting reasons why La Rochefoucauld's concept of truth continues to have such enormous appeal to the modern reader.

The term anamorphosis, from the greek ana (again) and morphe (shape), designates a variety of perspective experiments that can be traced back to the artistic developments of the 1500's and 1600's. Anamorphic devices challenge viewers to experience different forms of perceptual oscillation and uncertainty. Images shift in front of the eyes of puzzled spectators as they move from the center of the representation to the margins, or from one side to the other. (A) Wry Views demonstrates that much of the literature of the Spanish Golden Age is susceptible, and indeed requires, oblique readings (as in anamorphosis).

In this comparative study of Honore d'Urfe's L'Astree and Charles Sorel's Le Berger extravagant, the author examines the historical transition from the idealist, pastoral romance to the more realist anti-romance. By analyzing the literary conventions shared by both works, Hinds traces the transformation of poetic forms, courtly language, polemics, emblematic representation, and character depiction in Sorel's parody of pastoral. Basing his enquiry on Mikhail Bakhtin's and Julia Kristeva's theories of discourse, he focuses on the linguistic transformation of source texts in d'Urfe's pastoral and the altering of d'Urfe's language in the hands of Sorel. Narrative themes, such as the echo myth, verbal disguise, discursive travesty, and cross-dressing are studied to demonstrate their adaption in the pastoral romance and its parody. Hinds considers the figure of the omb and the motif of death as means to figure a Baroque notion of authorship and to express pre-Classical literary criticism. Finally at issue is the influence of this romance and anti-romance on the development of criticism of the novel and the formation of seventeenth-century French fiction.

In The Great Chiasmus, Olson explores the use of the grammatical figure called the chiasmus in the work of Miguel de Unamuno. The chiasmus, a reversal in the order of words or parts of speech in parallel phrases, appears on a variety of levels, from brief microstructures (""blanca como la nieve y como la nieve fria""), to the narrative structures of entire novels, and even, Olson suggests, to encompass the stages in Unamuno's novelistic work, forming a chiasmus that can be schematized as ABC:CBA. As a phenomenon of enclosure, the chiasmus is related to other enclosing phenomena such as the image of Chinese boxes and the mise en abyme. These structures, three-dimensional versions of the chiasmus, are also frequent in Unamuno's texts. The chiasmus is also found on the conceptual level, in which Unamuno regards apparent contraties as freely reversible and thus identical. From early adulthood he was fascinated by the Hegelian idea of the identity of pure Being and pure Nothingness, and that concept provides the structure underlying a wide variety of his paradoxes and verbal conceits. In this connection, Unamuno explores concepts usually considered opposites, such as mind and body or spirit and matter (subsumed in the ""Word"" and ""Flesh"" of Olson's subtitle). Olson's close readings of the texts lead to observations on Spanish history, events in Unamuno's life, the psychological dimensions of his characters, and the authorial self found within his texts.

