Purdue University Monographs in Romance Languages (vols. 1–42, 1980–1992)

Lorca's poetry is founded upon a complex symbolical system of recurring motifs. This book analyses a number of those motifs as poetic signs through a contextual reading of Libro de poemas (1921) and Diván del Tamarit (1940) as the initial and final stages of Lorca's career. The sexual and religious crisis voiced in Libro de poemas achieves poetic articulation through the sign of the star, while the betrayal of childhood's fairytale is evidenced in the sign of the moon. Diván del Tamarit exemplifies the trancelike writing of the poetry of “opening up one's veins” as an activity developing between the desire for a word that will capture plenitude and the word's impenetrability to fix an impulse that, in itself, resists any determinacy.

Israel Pelletier argues that Trois contes demands a different kind of reading which distinguishes it from Madame Bovary and other Flaubert texts. By the time he wrote this late work, Flaubert's attitude toward his characters and the role of fiction had changed to accommodate different social, political, and literary pressures. He constructed two opposing levels of meaning for each of the stories, straight and ironic, which produced a more fruitful way of addressing some of his concerns and assumptions about langauge and illusion. Included in this study are a provocative feminist reading of Un Coeur, an assessment of Saint Julien as Flaubert's attempt to come to terms with his originality as a writer, and an interpretation of Hérodias as an autobiography of the writing process.

Establishing the notion of reasonable foolishness and foolish reason as a generic principle of the old French farce, Boucquey's study examines the interdependencies among four key mimetic phenomena: the demented universe of the Feast of Fools festival, the genre of the farce, Bruegel's representation of the world, and the euphoric comedies of triumphant madness created by Moliere. This reinterpretation of French farce according to the principle of a topsy-turvy world reveals the link of madness that unites the four modes of production studied, from textual linearity, through representational surface, to theatrical three-dimensionality. Of pluralist conception, the book's eclectic critical apparatus draws readily on foundations as diverse as historicism, semiotics, structuralism, Foucauldian theory, iconography, Derridean textualization, and etymology.

During the Golden Age, poetry and drama entered into a dynamic intertextual and intergeneric exchange. The Comedia appropriated the different poetic currents prevalent during the Renaissance and also often enacted the controversies surrounding poetic language. Of particular interest is the influence of gongorismo on the comedia. Luis de Góngora himself experimented with dramatic form in his two little-known plays, Las firmezas de Isabela and El doctor Carlino. In his quest for effective dramatic language, Lope de Vega dramatized Gongorine language through both parody and respectful imitation. Calderón de la Barca, whose plays represent the culmination of Góngora's influence on Golden Age theater, transformed gongorismo into a rich, performative code that functions simultaneously as poetic discourse and dramatic convention.

Applying recent European and Anglo-American feminist scholarship to the problems of gender representation, Charnon-Deutsch challenges the prevailing idea that the 19th-century Spanish novel is woman centered. The author's examination of novels by Valera, Pereda, Alas, and Galdos demonstrates that these works are instead a complex exploration of male identity. Decoding the gender ideology of women's roles, discourse, and representations, Charnon-Deutsch uncovers in the novels multiple configurations of androcentricity as well as voyeuristic tendencies, which she interprets as a means of mastering what is threatening to the male psyche.

Malcolm K. Read employs a psychoanalytic model which sees civilization as a manner of instinctual renunciation in this analysis of selected texts from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Focusing on their moments of silence and contradiction, he demonstrates that certain attitudes toward the body expressed in these texts have a basis, albeit unconscious, in a motivation which is ultimately political. The central topics, deeply intertwined thematically and theoretically, relate to the nature and development of language; to the Baroque art of Gongora and Quevedo; to Feijoo's defense of the rationalist subject set against Torres Villarroel's subversion of the same; and to the neo-classical aesthetics of Luzan and Arteaga. The result is an interdisciplinary approach that challenges traditional assumptions in both literary criticism and linguistic historiography.

Benito Perez Galdos sought a new narrative structure which would revitalize the literary models prevalent in 19th-century Spain. He found such a structure in the creation of a dialogue between normally incompatible texts — between old and new, national and foreign, high culture and low. From the confrontation of these incongruous texts a narrative is born which, through the destruction of textual hierarchies, creates an ambiguous and often duplicitous texture of storytelling. Five paradigms, based upon five Novelas Contemporaneas, are used to exemplify the dialogical structure of the new Galdosian novel.

Aunque en Italia la imitación como ejercicio literario formaba ya parte integrante de la preceptiva poética, para los escritores castellanos del siglo XVI representaba una manera nueva de aproximarse tanto a los clásicos greco-latinos como a los italianos más recientes. La imitatio enlaza a España con la actualidad circundante, y el renacimiento literario que resulta de su práctica queda delineado no sólo por su contexto geopolítico sino por su dinámica interna. El Cinquecento italiano tiene su base en la excelencia literaria que habían logrado anteriormente Petrarca y Boccaccio en el Trecento; la participación de España en esa misma excelencia coincide, en parte, con una visión del país como poder político universal.

This is an interesting book that provides a sane analysis of the relation between form and meaning in the fabliaux. It will henceforth be standard reading for those dealing with what nevertheless remains one of the most problematic genres of Old French Literature for the modern scholar.Keith Busby, Speculum — A Journal of Medieval Studies, Jan. 1990

This study seeks to demonstrate that throughout centuries of re-creation, linguistic devices have been used to support both the production and the reproduction of the romances. On the basis of this demonstration, it is argued that it is time to recognize these devices as evaluators and to include a discussion of evaluative mechanisms in the study of the Romancero tradition.

