E-Book Overview
This literary study of self looks at how representative texts of different genres enable the expression of different types of self, defined as discourse in which tensions between normative structures (political, social, and literary) are managed by a subject (either a character or author, or both) with a certain degree of creative agency. The degree to which creative agency is exploited depends, in part, on the genre selected by or imposed upon the author. In epic, for example, creative agency is largely in the service of the prevailing order, and there is a suspicion of the power of textuality to displace or replace this order. This power is tentatively realized in twelfth and thirteenth century chivalric romance.
As an amalgam of epic and romance, Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo's Amadis de Gaula (c. 1508) reveals a more complex relationship to the individual self. The knight is encouraged to wander into the woods, and the violent and romantic encounters that occur there become a rite of passage into adulthood and social acceptance. Self becomes a creative process by which the individual manages his private motivations and his public duties into a workable balance.
In the Cartas de relation of Hernan Cortes (1519-1525), Cortes is both narrator and hero. America, a wilderness of actual Others, is not a place of withdrawal and growth, but a place of opportunity. Cortes manages to inscribe himself as and ideal servant and royal stand-in by creatively exploiting all the discourse at his disposal: a rhetoric of empire, kingship, and vassalage; a practice of interrogation and punishment; a process of textual mapping; and a practice of psychological policing and government. Cortes addresses an audience that is as multiple as the means he exploits to construct himself.
In Lazarillo de Tormes by Anonymous (1554), the anonymous author writes against the class of which he is a part. With deft irony, he turns the privileged reader's disgust for Lazaro and the subsistence thievery upon which he and his fellow paupers depend into disgust for a system that creates such desperation.
E-Book Content
Epic Epistles: Scripting the Early Modern Self in Chivalric Romance, the Picaresque and the Conquest Relation
by
Barnaby William Clunie
A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy Centre for Comparative Literature University of Toronto
© Copyright by Barnaby William Clunie 2007
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