"Talking and Text: Essays on the Literature of Golden Age Spain," by Elias L. Rivers

Talking and Text: Essays on the Literature of Golden Age Spain, by Elias L. Rivers.

From the Introduction by Emilie L. Bergmann:

The articles in this collection represent more than half a century’s exploration of literary texts and the social history of language by an extraordinary scholar. Throughout his career, still remarkably productive long after retirement, Elias L. Rivers has addressed the work of the greatest authors of Spain’s cultural Golden Age: Garcilaso de la Vega, Miguel de Cervantes, Luis de Góngora y Argote, Francisco de Quevedo, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Since these are also some of the language’s most difficult authors, Elias’s lucidly written interpretations of renaissance and baroque stylistic labyrinths have become recognized as classics whose usefulness continues to grow over the years since their first publication. Like Elias’s best graduate seminars, which I had the privilege of attending in the early 1970s, they present the broad sweep of literary history from classical antiquity to Petrarchist poetics and Derrida’s theorizing of writing and speech, tuning the reader’s ear to resonances of classical and Italian texts in the poetic production of early modern Spain, in a distinctly contemporary key. Elias’s profound interest in sociolinguistics lends immediacy to the voices of poets who wrote for élite audiences in imperial Rome and Castile. His perspective is particularly effective for teaching heritage speakers who have learned about diglossia from personal experience, becoming skilled in an official, written language while speaking a “mother” tongue at home.

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction: Emilie L. Bergmann

Problems of Genre in Golden Age Poetry

The Horatian Epistle and its Introduction into Spanish Literature

Interplay of Syntax and Metrics in Garcilaso’s Sonnets

The Pastoral Paradox of Natural Art

Nature, Art and Science in Spanish Poetry of the Renaissance

Some Ideas about Language and Poetry in Sixteenth-Century Spain

Talking And Writing In Don Quixote

Cervantes’ Art of the Prologue

Cervantes and the Question of Language

On the Prefatory Pages of Don Quixote, Part II

Genres and Voices in the Viaje del Parnaso

Language and Reality in Quevedo’s Sonnets

The Comedia as Discursive Action