Novelas ejemplares (1613) was published between El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, part I (1605) and its second part in 1615. Don Quijote enters the literary scene as a text that questions the traditional parameters of reading and writing. Yet with Novelas ejemplares Cervantes throws himself into the literary arena with a collection of stories in which delinquents, marginalized and eccentric men (and women) disturb the legal, spiritual and social ecosystems while also highlighting the moral and ethical nuances that hegemonic narratives of the Spanish Golden Age often ignore. Covarrubias’s Tesoro de la Lengua (1611) accentuates the multiple oscillations that place ‘exemplos’ between admiration and repudiation, between the original and the copy, implicitly underlining that lo ejemplar also alludes to disparate possibilities that escape its conventional, moralizing scope. The seminar explores the twists and turns that propel Cervantes’s textualities to re-write categories such as blood, nobility, conversion, inheritance, violence, madness, honor, jealousy, among many others. Our goal will be to identify the complex intersections that open the textual body to unfathomable ways of being and thinking within the orthodox Castilian body politic.
Seminar will be conducted in Spanish. Critical readings will include selections in English and Spanish.
Prerequisites: FSH placement or permission of the instructor
About Professor Otero-Torres
Dámaris Otero-Torres specializes in Spanish Golden Age literature; cultural and gender studies theory.
Otero-Torres has published numerous articles on the construction of gendered subjectivities and national identities in the Spanish comedia. Her book Vientre, manos y espíritu: hacia la construcción del sujeto femenino en el Siglo de Oro (Xalapa, Universidad Veracruzana, 2000) maps out reading strategies to deal with the notion of female subjectivities in early modern Spanish culture.
She is currently working on a book manuscript dealing with issues of authority, authorship and power in Golden Age women writers, primarily on the work of sixteenth-century Spanish philosopher Oliva Sabuco de Nantes.