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Articles 61 - 90 of 129
Full-Text Articles in Modern Languages
The Dangerous Quest For Nature Narratives In Goethe’S Werther: A Reading Of The Ruptured Monologue And The Ruptured Body, Heather I. Sullivan
The Dangerous Quest For Nature Narratives In Goethe’S Werther: A Reading Of The Ruptured Monologue And The Ruptured Body, Heather I. Sullivan
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
Assessing Goethe's narrative ruptures, this essay follows their trail in three directions: first through the editor's sudden interruption of Werther producing the post-epistolary multiplicity of voices, second in the alterations Goethe made to the 1787 version of Werther that enhance the theme of rupture itself, and third along the fault-lines delineated in three exemplary "letters of nature" from Werther.
Critiques Of The "Novela Rosa": Martín Gaite, Almodóvar, And Etxebarría, Debra J. Ochoa
Critiques Of The "Novela Rosa": Martín Gaite, Almodóvar, And Etxebarría, Debra J. Ochoa
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
At the end of the twentieth century, film director Pedro Almodovar (b. 1949), in La flor de mi secreto (1995), and writer Lucia Etxebarria (b. 1966), in Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes, una novela rosa (1998), continue to analyze the novela rosa, a project begun by Carmen Martin Gaite in El cuarto de atrds (1978) and Usos amorosos de la postguerra (1987). Martin Gaite argues that women of her generation were victims of the Francoist ideology found in popular romance novels. Like many others, including Franco's own daughter Carmen, she received a limited education that did not allow women …
Another Look At Calderón’S El Príncipe Constante As Tragedy, Matthew D. Stroud
Another Look At Calderón’S El Príncipe Constante As Tragedy, Matthew D. Stroud
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
The forms and definitions of tragedy have been a frequent preoccupation for James Parr over the course of his distinguished career. One of his more influential articles was "El príncipe constante and the Issue of Christian Tragedy," published in 1986. Parr's approach was primarily ethical and formalist, dealing with the Aristotelian requirements of tragedy: areté, hubris, catharsis. He countered the long and distinguished scholarship that maintains that Christian tragedy is an impossibility by reconsidering, even redefining, hamartia and anagnorisis, and essentially ignoring peripeteia. Hamartia, in his reading, is much more than a flaw or an …
Defining The Comedia: On Generalizations Once Widely Accepted That Are No Longer Accepted So Widely, Matthew D. Stroud
Defining The Comedia: On Generalizations Once Widely Accepted That Are No Longer Accepted So Widely, Matthew D. Stroud
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
Defining the comedia is a challenge that is rarely addressed directly in the pages of the Bulletin of the Comediantes. Those of us who spend our professional lives working with the plays that are brought together under this cover term have a visceral or intuitive understanding of what falls into the category of comedia and what lies outside of it. We are hardly exempt from having to articulate our definitions in concrete terms, however, because students, colleagues, and organizations to whom we write grants all want us to establish the limits, scope, and parameters of our field of study. …
The Closest Reading: Creating Annotated Editions, Matthew D. Stroud
The Closest Reading: Creating Annotated Editions, Matthew D. Stroud
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
Teaching old literature of any kind to undergraduates is a challenge. The language is difficult, the themes often lack resonance for today's students, and the cultural references are abstruse. When one adds to the mix that the works are in an archaic version of Spanish, not the native language of most students in the United States, and that the plays are written in florid, baroque poetry, the task of helping students to appreciate the Spanish comedia for its literary value is made considerably more demanding. A great many students simply do not understand what is going on with the plots …
The Odd Man Out: The Kings In Corneille's Machine Plays, Nina Ekstein
The Odd Man Out: The Kings In Corneille's Machine Plays, Nina Ekstein
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
Andromède and La Conquête de la Toison d’or have a largely unenviable status in Corneille’s oeuvre. They are often either dismissed or marginalized, and almost inevitably read as different from, and therefore inferior to, the more canonical Cornelian works. In fact, both plays are richer and more interesting than commonly thought, as I hope to suggest by an examination of the curious and curiously similar role of the king.
