Edward H. Friedman

Introduction to scholarship in modern languages and literatures

In lively, informative discussions fifteen distinguished scholars of language and literature address graduate students and advanced undergraduates. Each essay examines the significance, underlying assumptions, and limits of an important field in linguistics or literary studies; traces the historical development of its subject; introduces key terms; outlines modes of inquiry now being pursued; and predicts likely future developments.Introduction to Scholarship makes an excellent text in courses designed to acquaint upper-level students with the forms and practice of research and criticism in language and literature study. Frequent examples make the material readily accessible. Students will find the suggestions for further reading especially helpful.

Cervantes's Don Quixote: A Casebook

This casebook gathers a collection of ambitious essays about both parts of the novel (1605 and 1615) and also provides a general introduction and a bibliography. The essays range from Ramon Menendez Pidals seminal study of how Cervantes dealt with chivalric literature to Erich Auerbachs polemical study of Don Quixote as essentially a comic book by studying its mixture of styles, and include Leo Spitzers masterful probe into the essential ambiguity of the novel through minute linguistic analysis of Cervantes prose. The book includes pieces by other major Cervantes scholars, such as Manuel Duran and Edward C. Riley, as well as younger scholars like Georgina Dopico-Black. All these essays ultimately seek to discover that which is peculiarly Cervantean in Don Quixote and why it is considered to be the first modern novel.

The semiotics of love in Lope's "EL perro del hortelano"

. g. OPE de Vegas La dama boba offers an example of the power of love to transform a lady simpleton into a woman clever enough to manage her matrimonial interests. The culminating act of this process relates to a case of judicious naming, a stratagem that permits the protagonist to deceive by telling the truth-a convention that Lope underscores in the Arte nuevo1and thus to win the man who has inspired the metamorphosis. In La dama boba, Lope tempers neoplatonism2 with self-promotion and greed on the part of the male love object and with the comeuppance of a sister too bright for her own, or societys, good. The classic discourse of love is recontextualizedearly

Girl Gets Boy: A Note on the Value of Exchange in the Comedia

The Spanish picaresque novels foreground the ironies of first-person narration and the illusion of authority, as manifested in a dialectic of sorts between the narrator/protagonist and the implied author. The feminine variation of the picaresque, with women (and womens voices) created by men, offers especially strong markers of the authors presence in the text as manipulator of story, discourse, and message production. In the theater, there is, of course, no narrator. Perspective must stem from direct discourse, which does not necessarily mean that all voices are equal. Male dramatists and a male-oriented society mediate the speech of women and the direction of the plays. Even in the comic works of the Golden Age, the aggressive female and what Bruce Wardropper calls a feminist perspective may lend themselves to deconstruction. A case in point is Lopes La dama boba, in which success may be a losing battle. (EHF)

Quixotic Pedagogy; Or, Putting the Teacher to the Test

Over twenty years ago, I had the opportunity to contribute to a collection of essays, published by the Modern Language Association, on teaching Don Quixote. The current essay looks, personally and from a distance, at how we can study the novel in the new millennium, when the boom in theory, greatly improved technology, and a different gener ation of students (terrific to teach, as were their predecessors) affect pedagogical strategies. My present approach is neither high-tech nor radically altered, but?befitting this most self-conscious of texts?it strives to bear in mind changes in academia and culture, and to find multiple means of instructing and engaging students in the business and pleasure of reading.

Don Quijote's Sally into the World of Opera

The fascinating character of Don Quijote has intrigued readers and literary critics throughout the centuries. Yet, the windmill-fighting knight and his jolly squire, Sancho Panza, had an even greater impact on the world of music and particularly opera. This book examines the history of Don Quijote in opera from the 17th century to our times. It offers great insight into the reception of this literary work via operatic interpretations in major European countries. It also shows how an important literary work influenced the development and evolution of certain forms of opera.

Toward a More Perfect Union: Art and Craft in Calderon's Saber del mal y del bien and ¿Cual es mayor perfeccion?

Recent critical theories have focused not so much on meaning as on the production of meaning(s) in a literary text. Through the examination of three critical articles on Lope de Vegas La dama boba, one may determine (metacritically) patterns of analysis that place the text in distinct positions in the interpretive process. Because multiple meanings are encoded in a text, the message(s) offered by verbal signs may extend beyond or even contradict the initial premises and the apparent direction of the work, exhibiting a «meaningful» duality. When applied to two Calderonian texts, the approach leads to the establishment of a symmetrical structure and its dialectical opposition, as context counters text. The uncertain synthesis is a distinguishing mark (in the double sense of the term) of Calderóns dramaturgy. (EHF)

Recursos artísticos: adaptaciones y reconstrucciones dramáticas

There is an obvious relation between the imitation and adaptation of literary works. The focus of the essay is the adaptation of early Spanish modern works —including Don Quijote and plays by Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Juan Ruiz de Alarcon— and Miguel de Unamuno’s Niebla into dramatic texts in English. Adaptation becomes a method of reading, analysis, and interpretation, as well as a form of communication among authors.

Exemplary Irony: Cervantes's La señora Cornelia in Context

This essay examines how an ironic vision is created in the works of Cervantes and how the writer plays with the intertext. The structure of La señora Cornelia is analyzed in the context of the conventions of Golden Age narrative and as a basis for the developments and innovations to come later from the author of Don Quijote.

Lope de Vega's La dama boba and the Construction of Comedy

The essay seeks to extract from Lope de Vegas La dama boba (1613) what might be labelled the playwrights theory of comedy. The process is thus internal, based not on reigning prescriptions and poetics but rather on the specific ways in which Lope uses language, circumstance, literary precedent, and an expressed interest in pleasing the public as he composes a comic play. La dama boba is overdetermined; it moves in multiple directions and examines the motives and mysteries of love (and chemistry) from multiple vantage points. Its humour is based on a number of elements that are hardly innately funny: honour, social decorum, strongly patriarchal rules of conduct, and bobería itself. Although love obviously is a key factor here, emotion is often replaced with self-interest, and the blend is ultimately inviting, exciting, and open to critique. In considering La dama boba, I address my attempt to re-create aspects of Lopes comic vision in an adaptation of the play titled Wits End, which was first performed in 2006.