Papers by Steven Wagschal
Revista de Estudios Hispánicos
Ovid in the Age of Cervantes, 2010
Cervantes and the Early Modern Mind, 2021
Minding Animals in the Old and New Worlds, 2018
Minding Animals in the Old and New Worlds, 2018
Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America, 2012
read over the manuscript and made valuable suggestions. Many of the ideas in Lako 's and Johnson'... more read over the manuscript and made valuable suggestions. Many of the ideas in Lako 's and Johnson's book were rst introduced in less developed form in their Metaphors We Live By. Clearly, there are also di erences among humans that may be cultural, historical, and/or physiological (which are not directly addressed by Lako and Johnson). However, such di erences do not appear to negate the commonalities of our most fundamental and basic cognitive structures, such as the ones to be discussed here (particularly, primary and secondary metaphors). Volume. () e Smellscape of Don Quixote the sensory-motor experience of verticality that is produced by pouring or seeing someone else pour something into a container. As the volume of liquid rises, there is more in the container. As the liquid is consumed, there is less and less, while the vertical column gradually goes down. Such pairings, of which there are at least two dozen, become what Lako and Johnson call "primary metaphors" (-). ese are simple metaphorical pairings that people tend consciously not to understand as metaphors because they are so basic. In turn, Lako and Johnson argue, "secondary metaphors" use these simple, primary metaphors as building blocks "like atoms that can be put together to form molecules" (). e primary metaphors form the schema for other thoughts, leading to secondary metaphors like "prices are rising" or "the stock market crashed" in which ultimately "more means up" and "less means down" (-). While they may sound similar, such basic cognitive metaphors are not the same as "lexicalized" or "dead metaphors," a term used in literary studies, philosophy, and linguistics to designate any metaphor in a particular language that has become such an ordinary part of language that it no longer seems metaphorical (i.e., "table leg"). In contrast, these cognitive metaphors correspond more specically to "cross-domain pairings" in which concepts are taken from a sensory-motor source domain (usually involving sight) and paired with a target domain from subjective experience. Such cross-domain pairings, learned in this way, correspond to permanent neural connections, which extend across the brain between the relevant sensory-motor area (source) and the subjective experience area (target) thus establishing the "inferential structure" for experience (-).
The British Journal of Aesthetics, 2014
AUniversity Microfilms order no. 9930825. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1999. Includes bi... more AUniversity Microfilms order no. 9930825. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1999. Includes bibliographical references.
The Creation and Re-creation of Cardenio
Strangely and sadly, Cervantes is almost entirely ignored by modern scholarship on the seventeent... more Strangely and sadly, Cervantes is almost entirely ignored by modern scholarship on the seventeenth-century play Cardenio and the eighteenth-century play Double Falsehood.1 His name and his novel are often invoked. But the words critics quote and analyze are those of Thomas Shelton, the first translator of the Spanish Don Quijote. Scholars compound this confusion (of the Spanish text with the English translation) by assuming that the eighteenth-century Double Falsehood and the seventeenth-century Cardenio had the same source. But why must we, or should we, make that assumption? The Spanish text was available in England, and being read by Englishmen, in 1612, 1727, and every year between. If we remove these self-imposed blinders, we can learn a lot about Double Falsehood and its relationship to Cervantes.
Revista canadiense de estudios hispánicos, 2008
Page 1. STEVEN WAGSCHAL Medicine, Morality, Madness: Competing Models of Insanity in Calder?n... more Page 1. STEVEN WAGSCHAL Medicine, Morality, Madness: Competing Models of Insanity in Calder?n's El mayor monstruo del mundo A trav?s de una lectura de El mayor monstruo del mundo (1637) de Calder?n de la Barca ...
