Elias L. Rivers

The Pastoral Paradox of Natural Art

This essay is dedicated to the memory of Leo Spitzer. He, more than any other scholar in the twentieth century, has opened up penetrating new perspectives and deepened our understanding of the Romance languages and literatures. The present essay is, in fact, hardly more than a development of ideas first sketched by him ten years ago; 1 whether he himself would have approved of such a development is, of course, quite another matter.

Reality and the poet in Spanish poetry

Six lectures delivered in 1937 at Johns Hopkins University at the invitation of the Turnbull Poetry Lecture Foundation.

Problems of Genre in Golden Age Poetry

We cannot help coming back again and again to the same old questions: What is literature? What is poetry? What are the different kinds of poetry? I do think that there has been some progress toward giving tentative, historically circumscribed answers to these questions, but ever since Aristotles Poetics progress has been relatively slow, and there is certainly no end in sight: there will always be some unborn Borges looming just beyond the horizon. And there has been, in my opinion, some retrogression, led by Romantic individualists, like Croce, for example, who try to fly in the face of pragmatic reality, the material reality of catalogues and libraries within which the reader-writer finds his way from history to literature, from plays to novels to poetry, from Petrarchan sonnets to Horatian odes to dramatic monologues. It seems highly likely that the reader and the writer, perhaps even the text itself, depend on some such categories as they organize their different activities and passivities of reading, of writing, of being read. In this paper I can hardly hope to scratch the surface unless I simplify some basic questions; I will do so by taking a pragmatic point of view, based on the social functions of literary discourse. Within our sociolinguistic world we are constantly involved in different types of speech act, as first demonstrated analytically by

An Anthology of Spanish Poetry, 1500-1700: Part II, 1580-1700

Read more and get great! Thats what the book enPDFd an anthology of spanish poetry 150

Entre la voz y el silencio (review)

Margit Frenk, the Mexican scholar who produced in 1987 the most authoritative edition of the lyrics that belong to the Hispanic oral tradition (Corpus de la antigua lírica popular hispánica, siglos XV al XVII ), has now published a book on the symbiosis of written texts and oral traditions in Spain from the Middle Ages through the seventeenth century. She is fully aware of the more general and theoretical studies of this symbiosis, from Chaytor (1945) and McLuhan (1962) to Ong (1982), Havelock (1986), and Zumthor (1987); her additions to and modifications of their arguments are based on a wealth of new empirical data drawn from Spanish sources, especially poetry. Dr. Frenk defines her central theme as “la difusión de la escritura a través de la voz humana hasta época muy reciente.” She goes on to explain herself as follows (p. 5):

An Example of Hispanic Originality

One of the advantages that the Hispanist enjoys is the wealth of material in his field that has yet to be brought to light. The literatures of England, France, and Germany have been subjected to the scrutiny of many scholars for many years, and their canons are little short of definitively established. The frontiers of the Hispanists field of research, on the other hand, have yet to reach any such degree of stability; they continue to expand, frequently taking in large tracts of new and unexplored territory. An example of this is the virtually unknown poetry of Francisco de Aldana (15371578),1 which, except in anthological fragments, has not been re-edited since the sixteenth century. A single sonnet of his suffices to convince us of his originality and power; in fact, the following sonnet is so unique that we are at a loss as to how it can be made to fit into the accepted sonnet tradition, for we find nothing like it in Petrarch or in the Petrarchists of Italy, France, or England.