It is tempting to speculate that had Ausiàs March (1397–1459) written in Spanish instead Catalan, or rather the Valencian form of it which was his native tongue, he would by now undoubtedly be more widely recognised as the finest lyric poet in the Iberian Peninsula before the sixteenth century, and as one of the greatest in fifteenth century Europe as a whole. This study concerns one aspect of March's poetry: his use of analogy. March's poetry provides a large and varied working context in which to approach the simile as a poetic instrument in its own right, and it is almost as much to this broad aim as to the more specific matter of the use and function of the similes and allied forms of analogy in March's work that this study is addressed. Partly with the non-specialist reader in mind—someone with an interest in simile but not necessarily a direct concern with March—the quotations in Provençal and Catalan have been translated.

Añadir uno más a los múltiples estudios sobre don Juan quizá parezca tarea innecesaria o vanidosa. A veces pienso que don Juan, junto a su lista de mujeres seducidas, pudiera presentar otra, más larga si cabe, de críticos seducidos por sus andanzas. Mas no sobre don Juan sólo. Pues las figuras que rondan en torno suyo, singularmente las mujeres y el Comendador, lo determinan de tal modo que sin ellas se volatizaría. Don Juan es un mito y, como tal, un objeto de fantasia o deseo, no ya del autor o del lector, sino de aquellos otros personajes que con él se rozan. Aparente protagonista, su existencia se subordina a la de los seres cuyo vacío figurativamente llena o cuyo deseo frustra, según se prefiera mirarlo. Mi estudio, aunque comprenda literaturas foráneas, se centra en la literatura española.

The objective of this study is to inquire, from a broad epistemological view, into the underlying nature of fictions, and above all, to discover how it is possible to create and process them. In Chapter One, I put forth four "postulates" in the form of though experiments. in Chapter Two I turn attention to make-believe, imaginary, and dream worlds, and how they can be conceived and perceived only with respect to the/a "real world." Chapter Three includes a discussion of the affinities and differences between one's tacit knowledge of certain aspects of the number system in arithmetic (an ordered series) and the range of all possible fictional entities (an unordered network). In Chapter Four I establish more precisely the relations between one's "real world" and one's fictional worlds in light of the conclusions from Chapter Three. And, in Chapter Five, I attempt to construct a formal model with which to account for the construction of all possible fictional sentences.

While Calderón's autos portray this teleological view of life with unequaled ingenuity, his comedias lie somewhere on the line of development of European thought and activity between the other-worldiness of orthodox Thomism and the naturalism of which Spinoza's ideas are one example among many. Let us characterize the comedias briefly by stating that the motives which move the dramatic action forward are generally of a teleological nature; that is, they envisage some hypostatized end outside the individual characters. Yet, there are key moments when it becomes apparent to the reader or spectator that these ends have been created and set before the characters by themselves, by the requirements of their social standing in the play, by the manipulating dramatist Calderón, or, in broader terms, by the social climate of the audience for whom these plays were written and performed. Both reason and exalted passions become the preserve of noble blood in Calderón's plays. Whether he is dealing with vengeful husbands, monarchs, usurpers, contemplative men of learning, or saints, the thread of social distinction never disappears. The concern of his characters that they not commit a "low" action, is not simply a Christian concern with avoiding sin. The characters are much more concerned with practicing a virtue which will distinguish them from the vulgar.

The Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar was clearly influenced by his predecessors John Keats and Edgar Allan Poe. However, to what extent? Which aspects of the two Romantics have been kept and which ones transformed by Cortázar’s imagination? And is there a common bond in the works of Keats and Poe which is also the common denominator for their works? And why these particular images, themes, or ideas? This books tries to answer all these questions and is of interest to everyone who wants to know more about Cortázar.

Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922 –2008) was a French writer and filmmaker. His first involvement with the cinema was in the early 1960’s; scripting one of the most controversial films of the decade, L’Année dernière à Marienbad , directed by Alain Resnais.

In this study the focus lies on the cinema of Robbe-Grillet . Each chapters deals with a specific film and a specific aspect of his work.

Selon une dynamique évidente mais, apparemment, irrésistible, les textes médiévaux mal connus tendent à le rester, et leur obscurité à se justifier d'elle-même. La raison immédiate en est, cette fois, une répétition régulière d'une très vieille hypothèse, jamais vérifiée, sur la nature de la Chanson d'Antioche. La présente étude vise en premier lieu à briser, au profit d'une littérature parfois incroyablement méconnue, le cercle vicieux des écrits de seconde main; elle peut aussi, à l'occasion, servir l'étude du processus d'obscurcissement lui-même. Nous nous efforçons donc de répondre ici à une double question historique et critique. Comment se fait-il qu'on entend parler si peu—et si méchamment—d'un cycle épique majeur et unifié, celui de la Croisade? Quelle est l'origine du topos critique qui assigne à ce Cycle un rang inférieur aux autres, quelquefois en le rejetant totalement hors du genre épique? Car nous avons affaire à un topos, dont il s'agit de bien mesurer l'étendue.

This study examines Marcel Proust’s works and his readers, starting of with the reading encounter one needs in order not to miss out on things, and ending by exploring the nature of Proust’s vision. An interesting study for everyone who wants to know more about Proust and his ideas.