Comparative Literature Faculty Works

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    Poetry and the Persiles: Cervantes' Orphic Mode
    (eHumanista/Cervantes, 2017) Middlebrook, Leah
    The topic ‘Cervantes and poetry’ has given rise to a great deal of criticism, much of it shaped by tantalizing moments in which Cervantes appears to have commented on his skills with rueful self-knowledge – for example, in the well-known lines of the Parnaso: “Yo, que siempre trabajo / y me desvelo / por parecer que tengo la gracia de poeta / que no me dió el cielo” (Parnaso I.25-27). Such asides, woven into works from the Galatea through Don Quijote and the Viaje del Parnaso, suggest that Cervantes wished he were a better poet. The first premise of this essay is that the question of Cervantes and poetry turns on that one ingenious conceit, “Miguel de Cervantes,” el manco sano, who in the Persiles serves as the point from which Cervantes undertakes the testing of poetry, of poetic speech, and of the poets who claim poetic license that is such a consistent feature of his writing. The second premise is that Cervantes' final, posthumous work, the romance Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, represents his most fully-elaborated idea of poetry. I argue this point by showing that in the Persiles, Cervantes drew on Ovid’s myth of Orpheus to stage a final demonstration of the truth of poetry. The Orphic subject position establishes the narrative as unfolding on the threshold between this world and the afterlife, a space in which poets graced with divine gifts of song are permitted to pass beyond the human world and retrieve essential truths for the living. When Cervantes writes to the Count of Lemos that he is composing the Dedication of the Persiles having received the extreme unction and “Puesto ya el pie en el estribo” (108), or when he offers his final valediction in the Prologue: “¡Adiós, gracias! Adiós, donaires; adios regocijados amigos! Que yo me voy muriendo y deseando veros presto contentos en la otra vida” (114), he establishes the narrative on this Orphic threshold between life and death. Ultimately, Cervantes believed, like William Carlos Williams, that, "love and the imagination / are of a piece / swift as the light / to avoid destruction."
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    Review - Huir Procuro el Encarecimiento
    (Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 2014) Middlebrook, Leah
    Review of a collection of essays on the important sixteenth-century Spanish poet, translator and aristocrat Hernando de Acuña
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    "From Musaeus to Parnassus: Poetry, Modernity and Method in the Seventeenth Century"
    (Calíope: Journal of the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry, 2013) Middlebrook, Leah
    The narrative of a “new” mindset that dispenses with the mythopoetic in favor of the intellect is a foundational myth of modernity. Perhaps that is not surprising, given the powerful constitutive role which moderns attribute to the other; the “poetic,” perennially cast as the other of the modern, exercises its greatest generative force --the force of poiesis, with which the terms poesía and poema are associated in so many treatises-- within the modern imagination. This essay focuses on iterations of the modern origin story as I trace the stages by which primordial powers associated with poetry are deployed to anchor a “new” modernity in Spain and the Americas. I will also demonstrate that by the late baroque, poetry loses that power as modern institutions gain primacy over poetic energies. It is my contention here that for late-sixteenth and early seventeenth-century writers, the narrative of poetry’s subordination exercised a certain kind of daemonic force that was drawn from associations with prophecy and the divine that were invoked as much as they were suppressed, subordinated or excluded in their accounts.
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    The Poetics of Modern Masculinity in Sixteenth-Century Spain
    (Center for Renaissance and Reformation Studies U Toronto, 2010) Middlebrook, Leah
    For many writers, politicians and courtiers in early modern Spain, to raise the topic of poetry was to raise the topic of masculinity. In Spain, the sixteenth century marks a particular threshold – we might consider it the “early” early modern – during which the country’s subjects and perhaps especially its ranks of elites adjusted to a new national identity: Spain under the Habsburgs ceased to be a self-contained peninsular kingdom dominated by Castile and became a seat of a pan-European and incipiently global empire. Surprisingly, perhaps, one aspect of accommodating this shift was accepting a profound revision in the ways in which relationships between masculinity and nation, masculinity and letters, masculinity and poetry, and poetry and identity were conceived of in the social and cultural imagination. A survey of the so-called “new” art composed during this period (poetry based on Italian models and forms, primarily sonnets and songs) demonstrates that writers perceived a fundamental link between poetry and some of the historical, political and social processes that were transforming Spanish codes of gender, power and privilege.