Infallible Texts And Righteous Interpretations: Don Quijote And Religious Fundamentalism, Matthew D. Stroud
Infallible Texts And Righteous Interpretations: Don Quijote And Religious Fundamentalism, Matthew D. Stroud
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
Religion in Don Quijote has been a frequent subject of inquiry over the past century. As a "vehicle for religious expression," to use Ziolkowski's terminology (1), Cervantes's masterpiece has been studied as an analogy of the relationship between religious faith and the world around it (Ziolkowski 8), as a manifestation of the historic clash between the secularization of the modern era and the waning medieval domination by "religious institutions and symbols" (Ziolkowski 9, citing Berger 107), as a vessel of both the spirit and the letter of selected pronouncements of the Council of Trent (Descouzis 479), as a text that …
Over The Top: From The Tragic To The Comic In Corneille, Nina Ekstein
Over The Top: From The Tragic To The Comic In Corneille, Nina Ekstein
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
The notions of tragedy and comedy that one can intuit from the theater of Corneille are markedly different from those found in other authors of the period. This is but one aspect of a larger issue concerning Corneille's placement in the hallowed pantheon of literary history. He is one of the major canonical authors and yet he often disconcerts. He was one of the principal theorists of drama in the seventeenth century and yet he took a number of stands in direct and lonely opposition to his peers. Alain Couprie points out that Corneille "a toujours été un auteur suspect," …
The Director’S Cut: Baroque Aesthetics And Modern Stagings Of The Comedia, Matthew D. Stroud
The Director’S Cut: Baroque Aesthetics And Modern Stagings Of The Comedia, Matthew D. Stroud
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
The last twenty-five years have witnessed a relative explosion in the number of staged productions of Spanish comedias. Whether the performances take place in Madrid, Almagro, New York, or El Paso, the experience has changed forever the way those who have attended performances view plays previously known only by reaing [sic] the text. One cannot fail to have been affected by the interaction between literature and theater, between professors and directors, between text and performance. A debate that has arisen as a result of this spectator's experience, especially after the production of a particularly well-known comedia, …
Corneille's Absent Characters, Nina Ekstein
Corneille's Absent Characters, Nina Ekstein
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
The relationship between presence and absence in theater is intertwined and complex. For Kibédi Varga, a work of art invariably signifies absence in that it proposes an image, a representation, rather than the thing itself (341-42). This is obviously true of theater. At the same time, theater is essentially about presence. The empty stage is a space that derives its potential for force and meaning from the expectation of live bodies engaged in concrete actions there. Perhaps more to the point, theater is about the dialectical relationship between absence and presence. According to Fuchs, "theatre is ever the presence of …
Alicia Sotero Vásquez: Police Brutality Against An Undocumented Mexican Woman, Rita Urquijo-Ruiz
Alicia Sotero Vásquez: Police Brutality Against An Undocumented Mexican Woman, Rita Urquijo-Ruiz
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
This article focuses on police brutality and human rights violations in the United States. The author examines the infamous Riverside Sheriff's brutal beating of an undocumented Mexican woman—which was captured and broadcast live via television—as exemplary of a particular historical relationship between Mexican labor, the U.S. nation-state, and the material conditions of immigrant laborers. Tracing this relationship through a historical survey of Mexican immigration from the turn of the twentieth century and placing the analysis in the context of Critical Race Theory, the article foregrounds the intersection of race, class, and gender. While the author focuses on the Riverside Sheriff's …
Authenticity, Authoriality, And The Nature Of Electronic Texts: Don Quijote In The Age Of Digital Reproduction, Matthew D. Stroud
Authenticity, Authoriality, And The Nature Of Electronic Texts: Don Quijote In The Age Of Digital Reproduction, Matthew D. Stroud
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
In "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Walter Benjamin provided thought-provoking insights into the way that lithography, photography, and cinema changed the nature of art and our perceptions of it. Among other considerations, he noted that the efficient mass reproduction of works of art affected notions of authenticity, the author, and the response of the viewer or reader. In many ways, the advent of the Internet causes us to review his arguments and expand on them in light of this new, digitized, decentralized, and diffuse method of reproducing works of art, including literature. Among the first …
