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Inke Gunia , De la poesía a la literatura : El cambio de los conceptos en la formación del campo literario español del siglo XVIII y principios del XIX De la poesía a la literatura : El cambio de los conceptos en la formación del campo literario español del siglo XVIII y principios del XIX . Inke Gunia. Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2008. Pp. 305.

2012; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 109; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/663351

1545-6951

Miguel Tamen,

Spanish Literature and Culture Studies

Previous articleNext article FreeInke Gunia, De la poesía a la literatura: El cambio de los conceptos en la formación del campo literario español del siglo XVIII y principios del XIX De la poesía a la literatura: El cambio de los conceptos en la formación del campo literario español del siglo XVIII y principios del XIX. Inke Gunia. Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2008. Pp. 305.Miguel TamenMiguel TamenUniversidade de Lisboa and University of Chicago Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe word “poetry” seems to translate the Greek word πoίησις. However, it doesn’t or hasn’t in a long time. It was mostly replaced by “literature.” Many things denoted now by “literature” (say, novels) did not exist when the Greeks used πoίησις, and many things the Greeks called πoίησις (say, tragedies) exist now only in the sense that matriarchy and Betamax can be said to exist. Inke Gunia’s book attempts to explain how the word “poetry” was gradually replaced by the word “literature” or at least how in Spain poesía was replaced by literatura. Her theory belongs in the families of explanation that suggest that linguistic, verbal, or conceptual changes take place because certain other kinds of changes have already taken place. For her, the change that determined these lexical ripples is what she calls “the formation of a literary field.” So the order of the explanation is, first, a literary field (whatever that means) is formed, and then the word “literature” replaces the word “poetry.” This is an unusual theory, not least because it looks so much and is so little like physics. In fairness to the author, the theory bit of her book is only Pierre Bourdieu’s, and so the sign of vaster afflictions of the intellect that will have to remain mostly undiscussed here. Gunia gets done with the astringencies in her introduction (which resurface only in the odd devotional moment and then in the conclusion) and sensibly adopts the tone and tenor of the encyclopedia entry. Her book reads in fact like a midsize dissertation on eighteenth-century Spain, or, rather, the Bourbon reigns of Philip V, Ferdinand VI, and Charles III and IV (1700–1808), though one perhaps prompted by too strict an avoidance of historic occurrences.There is a recognizable symmetry in the organization of the book. Part 1 deals with the first two reigns, and part 2 with the last two. Each part has four sections, thematically parallel: the first sections deal with social and economic change, the second with political power, the third with intellectual institutions (such as universities and academies), and the fourth with matters of “literary field.” She usually relies on the obvious correct sources, namely, John Lynch and W. N. Hargreaves-Mawdsley for the straight history, José Antonio Maravall for the intellectual history, and Antonio García Berrio for matters of Spanish poetics, as well as the relevant eighteenth-century Spanish authors, namely, Ignacio de Luzán, Gaspar de Jovellanos, Benito Feijoo, and, a pleasant late surprise, Esteban de Arteaga. She also relies on a number of dictionaries and encyclopedias. This is I believe due to the fact that there is an important lexicographic side to her thesis, as there is in general to Begriffsgeschichte. Stripped of ornaments, the thesis can be paraphrased as poesía (poetry) > buenas letras (bonae litterae, the good letters) > bellas letras (belles lettres) > literatura (literature) (see 262–63). This, however, poses a palpable problem. In fact, as Gunia acknowledges in passing (253), the terminus post quem for Spanish literatura in a recognizable modern sense is 1846, that is, not only thirty-eight years after the abdication of Charles IV but also, one could metaphorically say, in another world. So the book makes an argument for a conceptual change within certain temporal boundaries even though it turns out that the evidence for the change transcends those boundaries. This is methodologically similar to making an argument for the fall of the Roman Empire based on considerations of the reigns of Octavian and Tiberius—that is, it requires some hindsight. The argument of the book would be better construed as an argument about the changes that, in a later moment, led to the emergence of the concept of literature in Spain (the title should be translated not as “From ‘poetry’ to ‘literature’” but as “From ‘poetry’ toward ‘literature.’”)It is, as such, a two-pronged argument. Gunia claims that shifts in both intellectual concerns and “fields” have rendered the old concept of poetry useless in Spain (as well as that the former mirror the latter). The first part of the