Graduate Studies

MPhil in European Literature & Culture | Course content | Modules | SP Golden Age

MPhil in European Literature & Culture

Spanish | SP Golden Age

Golden Age Literature and Culture: The Baroque Marvel
(Convenor: Dr Rodrigo Cacho)

The Baroque is one of the most complex and innovative cultural periods in Early Modern Europe. The waning of the Renaissance in the 17th century led to a revision of its main ideals which gave shape to a new perception of the world. While Galileo challenged the traditional scientific understanding of the cosmos, Descartes questioned human ability to actually process what we call ‘reality’. This intellectual turmoil produced also some of the finest writers, artists and composers, which Hispanic historiography aligns under the label of Golden Age. This context favoured the rise of Conceptism, a new aesthetic code centred on a conflictive relationship between language and representation based on an unstable vision of the world. Art, therefore, becomes a fluid expression of its evanescent nature which, ultimately, shakes our senses and produces a feeling of marvel. The Baroque allows seeing the world with new eyes. This module will offer a wide-ranging approach to the Hispanic Baroque focusing on great authors such as Cervantes, Quevedo, Góngora and Sor Juana, and considering the various links between them and other disciplines such as architecture, painting, sculpture and music.

Each session will be devoted to topics such as,

• The Art of Wonder: Gracián and European Conceptism
• Cervantes and Adventure: the Road to Persiles
• Góngora and Sor Juana: the New Poetry and the New World
• Sermons and Conversion in Colonial America
• The Construction of the American Identity: From Columbus to the Inca Garcilaso
• Quevedo and Calderón: Dreams and Nightmares
• Image and Text in Early Modern Spain
• Baroque Spaces: Art and Architecture

Preliminary reading
Blanco, M., Les Rhétoriques de la pointe. Baltasar Gracián et le conceptisme en Europe (Genève: Slatkine, 1992).
Brown, J., Images and Ideas in Seventeenth-Century Spanish Painting (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).
Elliott, J. H., The Old World and the New (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1970).
——, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830 (New Haven & London, Yale UP, 2006).
Foucault, M., The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2001).
Kluge, S., Baroque, Allegory, Comedia: The Transfiguration of Tragedy in Seventeenth-Century Spain (Kassel: Edition Reichenberger, 2010).
Maravall, J. A., Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1986.)
Pagden, A., The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982).
——, European encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven & London: Yale UP, 1994).
Parker, A. A., The Mind and Art of Calderón, ed. D. Kong (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988).
Riley, E. C., Cervantes’s Theory of the Novel (Newark, Delaware: Juan de la Cuesta, 1992).
Robbins, J., The Challenges of Uncertainty: An Introduction to Seventeenth-Century Spanish Literature (London: Duckworth, 1998).
——, Arts of Perception: The Epistemological Mentality of the Spanish Baroque, 1580-1720 (New York: Routledge, 2007).
Terry, A., Seventeenth Century Spanish Poetry: The Power of Artifice (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993).

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