Selected Suites

Selected Suites
Author: Federico García Lorca
Publisher: Aris and Phillips Hispanic Cla
Total Pages: 485
Release: 2018
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1786941074

A generous selection and fresh translation of Lorca's suites, work that might have taken its place beside Songs (1927) and Poem of the Deep Song (1931) as a trilogy of Lorca's early modernist lyric. More personal than the other two works, Lorca's suites explore a 'heart without echo' in his time.

Contrary Things

Contrary Things
Author: Catherine Brown
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 226
Release: 1998-08-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0804765146

This work of intellectual and cultural history seeks to understand the recurring connection of teaching with contradiction in some major texts of the European Middle Ages. It moves comfortably between patristic and monastic exegesis, the Paris schools of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and late medieval Spain; between Latin and vernacular, between religious and secular. It assimilates the methodologies of religious and erotic texts, thereby displaying the investment of each in the sensuality and analytical power of language. The book begins by exploring Christian exegesis, in which biblical contradiction is the textual incarnation of a Truth that is at once and paradoxically singular and multiple. Exegesis teaches us of the possibility of maintaining the truth in one biblical proposition and, equally and simultaneously, in its apparent opposite. Under the aegis of dialectic and the Aristotelian rule of non-contradiction, however, we are next taught to read either/or, and to resolve contradiction not through suspension and multiplicity, as in exegesis, but rather through a judgment that favors either one proposition or the other. The writers studied here are John of Salisbury, whose Metalogicon is an ostensibly moderating critique of the intellectual extremism of the School of Paris logicians, and Peter Abelard, in whose life and writing the forces of contradiction work with maiming and illuminating violence. The book then considers the teaching-textuality of two great secular works of the Middle Ages, formed under the double instruction of the master disciplines of monastic exegesis and dialectic and under the tutelage of Ovid. Calling simultaneously on the both-and of exegesis and the either/or of dialectic, the teaching of these two texts is both biblical and worldly—impossibly, both at once, always in motion. The De Amore of Andreas Capellanus teaches two opposite propositions and commands that either one or the other must be chosen, yet in practice shows each proposition to be deeply embedded in the other. The concluding chapter turns from the Latin to the vernacular tradition to study one of the lesser-known examples of contradictory teaching, the fourteenth-century Libro de Buen Amor of Juan Ruiz, whose titular "good love" conflates the contrary things of spiritual and carnal love, while reminding readers that the difference between the two is urgently consequential.

The Repeating Island

The Repeating Island
Author: Antonio Benitez-Rojo
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 371
Release: 1997-01-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0822382059

In this second edition of The Repeating Island, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, a master of the historical novel, short story, and critical essay, continues to confront the legacy and myths of colonialism. This co-winner of the 1993 MLA Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize has been expanded to include three entirely new chapters that add a Lacanian perspective and a view of the carnivalesque to an already brilliant interpretive study of Caribbean culture. As he did in the first edition, Benítez-Rojo redefines the Caribbean by drawing on history, economics, sociology, cultural anthropology, psychoanalysis, literary theory, and nonlinear mathematics. His point of departure is chaos theory, which holds that order and disorder are not the antithesis of each other in nature but function as mutually generative phenomena. Benítez-Rojo argues that within the apparent disorder of the Caribbean—the area’s discontinuous landmasses, its different colonial histories, ethnic groups, languages, traditions, and politics—there emerges an “island” of paradoxes that repeats itself and gives shape to an unexpected and complex sociocultural archipelago. Benítez-Rojo illustrates this unique form of identity with powerful readings of texts by Las Casas, Guillén, Carpentier, García Márquez, Walcott, Harris, Buitrago, and Rodríguez Juliá.

Embodying Pessoa

Embodying Pessoa
Author: Anna Klobucka
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2007-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0802091989

The multifaceted and labyrinthine oeuvre of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) is distinguished by having been written and published under more than seventy different names. These were not mere pseudonyms, but what Pessoa termed 'heteronyms,' fully realized identities possessed not only of wildly divergent writing styles and opinions, but also of detailed biographies. In many cases, their independent existences extended to their publication of letters and critical readings of each other's works (and those of Pessoa 'himself'). Long acclaimed in continental Europe and Latin America as a towering presence in literary modernism, Pessoa has more recently begun to receive the attention of an English-speaking public. Embodying Pessoa responds to this new growth of interest. The collection's twelve essays, preceded by a general introduction and grouped into four themed sections, apply a range of current interpretative models both to the more familiar canon of Pessoa's output, and to less familiar texts – in many cases only recently published. As a whole, this work diverges from traditional Pessoa criticism by testifying to the importance of corporeal physicality in his heteronymous experiment and to the prominence of representations of (gendered) sexuality in his work.