Orientalismo en el modernismohispanoamericano, de Araceli Tinajero,es un novedoso estudio que analiza el modernismo en Latinoamérica desde unaperspectiva fresca y original. Lo que hace a este texto único es su enfoque enlas representaciones de las imágenes, los artefactos culturales y el pensamientooriental (principalmente japonés) en la escritura modernista. La autora hablajaponés y conoce la cultura del Japón. Con su conocimiento nos acerca a losescritores modernistas que eran cronistas o corresponsales y lograron llegar alLejano Oriente donde inventaron/construyeron una forma de exotismo que derivapero difiere del Orientalismo que propone Edward Said. En Asia esos escritoresdescubrieron que había un acercamiento cultural muy sutil (no europeo) entreLatinoamérica y el Oriente. El resultado de ese encuentro es único porquepresenta un paradigma diferente, un Orientalismo que se aleja de una miradaeuropea.Basándoseen la etnografía, los estudios poscoloniales, la teoría literaria, la historiadel arte y la teoría de los relatos de viaje, Tinajero analiza diversos textosmodernistas y demuestra cómo la escritura "periférica" del modernismo escritadesde la modernidad occidental no es realmente marginal. El análisis de losartefactos culturales en los textos modernistas nos permite conocer el modernismomás a fondo y a comprender el encuentro cultural entre Oriente y Occidente. Esefenómeno sobre todo ofrece la alternativa de una visión del Oriente desde unaperspectiva enfáticamente hispanoamericana.ElOrientalismo que propone Tinajero basándose en el estudio del modernismohispanoamericano es innovador y representa una invaluable contribución a losestudios críticos del modernismo latinoamericano.Araceli Tinajero's Orientalismo en el modernismo hispanoamericano falls within the present revisionist trend with respect to Spanish American modernism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The text's uniqueness stems from its focus on allusions to images, artifacts, and thought from the East – primarily Japan – found in central and peripheral writings within the Spanish American movement. The author knows the Japanese language and culture and brings her knowledge to bear in her discussion of modernist writers who, chiefly as chroniclers and correspondents, made their way to the East and there invented/constructed a form of exoticism (Orientalism, following but diverging from Edward Said), while discovering affinities between non-European tendencies within their own American environment and Eastern culture. The result of this encounter was a unique, non-European Orientalism. Drawing on ethnography, postcolonial studies, literary theory, art history, and travel theory, Tinajero analyzes a selection of modernist texts to show how writing at the margin of Western modernism-modernity is at once within and without the mainstream. The examination of Oriental cultural artifacts in modernista texts contributes to our understanding of modernism, of the East-West encounter, and of the culturally specific configurations of these phenomena in South America. Tinajero's concept of Orientalism focused on Spanish American modernism is a fresh approach and represents a valuable contribution to Spanish American modernist scholarship.

The Psyche of Feminism argues that a feminist ethics, in order to be both feminist and ethical, needs to embrace psychoanalysis. After reviewing the relation between feminism and psychoanalysis and arguing for the centrality of psychoanalysis to feminist thought, the study offers an analysis of two attempts by George Sand to reimagine the sexual relationship (Letters to Marcie, Lelia), where the emphasis is on political injustice and the impossibility of women's desires. Moving from rights and desires to the question of pleasures, Peebles then takes up a relatively little-read work by Colette, The Pure and the Impure, in which the narrator suggests that pleasure and its corporeal language hold the key to any understanding of masculinity and femininity. We are then led to the risky question of ""neutrality"" put forward by Nathalie Sarraute ( You Don't Love Yourself ), whose work forces a psychoana­lytic feminism to face the question: what if sexual difference itself is a ruse? Does the notion of a human neutrality condemn us either to a bygone humanism or to psycho­sis? The final chapter of the work synthesizes these analyses, and argues for a fundamental feminist rethinking of the ideal of equality, an ideal that figures significantly—and uneasily—in each of the works this book treats.

Francisco de Quevedo, the Spanish poet and satirist whose books were by far the most widely read in Spain in the 17 th century, died unaware that his genius had created modern satire in Spanish, and that for the ensuing five centuries, as we now know, his name would be a household word wherever Spanish was spoken. Between 1605 and 1621, Quevedo wrote a sequence of five Dreams or Visions ( Suenos y discursos ), in each of which he hilariously envisions Spanish society as populated by people rightfully condemned to Hell. These astonishingly witty and irreverent satires of contemporary Spanish culture, morality, prejudice and religious fanaticism, were composed in a style so allusive, elliptical and equivocal as to successfully entertain both those who barely understood their full range and import, and others who celebrated the poet's rebellious insinuations. Censorship prohibited the publication of such satire in its original form, but hundreds of copies were made by hand and circulated widely. In 1993 a critical edition of all of the surviving manuscripts was published. Today the Suenos are commonly read in modern editions of the first censored version, printed in 1627. The present book ( La tradicion. . . ), compares this version with all of the 43 extant manuscripts, and for the first time identifies those groups of manuscripts from which the publishers of the first edition derived their text. This text can now be seen as a version not only censored, but corrupted successively by copyists and editors who did not understand Quevedo's satire, and did not hesitate to add entire clauses, omit others and transfer sentences from one place to another. The result is hardly what Spain 's most famous satirist originally wrote.