argument rehearses the story about the demise of notions such as imitation and art (in the sense of “technical procedure”) and the emergence of notions such as genius and imagination. All there is preparation for the otherwise nonexistent Spanish Romanticism, a dress rehearsal for a no-show. In this respect, the Spanish fable is perhaps more akin to a version of intellectual skirmishes characteristic of early eighteenth-century England. In fact, the Spanish apologies for the imagination sometimes feel like a local production of Addison and Steele’s Spectator and Tatler doctrines. Incidentally, the role of Addison in Gunia’s argument is a good example of one of the book’s shortcomings. Foreign names (Addison, Blair, Boileau, Kant, Lessing, Smith, and Voltaire, among many others) and general names of doctrines are used and conjoined in a propitiatory or overallusive fashion, where often a more substantial discussion is called for. The relevant fact, revealed by his Spanish translator, that Addison’s texts were known in translation in Spain as early as 1714 is given short shrift (106 n. 265). This is all the more regrettable as it occurs in the context of a discussion of Luzán’s 1737 Poetics, where the Platonic pair “icastic”/“fantastic” 1 is characterized un-Platonically in terms of an opposition between universal and particular that could perhaps be attributed to Addison’s essays On the Pleasure of the Imagination (1712) (one suspects that the Spectator would have been more widely read in 1737 Spain than the Sophist). Other less adventurous sources for the distinction proper could be Marsilio Ficino, Giacoppo Mazzoni, or, in particular, Giambattista Vico (whom Luzán mentions elsewhere).Gunia’s second, and main, line of argument concerns sociological matters. She describes what she calls “the beginning of the constitution of a(n artistic and) literary field [sic]” (89), roughly coinciding with the reigns of Philip V and Ferdinand VI, and then discusses the putative shift “from external control to self-organization in the (artistic and) literary field [sic]” (196), contemporary with Charles III and IV. Paraphrased in simpler terms, the story she tells begins with “the flexibilization of a rigid social hierarchy” (89) that allows for “specialization” to emerge and so for the profession of homme de lettres (rarely femme) to be possible (196). It begins in a moment where the state controls the budding “literary field” and ends, presumably, with its end. This agonic fable has its moments of fantasy, such as when Gunia imagines the resistance of those “who fought for their privileged power position in the artistic and literary fields and defended their concept of a special art and literature” (204 –5). Not even in Spain, though, was a war ever fought in the name of conceptual matters. The mother of all fantasies is the notion of “symbolic capital,” according to which “these fights have the goal of maximizing both material and symbolic earnings” (20). This strikes me as overestimating Philip V. More important still is that, in their own terms, the fights have to be won (since “literature” is waiting in the wings to emerge), but were, in Gunia’s opinion, lost. As she dispiritedly acknowledges toward the end, “the seeds of change…have scarcely produced anything. What was missing was a solid economic infrastructure that could have created the ground for the literary artistic trade to flourish” (204).I believe this recidivist Marxist spasm to be a symptom of how little the “theory of the literary and artistic field” (19) is prepared to detect and withstand change, in this case the simple fact that the word “literature” eventually became common currency without any trace of a “literary field.” In this respect, Marxism, which always tells you why everything fails by definition, proves a safer pair of metaphysical hands. In reading Gunia’s book, one is indeed struck by how little seems to have changed for her in the period covered by it: detestable Church gives place to detestable Enlightenment, and detestable Aristotle to detestable Romanticism. It could be, however, that what has changed is never quite captured by her because she seems to look for change in odd places (e.g., in universities and academies) while wearing bad glasses (e.g., Bourdieu’s idea that “many practices and representations of artists and writers can only be explained in relation to the field of power” [20]). To be sure, some things have not changed at all, then or since. The book ends on two depressing notes: one (inaccurate) of a country suffocated by the state, the other a description of Spanish intellectuals as little more than public servants. This latter note finds a disturbing contemporary echo in the fact that the publication of this book was sponsored by a Spanish government agency. Notes 1.Plato, Sophist 236ab, trans. F. M. Cornford, in The Collected Dialogues, Including the Letters, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (1961; repr., Princeton University Press, 1996), 978–79. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 109, Number 3February 2012 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/663351 Views: 171Total views on this site © 2012 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.