Hispanic Review, 2002
THE last century has left us with three main views of Gongora's Fabula de Polifemo y Galatea.... more THE last century has left us with three main views of Gongora's Fabula de Polifemo y Galatea. In the first-which characterizes both Damaso Alonso's (186-207) and A. A. Parker's (111-6) interpretations-the poem is said to concern opposing dualisms (monstrosity/beauty, darkness/ light, love/jealousy) united and balanced in an organic whole.1 According to the second view, the positive values in this dualism are celebrated; for R. 0. Jones, these are beauty and life (36-7), while for Robert Jammes, they are love and other pastoral ideals (533 54). The third holds that the negative values of the dualism triumph; for instance, Melinda Eve Lehrer interprets much of Gongora's poetry, including the Polifemo, as "beautiful pastorale[s] ... built up and then shattered" (57). Along similar lines, R. John McCaw's recent article treats the poem's subversion of pastoral: "The contradiction between Polyphemus's words and deeds, then, signif[ies] the triumph of instinct over intellect, and, generally, the deflation of the integrity of pastoral ideals" (32). In what follows, I will support the third view by providing a new reading of the poem: the Polifemo is not a celebration of love, but rather a representation of love's destruction by jealousy. Gongora found in jealousy a representation of sublime experience, anticipating one of the dominant topics of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury aesthetics, and this sublime power of jealousy, the destroyer of love, is the true focus of the poem. The human emotion of jealousy is often described in literature in the most hyperbolic terms, reflecting perhaps the actual strength of the affective experience. Calderon and Lope de Vega, among others, provide good examples of this; hence the title of the former's play, El mayor monstruo los celos and Lope de Vegas horrific realization in Sonnet 56 of the Rimas that "ver otro amante en brazos de su dama" (13) is life's worst torment, worse than the tortures suffered by the Danaids, Tantalus, Ixion, Sisyphus and Prometheus. However, Gongora's use of hyperbole raises the theme to its Olympian zenith, indeed, beyond the bounds of conceptuality. Whereas the poetics of the day described an harmonious beauty in which the poet was encouraged to amaze the reader with admiratio or maraviglia, Gongora surpasses these tropes. I will show here how jealousy gave Gongora the opportunity to speak about something beyond the phenomena and experience of the world and beyond the poetics of his day: The sublime. I am not using the term "sublime" as it was sometimes used in Renaissance and Baroque Europe as a synonym for "great" or "elevated,"2 nor in Longinus's specialized sense as referring to phusis being revealed by the poet's effortless concealment of his techne, and having the effect of uplifting the reader's soul.3 Along these lines, the sixteenth century prescribed admiratio in poetry, as canonized in Francesco Patrizi's Della poetica (1586) where he writes on mirabile: "Ma doura il poeta pero sempre come di proprio officio suo e come a proprio fine, studiare di fare mirabile ogni soggetto ch'e gli prenda per le mani, comunque la si prendano i leggitori, the non tutti son uguali" (qtd. in Weinberg 2: 784-5). Although these uses well describe the kinds of metaphors created by Gongora's precursors and contemporaries, they do not adequately portray the magnitude of don Luis's images. I propose that Gongora's images are "sublime" in the modern aesthetic sense, as developed by Burke, Addison, and Sulzer in the eighteenth century, and systematized by Kant in the Critique of Judgement (Guyer 258-9). For Kant, the sublime is an experience wherein the subject's reason and imagination are overwhelmed by a scene of such great magnitude or power that it defies the subject's conceptual ability. He distinguishes two types: the mathematical and the dynamic. The subjective experience of the mathematical sublime occurs when the enormity of the object defies conceptualization. …
Journal article by Steven Wagschal; Cervantes: Bulletin …, 2001
... Cuando don Quijote supo que su historia ya estaba en letra impresa, se alborotó algún tanto, ... more ... Cuando don Quijote supo que su historia ya estaba en letra impresa, se alborotó algún tanto, recelando que el autor de ella pudiera desmandarse en sus atribuciones de historiador puntual y escrupuloso. Pero fue al conocer la existencia del «Quijote» apócrifo cuando dijo la ...
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Papers by Steven Wagschal