Rojas's Celestina (1499) is perhaps the second greatest work of Spanish literature, right after Don Quixote, and Delicado sought to surpass it with La Lozana andaluza (1530), an important precedent of the picaresque novel. Both works were written during the height of the Inquisition, when the only relatively safe way for New Christian writers of Jewish extraction like Rojas and Delicado to express what they felt about the discrimination they suffered and their doubts regarding the faith that had been forced upon their ancestors was in a covert, indirect manner. Some scholars have detected this subversive element in Rojas' and Delicado's corrosive view of the Christian societies in which they lived, but this book goes far beyond such impressionism, showing through abundant textual evidence that these two authors used superficial bawdiness and claims regarding the morality of their respective works as cover to encode attacks against the central dogmas of Christianity: the Annunciation, the Virgin Birth, the Incarnation, and the Holy Trinity. This book, which will generate controversy among Hispanists, many of whom have refused to examine these works for non-Catholic views, will be of interest not only to students and scholars of Spanish literature, but also to those involved in Jewish studies, Medieval European history, and cultural studies. Manuel Da Costa Fontes is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Kent State University. The author and editor of many books, he has published widely on the Portuguese ballad, crypto-Judaism, and medieval and Renaissance Spanish literature. His most recent book is Foiklore and Literature: Studies in the Portuguese, Brazilian, Sephardic, and Hispanic Oral Traditions.

This study by Cristina Ferreira-Pinto explores the poetic and narrative strategies twentieth-century Brazilian women writers use to achieve new forms of representation of the female body, sexuality, and desire. Female writers discussed include: Gilka Machado, Lygia Fagundes Telles, Marcia Denser, and Marina Colasanti. While creating new forms, these writers are also deconstructing cultural myths of femininity and female behavior. In order to understand these myths, the book also presents new readings of some male-authored canonical novels by Jose de Alencar, Machado de Assis, Manuel Antonio de Almeida, and Aluisio Azevedo. The specific focus on female sexuality and desire acknowledges the intrinsic link between sexuality and an individual's sense of identity, and its importance for female identity, given the historical repression of women's bodies and the double standard of morality still pervasive in many Western cultures. In the discussion of the strategies Brazilian female poets and fiction writers employ, Ferreira-Pinto addresses some social and cultural issues that relate to a woman's sense of her own body and sexuality: the characterization of women based on racial features and class hierarchy; marriage; motherhood; the silencing of the lesbian subject; and aging. Ferreira-Pinto's analysis is informed by the works of various and diverse critics and theoreticians, among them Helene Cixous, Teresa De Lauretis, Adrienne Rich, Gloria Anzaldua, Georges Bataille, and Wilhelm Reich.

This text explores the literary, cultural and political relationships of Francisco de Quevedo (1580-1645), one of the major writers of the Spanish Golden Age. It establishes the birth and development of the first Spanish literary field circa 1600, then focuses on the relationship between the literary field and the field of power (the King, the court at large and the Catholic Church hierarchy).

In the eighteenth century, a type of novel flourished showing naive outsiders who come to Europe and are amazed at what they see. Foreign travelers first setfoot in Europe in the sixteenth century and are memorably present in Montaigne's essay Des Cannibales. The genre was made popularin France by Montesquieu's novel Lettres persanes. Considering the "stranger" as a figure of ambiguity, Sylvie Romanowski explains why the genre was so useful to the Enlightenment. The question of why showing ambiguous stranger is important in that period is addressed in the book's introduction by setting the Enlightenment in the historical context of the seventeenth century. Romanowski then examines Montaigne's Des Cannibales, showing how these first "outsiders" relate to their eighteenth-century successors. She next considers Montesquieu's Lettres persanes in its entirety, studying the voices of the men, the women, and the eunuchs. She also studies other examples of the genre. The author closes with a discussion of the philosophical tension, ongoing in Western thought, between skeptics and those who, refusing skepticism, seek firm foundations for knowledge, this draws connections between the sixteenth century, and our "postmodern" era.