Knowing Irony: The Problem Of Corneille, Nina Ekstein
Knowing Irony: The Problem Of Corneille, Nina Ekstein
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
Irony and knowledge exist in a problematic relationship to each other, one that is strikingly similar to that between knowledge and secrets. If irony becomes unambiguously obvious, that is, known to all, it is no longer perceived as irony. And a secret is not a secret if it is widely known. By the same token, someone must perceive irony in order for it to exist, just as a secret must be known by someone. Thus the question of whether a given author is ironic is unlikely to have a clear, unambiguous answer. The probable lack of final clarity does not …
Pompée's Absence In Corneille's 'La Mort De Pompée', Nina Ekstein
Pompée's Absence In Corneille's 'La Mort De Pompée', Nina Ekstein
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
Corneille's La Mort de Pompée (1643) occupies a curious position in the playwright's oeuvre, coming as it does immediately after the tetralogy. Faced with the never-ending artistic challenge of what to do next, what features to keep from earlier works, how to innovate and thereby captivate his audience, how to outdo his latest success, Corneille made some daring choices in this play. Indeed, this play is commonly viewed as a significant point in Corneille's oeuvre, one at which the playwright moves off in a radically new direction. It is my contention that the basic choice to keep Pompée …
Gender And The Gaze: Sor Juana, Lacan, And Spanish Baroque Poetry, Matthew D. Stroud
Gender And The Gaze: Sor Juana, Lacan, And Spanish Baroque Poetry, Matthew D. Stroud
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
There are few motifs more ubiquitous in Renaissance and Baroque poetry than those that link falling in love to the eyes. Based at least in part on Theophrastus, as Halstead has pointed out (113-20), this notion of love describes a process by which one is captivated by looking at the object of desire, prompting an exchange of humors or spirits. If the love is returned, both lovers feel complete and satisfied, but if the object of desire does not reciprocate, one feels empty because one has given one’s soul to another while receiving nothing in return.
Metaphors Of Mathematics In Corneille's Theater, Nina Ekstein
Metaphors Of Mathematics In Corneille's Theater, Nina Ekstein
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
Mathematical metaphors are a distinctive and characteristic feature of Corneille’s theater, closely tied to his dramatic aesthetics. I divide these metaphors into two groups, identities and combinatorics. The field of identities deals with different kinds of equations, from the level of language, where elements are equated or placed in some other relationship that can be expressed mathematically, to the level of plot, where, for example, the search for identity (e.g. who is Héraclius?) resembles an algebraic equation. Combinatorics involves the arrangements and combinations of elements, and finds its greatest application here in the question of the constitution of couples to …
Uxoricidas, Matthew D. Stroud
Uxoricidas, Matthew D. Stroud
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
La figura del uxoricida aparece en muchas literaturas nacionales, pero la comedia española presenta tantos argumentos en que el marido mata a su esposa que llega a ser un verdadero subgénero. El uxoricidio es tan importante dentro de la historia literaria de la época que algunos han llegado a declarar, equivocadamente, que la matanza de una mujer representaba fielmente cierta peculiaridad del carácter nacional español, sobre todo cuando se trataba también del honor. Es verdad que la autoridad legal de matar a una esposa adúltera aparece en el Fuero juzgo, pero ya no estaba en vigor en el siglo …
Sophonisbe's Seduction: Corneille Writing Against Mairet, Nina Ekstein
Sophonisbe's Seduction: Corneille Writing Against Mairet, Nina Ekstein
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
Rewriting the subjects of tragedies was so common throughout the seventeenth century as to be a defining characteristic of the period. While originality was the rule in comedy, in tragedy it was disdained. The arrangement of the action, the power and beauty of the language. the originality of the articulation of the more or less ancient plot: these were the badges of the tragic virtuoso. Rewriting was both a compliment to the predecessor and an act of appropriation, a theft not so much of the subject as of authority over the subject. The tragic playwright rewrote with a presumption of …
