Department of Comparative Literature

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https://hdl.handle.net/1794/12488

The Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Oregon has the oldest doctoral program in comparative literature on the West Coast, as well as a unique major for undergraduates, and a dynamic faculty representing disciplines across campus. Oregon is also the home of the principal journal in the field, Comparative Literature, which recently celebrated its sixtieth anniversary.

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Browsing Department of Comparative Literature by Subject "Early Modern Spain"

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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.
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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