Pícaro and Cortesano: Identity and the Forms of Capital in Modern Spanish Picaresque Narrative and Courtesy Literature
2013; Liverpool University Press; Volume: 90; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1478-3398
Autores Tópico(s)Early Modern Spanish Literature
ResumoFELIPE E. RuAN, Picaro and Cortesano: Iden- tity and the Forms of Capital in Modern Spanish Picaresque Narrative and Courtesy Literature. Lanham, Maryland: Bucknell university Press. 2011. 167 pp. ISBN 978-1- 61148-050-4.Picaro and Cortesano opens with an allusion to the figure of Diego de Carriazo in Cervantes' La ilustre fregona as an example of the blending of gentleman and rogue. Felipe E. Ruan studies the interconnections of the two social types in early modern Spanish culture and in the literary models that reflect them: pica- resque narrative and the courtesy manual. A shared element is identity, with emphasis on two different approaches to what Stephen Greenblatt has described as 'self-fashioning'. Ruan's goal is to engage the cortesano and the picaro - and the texts associated with each - in order to seek points of reciprocity and correspondence between them. Analo- gously, Ruan considers character to be both culturally constructed and produced in part by individual agency. An initial argument is based on the serendipitous publication of an expurgated version of Lazarillo de Tormes (the 1573 censored edition) as an appendix to the courtesy manual Galateo espanol (c. 1582), by Lucas Gracian Dantisco. Lazaro de Tormes' attempts at self-improvement - social and economic - would seem to go hand in hand with lessons of the Galateo and its ilk, espe- cially given the significant reworking of the picaresque narrative. Ruan associates 'manners' with what Pierre Bourdieu labels 'symbolic capital', the means through which to rise in the social hierarchy. Class structure and identity are rigidly defined, but at the same time an individual subject may, as in the theological concept of determinism, have room for expression, conduct and free will to effect change. Rules and instructions in the manuals lay out a plan for success for those at the top and, notably, for those in the middle, and below, who want to go higher (medrar). The early chapters, or tratados, of Lazarillo de Tormes establish the eponymous protagonist as an occupant of the lowest rung of the social ladder, and his movement upward traces a programme for reform, with the squire of the third chapter as perhaps the most striking exemplar, positive and negative. The closing seventh chapter becomes a compendium, psychological and economic, of principles alternately learned and dismissed. Lazarillo de Tormes teaches that the struggle for upward mobility is fraught with dangers - and ironies - and its successors replicate the message. …
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