Browsing by Author "Greer, Margaret R"

In my dissertation I propose that the detailed representation of food and eating in seventeenth-century Spanish art and literature has a double purpose: to reaffirm a state of well-being in Spain, and to show a critical position, because artistic creations emphasize those subjects who, because of social status or cultural background, do not share such benefits. This double purpose explains why literature and painting stress the distance between foodstuffs and consumers, turning food into a commodity that cannot be consumed directly, but through its representation and value. Cervantes's writing is invoked because, especially in Don Quixote, readers can see how the protagonist rejects food for the sake of achieving higher chivalric values, while his companion, Sancho Panza, faces the opposite problem: having food at hand and not being able to enjoy it, especially when he achieves his dream of ruling an island. The principle is similar in genre painting: food is consumed out of the picture in still lifes, or out of the hands of the represented characters in kitchen scenes, for they are depicted cooking for others. Because of the distance between product and consumer, foodstuffs indicate how precedence and authority are established and reproduced in society. In artistic representations, these apparently unchangeable principles are mimicked by the lower classes and used to establish parallel systems of authority such as the guild of thieves who are presented around a table in a scene of Cervantes's exemplary novel "Rinconete and Cortadillo." Another problem to which the representation of foodstuffs responds is the inclusion of New Christians from different origins. In a counterpoint with the scenes in which precedence is discussed, and frequently through similar aesthetic structures, Cervantes and his contemporaries create scenes where the Christian principle of sharing food and drinking wine together is the model of inclusion that dissolves distinctions between Old and New Christians. I argue that this alternative project of community can be related to the expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain, decreed in 1609, because this event made many subjects interrogate themselves about their own status and inclusion. An artistic model of response to these interrogations about belonging is the figure of the roadside meal, which appears as the main motif of a meal shared by Sancho and a self-proclaimed Christian Morisco in the second part of Don Quixote, and reappears in a painting by Diego de Velázquez, which presents in the foreground a dark-skinned servant working in a kitchen, and in the background another roadside meal: the Supper at Emmaus. Both in literature and painting the way of preparing meals, eating and drinking creates ties, establishes a different principle of belonging, and promotes unity. In this alternative model characters are recognized as subjects of the kingdom as long as they eat and drink the way Christians do. Even though this model still leads to a single Christian kingdom, paintings and writings suggest a different form of cohesion, in which subjects are considered equal and recognize each other because of their participation.

This dissertation explores the representation of cognition in the Spanish Golden Age theatrical genre the auto sacramental, with reference to the best known playwright of these eucharistic mystery plays, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, and specifically his pre-1644 auto El veneno y la triaca (The Poison and the Remedy). I contextualize the auto in the Western philosophical tradition in which it was rooted, while also probing the psychomachia or allegories of mental and emotional processes in relation to philosophy of mind, cognitive literary studies and recent neuroscientific research. How are cognition, emotion, and decision making used and depicted in dramatic structures including character, plot, performance, and audience reception? This study establishes the relationship between organic neurological and psychological processes and literary tropos and archetypes that can make the dramatic mimesis of the auto sacramental understandable or successful even in modern secular theatrical contexts.

This thesis explores attitudes of Christians toward Islam and Muslims in Spain in the sixteenth century and intends to destabilize Islam's traditional place as adversary in Early-Modern Spanish history. My research aligns itself with and employs new trends in historiography that emphasize dissent and resistance exercised by individuals and groups at all levels of Spanish society in order to complicate popular notions about the extermination of Islam in Spain. I argue that within Spain there was, throughout the sixteenth century and after the expulsion of the Moriscos in the early seventeenth century, a continued interest in the religion and culture of Islam. I show that, far from isolating itself from Islam, Christian Spain was engaged with Muslims on multiple levels. The voluntary and involuntary migration of Spaniards to Muslim lands, for many emigrants of Christian decent, led to the embrace of a multicultural, multireligious, polylingual and polyethnic reality along the Mediterranean that was contrary to Spanish Counter-Reformation ideology. The dissertation includes textual examples from sixteenth-century Spanish and colonial "histories," and works by Cervantes, to support the argument that this official ideology, which has dominated historiography on this period, does not reflect much of the Spanish experience with non-Christians within and without its borders. My goal is to expose a context within the field of Early-Modern Peninsular studies for alternative forms of discourse that emphasize toleration for religious and cultural difference, interfaith and intercultural dialogue and exchange, and a basic interest in and curiosity about Islamic ways of life.

"Representaciones temporales en la construcción del espacio y el sujeto atlántico en el

siglo XVII" is a study of the different representations of time, temporality and space in

literary and historical texts such as the chronicles that originated in Peru and Spain. This

project seeks to understand the new configuration of time and space that appeared at this

time and that was represented in literary texts during the Spanish Baroque period. What is

most important is that the Atlantic is not only an ocean that separated two realities but

also a new space that made possible the emergence of a new subject who combined pre-

Hispanic culture and the occidental episteme. This new subject is the product of a

translation failure of the concepts that were transported back and forth across the

Atlantic. During the XVIIth century, many literary and historical texts are produced in

order to understand this new subject. As an immediate consequence of the encounter

between American and European epistemes, thinkers and writers in all Europe begin to

hesitate between "the real" and "the images"; a crisis of the real begins. In the Americas,

writers such as Guaman Poma or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz who produce narratives which

seek to interpret the new realities brought about by the encounter with the Europeans,

whose writings do not follow to either indigenous or European conventions. These

writers mix pre-Hispanic and Western traditions to account for the new forms of

subjectivity that the conquest produced. Similarly, Spanish writers such as Cervantes or

Calderón re-work traditional European conventions in order to understand and interpret

this new historical moment/subjectivity.