Elsa Morante has long been recognized internationally as one of the most significant and innovative writers of twentieth-century Italy; nonetheless, there has to date been no full-length study in English dedicated to her work. This collection of twelve essays offers the first comprehensive evaluation of Morante to appear outside Italy, while taking into account modern critical and theoretical developments.

Aesthetics of Equilibrium is the first book-length comparative analysis of the theoretical prose by two major Latin American vanguardist contemporaries, Mario de Andrade (Brazil, 1893-1945) and Vicente Huidobro (Chile, 1893-1948). Willis offers a comparative study of two allegorical texts, Huidobro's ""Non serviam"" and Mario's ""Parabola d'A escrava que nao e Isaura"".

Culinary Comedy in Medieval French Literature focuses on the intersection of food and humor across several medieval narrative genres. This book is a part of the Purdue Studies in Romance Literature Series.

While Victor Hugo's lasting appeal as a novelist can in large part be attributed to the unforgettable characters that he created, character has been paradoxically the most criticized and least understood element of his fiction. Character and Meaning in the Novels of Victor Hugo provides readers with a deeper understanding of the complexities and nuances that characterize both Hugo's novel writing and the nineteenth-century French novel, and will thus appeal to the specialist and non-specialist alike.

Radical Theatricality argues that our narrow search for extant medieval play scripts depends entirely on a definition of theater far more literary than performative. This literary definition pushes aside some of our best evidence of Spain's medieval performance traditions precisely because this evidence is considered either intangible or "un-dramatic" (that is, monologic). By focusing on the dialogic relationship that inherently exists between performer and spectator in performance -rather than on the kind of literary dialogue between characters traditionally associated with drama- Radical Theatricality diachronically examines the performative poetics of the jongleuresque tradition (broadly defined to encompass such disparate performers as ancient Greek rhapsodes and contemporary Nobel Laureate Dario Fo) and synchronically traces its performative impact on the Spanish theater of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

With the intense economic development and accelerated modernization experienced by Spain since the 1970s, and especially following its entrance into the European Economic Community in 1986, the country has undergone a rapid inversion in migratory patterns. After being an exporter of economic migrants for almost a century, in the last twenty years Spain has seen itself on the receiving end of immigration. Coinciding with a time when Spain is highlighting its belonging to Europe, the growing presence of Moroccan immigrants in particular confronts Spanish society with the repressed non-European, African and Oriental aspects of its national identity.""The Return of the Moor"" examines the anxiety over symbolic and literal boundaries permeating the Spanish reception of these immigrants through an interdisciplinary analysis of social, fictional, and performative texts. It argues that Moroccans constitute a 'problem' to Spaniards not because of their cultural differences, as many claim, but because they are not different enough. Perceived as 'Moors', they conjure up past ghosts that continue to haunt the Spanish imaginary, revealing the acute tensions inherent in Spain's liminal position between Europe and Africa.

Utopian Dreams, Apocalyptic Nightmares traces the history of utopian representations of the Americas, first on the part of the colonizers, who idealized the New World as an earthly paradise, and later by Latin American modernizing elites, who imagined Western industrialization, cosmopolitanism and consumption as a utopian dream for their independent societies. Carlos Fuentes, Homero Aridjis, Carmen Boullosa, and Alejandro Morales utilize the literary genre of dystopian science fiction to elaborate on how globalization has resulted in the alienation of indigenous peoples and the deterioration of the ecology. This book concludes that Mexican and Chicano perspectives on the past and the future of their societies constitute a key site for the analysis of the problems of underdevelopment, social injustice, and ecological decay that plague today's world. Whereas utopian discourse was once used to justify colonization, Mexican and Chicano writers now deploy dystopian rhetoric to interrogate projects of modernization, contributing to the current debate on the global expansion of capitalism. The narratives coincide in expressing confidence in the ability of Latin American and U.S. Latino popular sectors to claim a decisive role in the implementation of enhanced measures to guarantee an ecologically sound, ethnically diverse, and just society for the future of the Americas.

