"Miguel de Cervantes and María de Zayas: Tale-Tellers of Love, Madness and Death"
What makes a (love) story "exemplary"? Passionate romance? Model courtship? A cautionary tale? Stylistic craft? Cervantes entitled his collection of novellas Novelas ejemplares and said he would cut off the hand with which he wrote them if anyone found a bad example in them. Not all his critics agreed that stories including rape, thievery, madness, witchcraft and talking dogs, along with love, were exemplary. Yet his novellas were as path-breaking in their way as Don Quixote, and as popular and influential.
María de Zayas y Sotomayor, following soon after Cervantes, wrote two volumes of equally page-turning stories from an early modern woman's perspective. She too called her stories "exemplary" - Novelas ejemplares y amorosas in the first volume, and had male and female narrators take turns telling love stories from their gendered perspective. But she called the second set Desengaños amorosos and filled that volume with hair-raising images of cruelty to--and sometimes by--women.
We will read Cervantes' and Zayas's stories (about 2 novellas a week for undergraduates, more for graduate students) and compare them with selected examples from influential Italian and French tale-tellers Boccaccio, Bandello and Marguerite de Navarre (these last in English translation). We will all consider their relationship to the historical context, as Spain moved from ruling the first global empire to painful awareness of its decline. Graduate students will take the lead in bringing a variety of critical theories (eg., cultural materialism, narratology, feminism, psychoanalytic theory) and to our discussions.
Grades will be based class participation, oral reports, and essays (one short essay during the term, one long final essay), with length and topic appropriate to the students' levels.
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