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eBook details
- Title: Steven Wagschal. The Literature of Jealousy in the Age of Cervantes.
- Author : Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America
- Release Date : January 22, 2008
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 185 KB
Description
Steven Wagschal. The Literature of Jealousy in the Age of Cervantes. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007. 232 pages. $39.95 cloth. ISBN 978-0-8262-1696-0. Professor Wagschal begins his book by conceding that the concept of jealousy, as represented in Spanish Golden Age literature (and indeed, as commonly conceived then and now) covers a great range of emotional states with varying components. However, it is this very inconsistency (which he terms jealousies) that he finds fruitful, for as a result "jealousy in these early modern texts [is] a flexible, polyvalent designation that resists reduction" (17). He finds particularly useful the analyses of emotion developed by the contemporary philosophers of mind Ronald de Sousa and Peter Goldie, the former emphasizing that emotional reactions are not antithetical to reason but indeed can be rational reactions to a situation, the latter distinguishing between passing emotions and emotional predispositions or character traits (as in Cervantes's "Celoso extremeno"), and also insisting that analyses of the emotion cannot be separated from the complex relationship of the subject to a variety of objects. Thus to Goldie, the experience of jealousy can only be understood in the context of the narrative of a particular life. Such a conception is naturally convenient for the literary critic whose main interest is the expression of emotions in literary constructs. Just as Wagschal finds the polyvalency of the concept an enticement rather than an impediment to analysis, his use of contemporary philosophers keeps him from merely historicizing emotion: Spanish writers of the 17th century may have construed jealousy in particular ways and endowed it with certain attributes, but there is still such a thing as jealousy that endows his study with contemporary and historical interest. As he says, "The relationship of jealousy to the power of the gods is not a construct of Sartre, Girard or Derrida. On the contrary, Lope de Vega, Cervantes and Gongora each describe forms of jealousy which they compare with the divine, evoking the Greco-Roman or Judeo-Christian gods through a plethora of rhetorical strategies" (189). Indeed this quote sums up Wagschal's approach, for he examines the role of jealousy in a number of plays by Lope, in two novels by Cervantes, and in a few poems of Gongora's, and while he draws on many different forms of analysis (including psychoanalysis), there is a certain privileging of rhetoric, of how language is used to structure a particular version of jealousy.
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