Women And Marriage In Corneille's Theater, Nina Ekstein
Women And Marriage In Corneille's Theater, Nina Ekstein
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
Marriage is ubiquitous in Corneille's theater: there is not a single one of his plays in which marriage is not an issue, in which at least one union is not proposed. In part this state of affairs is due to the fact that the vast majority of Corneille's characters are marriageable. While marriageability is hardly unusual among the young, Corneille inevitably takes his characters at precisely the dramatic moment when the choice of life partner is to be made. For Corneille, that moment is not even limited to the young; not infrequently older characters are in need of a spouse …
Uncertainty In Corneille's Héraclius, Nina Ekstein
Uncertainty In Corneille's Héraclius, Nina Ekstein
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
Scholars agree that Héraclius (1646) occupies the extreme point of plot complication in the Cornelian oeuvre. Numerous events have occurred prior to the action of the play, events that are necessary to the spectators' understanding of what transpires onstage. Twenty years before the play opens, Phocas assassinated the emperor Maurice as well as his sons and took his throne. Léontine, the royal governess, switched the youngest of Maurice's sons, Héraclius, with her own son, thus sacrificing the latter's life so that the royal blood of Maurice might survive. Not long after, Léontine made a second substitution, this time switching …
Le Change In Corneille And Racine, Nina Ekstein
Le Change In Corneille And Racine, Nina Ekstein
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
Le Change is a concept typically associated in the seventeenth century with the baroque, with the pastoral, and with comedy. In the simplest terms, a lover abandons the object of his or her affections for another. In baroque aesthetics, change is linked to the larger concepts of mobility and metamorphosis (Rousset 44). It is a common motif in the pastoral as well, both in drama and prose fiction. The classic pastoral figure of change is Hylas from Honoré d'Urfé's Astrée, who moves cavalierly from one mistress to the next. Invariably in seventeenth-century France, change is held to be a …
Artistry And Irony In María De Zayas's La Inocencia Castigada, Matthew D. Stroud
Artistry And Irony In María De Zayas's La Inocencia Castigada, Matthew D. Stroud
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
By the time Maria de Zayas published her Desengaños amorosos, the honor scenario, due in large part to the dominance of the comedia and especially of Calderón, had taken on a number of characteristics that today seem inseparable from the familiar plotlines. A noblewoman, usually innocent of adultery but loved by another man, is believed for one reason or another to have dishonored her husband. He proceeds to verify that the affront has indeed been committed, and, upon (wrongly) coming to believe that his wife is guilty, undertakes to have her killed in secret so that his honor will …
Performativity And Sexual Identity In Calderón’S Las Manos Blancas No Ofenden (White Hands Don't Offend), Matthew D. Stroud
Performativity And Sexual Identity In Calderón’S Las Manos Blancas No Ofenden (White Hands Don't Offend), Matthew D. Stroud
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
Spanish comedia brims with examples of fluid gender identification. Not only do women frequently dress as men, but other characters almost always accept them as men or women depending solely on the clothes they wear. Is gender so superficial in these plays that it is merely a function of one's choosing the signifiers one wants to wear? Or is there an essentialism to gender that forces each character to assume the gender that corresponds to his or her sex in order to have a happy ending? Or is it something else, perhaps more reflective of Judith Butler's investigations into the …
Comedy, Foppery, Camp: Moreto’S El Lindo Don Diego, Matthew D. Stroud
Comedy, Foppery, Camp: Moreto’S El Lindo Don Diego, Matthew D. Stroud
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
In 1990, Francisco Portes brought his Teatro Pequeño to the Chamizal in El Paso and gave the audience his usual high quality performance of Moreto' s El Iindo don Diego. Those who attended the performance or have seen it on videotape know that Portes' s portrayal of Diego was nothing less than magisterial. He minces, he scolds, he blusters, he fusses, completely obsessed with his appearance and his affect on others. Don Diego's entry scene established his character and the comic tone for the entire play. In it, Diego converses with a very straight-laced foil, Don Mendo, a much …
Homo/Hetero/Social/Sexual: Gila In Vélez’S La Serrana De La Vera, Matthew D. Stroud
