This project analyzes self-reflective digressions in Golden Age Spanish literature, and in particular in the narrative work of their two main advocates: Miguel de Cervantes and Lope de Vega. By ‘self-reflective digressions’ we mean ironic digressions, willfully designed to break rhetorical rules, to poke fun at readers, and to make them reflect on what is a story, what is relevance, what is fiction. Cervantes’ and Lope’s self-reflective digressions explore the limits of fiction in a sort of self-sabotage, for fiction is by nature narrative and adding deferral and meanders impairs its course. In order to understand this aesthetic proposal, our project will examine how Early-Modern literary theory understood digressions in general, and why Cervantes and Lope used them to foster their new kind of writing: self-reflective and ironic digressive literature, a style apart from the heavy-handed, moralizing digressive literature in their environment (notably, the Guzmán de Alfarache). We will study how and why Cervantes and Lope looked at each other to construct a style that contemporaries appreciated only partially, but that had enormous influence in subsequent narrative developments and that questioned traditional ideas on narrative and gender. We will examine whether these ideas about female speech influenced the most famous fiction writer of the time (María de Zayas), an author who wrote in the wake of Cervantes and who was close to Lope.
The range of the project demands coordinating different experts. The team will be based in Switzerland (Université de Neuchâtel), but we will have partners in Argentina (Universidad de Buenos Aires) and Spain (Universidad de Extremadura, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona). The team will approach the texts from three complementary angles: 1) rhetorical history and rhetorical analysis, 2) career studies, and 3) gender studies:
1) The rhetorical approach will define digressions in general and as they were understood at the time, and will contextualize Cervantes’ and Lope’s innovations in the landscape of contemporary literary theory. In addition, the rhetorical approach will classify the digressions in our corpus and explain their evolution.
2) The career criticism approach will study self-reflective digressions as trait of late style, as well as a strategic movement that Cervantes and Lope used to react to professional stimuli.
3) The gender studies approach will examine how Cervantes and Lope related digressive literature to different styles: natural language, courtly conversation, and, in particular, feminine talk, as they conceived it. In addition, we will examine whether contemporary female writers (Zayas) adopted this trait for their female narrators.
The results will show the originality and significance of Cervantes’ and Lope’s digressive style (self-reflective digressions), their points in common, their differences, and the reasons that explain them. In addition, we will examine the subversive potential of digressive style, as it casts doubts on the very nature of narration, on literary and philosophical ideas (about literary genres, relevance, taxonomy), and specifically on gender roles, and on how they influence our ideas about literature. Our project will prove that Cervantes’ and Lope’s digressions were an invitation to reflect on literature that was rarely understood at the time, but which shaped Western ideas about fiction and denounces preconceptions on gender.
The outcomes of this project shall be:
1) a monograph on self-reflective digressions in Golden Age Spain;
2) two doctoral dissertations on a) Early-Modern theory on digressions; b) Digressions in Cervantes’ and Lope’s late narrative works;
3) one international congress dedicated to digressions in Golden Age literature in general and in Cervantes and Lope in particular (Neuchâtel, 2027);
4) four articles in peer-reviewed journals;
5) one monographic issue in a peer-reviewed journal with selected articles from the congress.