In the late 1970s, Brazil was experiencing the return to democracy through a gradual political opening and the re-birth of its civil society. Writing Identity examines the intricate connections between artistic production and political action. It centers on the politics of the black movement and the literary production of a Sao Paulo-based group of Afro-Brazilian writers, the Quilombhoje. Using Pierre Bourdieu's theory of the field of cultural production, the manuscript explores the relationship between black writers and the Brazilian dominant canon, studying the reception and criticism of contemporary Afro-Brazilian literature. After the 1940s, the Brazilian literary field underwent several transformations. Literary criticism's displacement from the newspapers to the universities placed a growing emphasis on aesthetics and style. Academic critics denounced the focus on a political and racial agenda as major weaknesses of Afro-Brazilian writing, and stressed, the need for aesthetic experimentation within the literary field. Writing Identity investigates how Afro-Brazilian writers maintained strong connections to the black movement in Brazil, and yet sought to fuse a social and racial agenda with more sophisticated literary practices. As active militants in the black movement, Quilombhoje authors strove to strengthen a collective sense of black identity for Afro-Brazilians.

In Naciones intelectuales, Ignacio M. Sanchez Prado explores the processes and works that laid the foundations of a new literary modernity in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. Focusing on a period that goes from the signing of the Constitution in 1917 to the death of Alfonso Reyes in 1959, Sanchez Prado centers his analysis on the way in which four elements of Mexican cultural practice - the notion of literature, the figure of the intellectual, the creation of academic institutions and the definition of national identity - emerged through the various debates held by leading figures of the period. Through an appropriation of Pierre Bourdieu's notion of 'literary field', the book analyzes different key moments, controversies, and cultural interventions, which ultimately led the diverse aesthetic spectrum created by the Revolution into becoming a highly institutional system of literature. Sanchez Prado's work deals with a wide range of writers, including Alfonso Reyes, Jorge Cuesta, Manuel Maples Arce, Ramon Lopez Velarde, Francisco Monterde, Jose Gaos, the Hiperion philosophers, and Octavio Paz. As a result, this books offers a cartography of Mexican literary institutions unprecedented in scope, which will allow readers, students, and scholars to understand the construction of modern Mexican literature in a clear, rigorous, and systematic way.

Indios en escena engages both the Baroque and Colonial fields of Hispanism in order to reevaluate fourteen major plays of Spanish Golden Age literature from a social-historical perspective. Castillo argues that these plays portray Amerindians not in their 'otherness' but as subjects of empire. It is the author's contention that these dramas reveal the vast contradictions between the two leading ideological trends of the age as performed on the stage: the discourse of honor and the juridical-theological code, both of which attempt to assimilate the Amerindian phenomenon under the auspices of church and state. These works consistently raise the paradoxical question of how a person can be a savage and have honor at the same time. The Amerindian must become a new 'subject' for the Spanish Crown (as stated by the discourse of honor in these plays), i.e., an honorable and distinguished Indian capable of lofty speech and courage in battle. Yet, Amerindians are also barbarians or wild 'children' (F. de Vitoria, Las Casas) who need the redemptive intervention of the Church to mature (evolve) and to be capable of salvation. These plays reveal the effort to integrate and assimilate the new indigenous entities under the monarcho-seigneurial system while exposing the philosophical contradictions that Baroque ideology has to overcome in order to elicit obedience. Thus, Castillo claims that this theater propagates the concept of the 'Amerindian' both as 'Honorable Subject', a theatrical archetype, and idolatrous barbarian 'Other', a model of representation that belongs to the mindset of religious crusades and evangelical enterprises.