"Love and Pedagogy; or, How to Create a Genius" by Edward Friedman
A dramatic adaptation of Miguel de Unamuno's Amor y pedagogía
Amor y pedagogía (1902), by the celebrated Spanish writer and thinker Miguel de Unamuno, centers on the project of Avito Carrascal to raise a genius according to the doctrine of “sociological pedagogy.” The object of the scientific process is Apolodoro, caught between his father’s strict supervision and his mother’s more traditional views on child-rearing. Avito Carrascal’s guide is the noted philosopher Don Fulgencio Entrambosmares, who advises both father and son. In the conflict between love and pedagogy, and for better or worse, Apolodoro makes important decisions of his own. In the narrative, Unamuno adroitly—and with doses of humor and irony—explores the dichotomies that mark life choices and that cause existential anguish. He is clearly concerned, as well, with the style in which he tells his story, through a technique that simultaneously responds to and wavers from the paradigms of realism.
In Love and Pedagogy; Or, How to Create a Genius, Edward Friedman captures the spirit of Unamuno’s work while adapting it for the stage. He endeavors to display, in the different medium, the challenges of form and content, the profound symbolism, the eccentricities, the meaningful contradictions, and the comic undertones of the original. Like its predecessor, Love and Pedagogy examines human foibles in the context of reality, metaphysics, and art.
EDWARD FRIEDMAN is Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of the Humanities at Vanderbilt University, where he has taught since 2000. His primary field of research is early modern Spanish literature, with emphasis on the picaresque, Cervantes, and theater. His research also covers comparative topics and contemporary narrative and drama. Recent publications include Cervantes in the Middle: Realism and Reality in the Spanish Novel, as well as the plays Into the Mist, Crossing the Line, The Labyrinth of Love, Pedro the Schemer: A Work in Progress, and Trading Up, based on works by Miguel de Unamuno, Miguel de Cervantes, and Juan Ruiz de Alarcón. In 2015, Friedman published a poetry collection, Quixotic Haiku: Poems and Notes. He has served as editor of the Bulletin of the Comediantes (1999-2017), president of the Cervantes Society of America, and director of the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt.
ISBN 978-1-58871-334-6, (PB) $25