Homo/Hetero/Social/Sexual: Gila In Vélez’S La Serrana De La Vera, Matthew D. Stroud
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
There is an ever growing body of criticism noting the homosocial underpinnings of comedia society in which women serve primarily to cement the relationships among men. Barbara Simerka, Harry Vélez de Quiñones, and others have convincingly begun to establish the homosocial nature of the stage society in which women, often as objects given signification only when they acquire exchange value, frequently have little say in their marriages or in other important aspects of their lives. The dama, to borrow a definition from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, is a character who takes her "shape and meaning from a sexuality of which …
Staging The Tyrant On The Seventeenth-Century French Stage, Nina Ekstein
Staging The Tyrant On The Seventeenth-Century French Stage, Nina Ekstein
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
The tyrant is a frequent figure of seventeenth-century theater. While not as ubiquitous as young lovers, fathers, or kings, the tyrant is a persistent subset of this last group throughout the period. Like so many elements of seventeenth-century theater, the tyrant has it origins in antiquity, both in terms of political theory and drama. Tyrants first appeared on the stage of fifth-century Athens, and the legends and histories of the tyrants of antiquity are often repeated on the French stage of the seventeenth century, from Hérode sending Marianne to her death, to Brute assassinating César, to Néron eliminating his rival …
Mithridate, Displacement, And The Sea, Nina Ekstein
Mithridate, Displacement, And The Sea, Nina Ekstein
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
When Mithridate opens, the king is rumored dead in Colchide, killed by the Romans in battle. His return by sea at the end of the first act is not merely a surprise, but also a temporal, geographical, and almost metaphysical displacement. Mithridate's homecoming turns everything upside down and brings the full force of incest to the amorous rivalry between Phamace and Xipharès. Having successfully spread rumors of his own demise, Mithridate seems to return from the dead, arriving after an absence of a year, from a relatively distant land by the waters of the Pont-Euxin (the Black Sea). Life and …
Pedro Calderón De La Barca, Matthew D. Stroud
Pedro Calderón De La Barca, Matthew D. Stroud
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
Don Pedro Calderón de Ia Barca was born on January 17, 1600, to parents of noble lineage. Although little is known of the early years of his life, it has been determined that Calderón attended the Jesuit Colegio Imperial in Madrid from about 1608 to about 1613. His mother died in 1610, after which his brother Diego left abruptly for Mexico, his sister Dorotea entered a convent, and his youngest sister Antonia went to live with her grandmother. In 1614, Pedro entered the University of Alcalá, and in 1615, after the death of his father, he went to study at …
The Lessons Of Calderón’S La Cisma De Inglaterra, Matthew D. Stroud
The Lessons Of Calderón’S La Cisma De Inglaterra, Matthew D. Stroud
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
Among Jacques Lacan's most useful theoretical innovations are his constructs to describe human behavior in three registers: the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. The imaginary is the register of the ego, of fantasies of possession and totalization, of rivalry and revenge, of specular relationships of the subject with its own reflections or its own projections. The symbolic is the register of the law and order, of language, of repression, of submission to Other structures and systems such as culture, civilization, and society. The ceaseless conflict between the imaginary imperatives for individual conquest and the symbolic surrender of the individual …
The Comedia In Amsterdam, 1609-1621: Rodenburgh's Translation Of Aguilar's La Venganza Honrosa, Matthew D. Stroud
The Comedia In Amsterdam, 1609-1621: Rodenburgh's Translation Of Aguilar's La Venganza Honrosa, Matthew D. Stroud
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
In the seventeenth century, the Spanish comedia was not only known outside of Spain, it informed other national literatures and was even performed abroad, either in Spanish or in translation. In most cases, it was received into an established cultural environment, such as Corneille's adaptations in France; its appearance was not considered politically inflammatory in any sense as the host cultures were able to deal with the comedia as only a literary phenomenon. In the case of the Low Countries before 1648, however, the comedia was translated and performed in a colony in more or less open rebellion against Spain …