Department of Romance Languages

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Browsing Department of Romance Languages by Author "Wacks, David A."

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    Between Sacred and Secular: Abraham ibn Ezra and the Song of Songs
    (Juan de la Cuesta Hispanic Monographs, 2004) Wacks, David A.
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    Crónica de Flores y Blancaflor: Romance, Conversion, and Internal Orientalism
    (Wayne State University Press, 2015) Wacks, David A.
    Crónica de Flores y Blancaflor is a medieval romance interpolated into a thirteenth-century account of the struggles of the kings of Asturias (eighth–ninth centuries) with the Umayyad Caliphate in Cordova. In this essay I demonstrate how the chronicler mapped political concerns onto courtly adventure narrative in order to promote ideologies of conquest and conversion. Flores’s conversion to Christianity in the context of his lifelong love relationship with Blancaflor is a metaphor for the Christian dream of the conquest of al-Andalus and the conversion of Iberian Muslims and Jews.
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    Don Yllan and the Egyptian Sorceror: Vernacular commonality and literary diversity in medieval Castile
    (CONSEJO SUPERIOR DE INVESTIGACIONES CIENTIFICAS, 2005) Wacks, David A.
    In this article the author compares the exemplo of Don Yllan and the Dean de Santiago, #11 in Don Juan Manuel's Conde Lucanor (ca. 1335) with an earlier Hebrew analogue found in the Hebrew Meshal Haqadmoni (ca. 1285) of fellow Castilian author Isaac ibn Sahula. A thorough analysis of the rhetorical and narrative style of both versions reveals that the two tales shared a common source in Castilian oral tradition. The appearance of the tale in an earlier Hebrew text from Castile (the only other known version in any language) calls into question the originality of Don Juan Manuel's most famous exemplo, suggesting a productive interplay between a common oral tradition in Castilian and coexisting literary traditions in Hebrew and Castilian.
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    Is Spain's Hebrew Literature 'Spanish'?
    (Juan de la Cuesta Hispanic Monographs, 2008) Wacks, David A.
    Discussion of the position of Spanish Hebrew literature in Spanish Literary History vis-a-vis the history of Spanish Hebraism.
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    Popular Andalusi literature and Castilian fiction: Ziyad ibn ‘Amir al-Kinani, 101 Nights, and Caballero Zifar
    (Revista de Poética Medieval, 2015) Wacks, David A.
    There is very little manuscript evidence of the popular (non-courtly) literature of al-Andalus. For this reason it is difficult to assess its importance for the development of Castilian literature, and more broadly, for our understanding of medieval Iberian literary practice as an interlocking set of systems that includes a number of linguistic, religious, and political groups. Ziyad ibn ‘Amir al-Kinani (Granada, ca. 1250) and the 101 Nights (Granada, 1234) are two examples of Andalusi popular fiction that provide important information for our understanding of works of early Castilian fiction such as the Libro del Caballero Zifar. The two Andalusi works provide evidence of a bilingual culture of storytelling that nourished both Arabic and Castilian literary texts. In particular, the inclusion of Arthurian material in Ziyad that predates the earliest translations of Arthurian texts into Castilian forces us to rethink both the sources of Zifar as well as the Iberian adaptation of Arthurian material in general
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    Reconquest Colonialism and Andalusi Narrative Practice in Don Juan Manuel's Conde Lucanor
    (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006) Wacks, David A.
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    Toward a History of Hispano-Hebrew Literature in its Romance Context
    (http://www.ehumanista.ucsb.edu/, 2010) Wacks, David A.
    Wacks proposes a new, comprehensive look at the Romance context of the Hebrew Literature of Christian Iberia. He surveys the extant criticism and provides an overview of key texts and their relationship to vernacular literary and cultural practices. Along the way, he provides some explanation for the intellectual and institutional practices that, until recently, have discouraged such an approach