Written Reliquaries

Written Reliquaries
Author: Leslie K. Arnovick
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2006-12-20
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027292841

Written Reliquaries: The resonance of orality in medieval English texts establishes the linguistic component of orality and oral tradition. The relics it examines are traces of spoken performance, artifacts of linguistic and cultural processes. Seven case studies animate verbal acts of making promises, quoting proverbs, pronouncing curses, speaking gibberish, praying Pater Nosters, invoking saints, and keeping silence. The study of their resonance is enabled by a methodological conjunction of historical pragmatics and oral theory. Insights from oral theory enlighten spoken traditions which in turn may be understood in the larger historical-pragmatic context of linguistic performance. The inquiry ranges across broad as well as narrow planes of reference to trace a complex set of cultural and linguistic interactions. In this way it reconstructs relevant discursive contexts, giving detailed accounts of underlying assumptions, traditions, and conventions. Doing so, the book demonstrates that an integrated methodology not only allows access to oral discourse in both Old English and Middle English but also provides insight into the fluid medieval interchange of literacy and orality.

Four Key Plays

Four Key Plays
Author: Federico García Lorca
Publisher: Hackett Publishing
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2019-06-03
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1624667775

In addition to a substantial introduction to the life and works of Federico García Lorca—avant-garde poet, playwright, and soul of Spain's "Generation of '27"—this collection features vibrant new English translations of four of his plays. The legacy of a dramatic, religious, and social iconoclast whose death made him a martyr of the left in Civil-War Spain and who today is embraced as a gay icon shines through in Michael Kidd's stage-worthy renderings of Yerma, Blood Wedding, The House of Bernarda Alba, and a more experimental play, The Audience, a kaleidoscopic exploration of sexual identity and theater.

Realism as Resistance

Realism as Resistance
Author: Denise DuPont
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2006
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780838756386

This book explores the fluid boundaries between realism and romanticism, while considering this oscillation between discourses as the legacy of the Quijote to the nineteenth-century Spanish novel. Furthermore, there are studies of characters who act as authors in Benito Perez Galdos's first series of Episodios Nacionales, Pio Baroja's La lucha por la vida, and Leopoldo Alas (Clarin)'s La Regenta. For many realists, romanticism has negative associations: quixotism, exaggeration, impracticality, and femininity or effeminacy.

The Cantigas de Santa Maria

The Cantigas de Santa Maria
Author: Henry T. Drummond
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2024-04-23
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0197670601

Alfonso X (1221-84) ruled over the Crown of Castile from 1252 until his death. Known as "the Wise," he oversaw the production of a wealth of literature in his scriptorium. One of the most impressive of these literary outputs is the collection of songs known as the Cantigas de Santa Maria, which by most counts comprises 429 songs preserved in four manuscripts. The miracle songs (or cantigas de miragre) form the focus of this book. While the Cantigas have been the subject of much scholarly attention, only a handful of studies have looked at the repertory through an interdisciplinary lens. Fewer still have probed how the Cantigas use the power of song as a communicative medium, one that functions as a social tool within the erudite environment of the Alfonsine court. This book offers a new perspective to the song collection, probing how the Cantigas use their music and text, together with rhetorical devices, to communicate with their desired audience. Author Henry T. Drummond builds upon previous methodologies, adopting a novel and holistic assessment of the songs' melodies, poetic features, and narrative logic to assess a wide selection of songs. He presents a nuanced understanding of a song form that effectively conveys its narratives to its listeners via a diverse combination of tools, embracing medieval rhetoric, rhyme-based play, and song's inherent ludic potential. Such devices, Drummond argues, allow for the Cantigas to loom large as propaganda pieces, designed to dignify Alfonso X through an elaborately devised courtly ritual.