Books and edited Collections by Crystal Chemris
Inspired by Walter Benjamin's notion of constellation, this book draws on theories of Latin Ameri... more Inspired by Walter Benjamin's notion of constellation, this book draws on theories of Latin American modernity to investigate the Spanish literary Baroque and its repetitions as a historical-cultural predicament in Latin American colonial and modern texts. Inca Garcilaso, Borges, Carpentier, Rulfo, Darío and a range of Latin American "Post-Symbolist" poets (Agustini, Pizarnik, Sosa, Lienlaf and Huinao) are juxtaposed with the Lazarillo, the Quijote, Fuenteovejuna and Góngora's Soledades to produce original readings on topics of violence, rape, frustrated pilgrimage, and the truncated ambitions of colonized peoples and confessional minorities. In turn, Benjamin is juxtaposed with Mallarmé to recast the aesthetic dynamics of modernity in political terms, in order to understand the Baroque within a more broadly historicized concept of the avant-garde. Generous in scope, this book addresses the community of Spanish and Latin American criticism as well as emerging and pressing theoretical concerns within the field of comparative literature.
Publications by Crystal Chemris
eHumanista: Journal of Iberian Studies 60 (2024): 183-201., 2024
Abstract:
In this essay I propose a comparison between Luis de Góngora and Miguel de Cervantes, ... more Abstract:
In this essay I propose a comparison between Luis de Góngora and Miguel de Cervantes, focusing on the Soledades and the Persiles, and demonstrating their common use of literature as a utopian imaginary to engage the political problems of their historical moment.
Keywords: Luis de Góngora, Soledades, Miguel de Cervantes, Persiles, Moriscos
eHumanista: Journal of Iberian Studies 57 (2024): 471-89., 2024
The comparison of Sor Juana’s Sueño and Góngora’s Soledades can be contextualized within new hist... more The comparison of Sor Juana’s Sueño and Góngora’s Soledades can be contextualized within new historical approaches which take into account the impact of the evolution of historiographic syncretism and hermeticism upon poetic form, as well as questions of colonialism and oppression.
eHumanista: Journal of Iberian Studies 56 (2023): 242-255. , 2023
Góngora’s juxtaposition of European hermetic symbolism with indigenous and Morisco signs can be c... more Góngora’s juxtaposition of European hermetic symbolism with indigenous and Morisco signs can be compared with a later homologous case of the interaction of Vodou and Freemasonry associated with the Haitian revolution. By tracing the trajectories of hermeticism, drawing on Frances Yates’s classic work as well as more recent studies, we can better understand the fragmented representation of colonized subjects in Hispanic early modern literature.
Hispanic Journal 43.2 (2022): 57-73., 2022
eHumanista/Conversos 10 (2022): 186-195, 2022
I propose to examine the Jewish Question in recent Marxist theory as a point of departure for exp... more I propose to examine the Jewish Question in recent Marxist theory as a point of departure for exploring Iberian confessional minorities and the concept of the nation in the early modern. In so doing, I hope to expand John Beverley’s notion of the Baroque as a place “before and after the nation” as well as to consider the present moment in Spanish early modern literary studies and history as disciplines.
eHumanista: Journal of Iberian Studies 48 (2021): 286-95., 2021
This study examines the political significance of imagery of cosmic battle (Titanomachy or Gigant... more This study examines the political significance of imagery of cosmic battle (Titanomachy or Gigantomachy) and related myths of family/national strife (the Oresteia) in a selection of Luis de Góngora's work, first by contextualizing the image of the Peruvian aleto in the Soledades, then by approaching the topic of syncretism in his Sacromonte sonnet, and finally by exploring the postdating of his sonnet on the Escorial to the Morisco expulsion order of 1609.
Keywords: Luis de Góngora, Moriscos, judeoconversos, Sacromonte, Escorial
(This article began as a paper for the LALISA (LATIN AMERICAN, LATINO, AND IBERIAN STUDIES ASSOCIATION) conference in April 2016 on "New Temporal Regimes in Literature, History, and the Social Sciences").
eHumanista: Journal of Iberian Studies 47 (2021): 157-176., 2021
This essay examines images of the Virgin Mary and of the bleeding body of Christ, in Spain and Sp... more This essay examines images of the Virgin Mary and of the bleeding body of Christ, in Spain and Spanish America, placing examples from the visual arts as well as cases of ekphrasis in literary texts (by Góngora, Cervantes, Domínguez Camargo and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz) in the context of colonialism and the oppression of Iberian confessional minorities.
eHumanista: Journal of Iberian Studies 42 (2019): 305-16.
I propose a Greek and Biblical architecture for Luis de Góngora's Soledades, interpreting certain... more I propose a Greek and Biblical architecture for Luis de Góngora's Soledades, interpreting certain parallels with Homer's Odyssey, Dio Chrysostoms's Hunters of Euboea, and Claudian's Rape of Persephone, as well as allusions to the Book of Jonah, as covert and symbolic protest against the expulsion of the Moriscos, thereby expanding recent studies by Mercedes Blanco and Colin Thompson and laying the basis for a more historicized reading of Góngora's major poem.
Among scholars of Spanish Baroque poetry, the dominant opinion has been that the writer Luis de G... more Among scholars of Spanish Baroque poetry, the dominant opinion has been that the writer Luis de Góngora was silent, indifferent, or even supportive in the face of the forced exile of the Moriscos, the “New Christian” descendants of con- verts from Islam. This essay instead takes the minority position that Góngora opposed the expulsion, thus mirroring his Andalusian patrons and his human- ist mentor Pedro de Valencia. Specifically, in his long lyric poem the Soledades, Góngora encodes opposition to the expulsion in the falconry scene and rein- forces the connection between the cantos through the theme of parental grief, elaborated as well in his fragmentary but systematic allusions to Claudian’s Rape of Proserpine.
Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 38.3 (2014): 419-41, 2014
Este ensayo pretende evaluar la ola reciente de estudios gongorinos surgida al calor del cuarto c... more Este ensayo pretende evaluar la ola reciente de estudios gongorinos surgida al calor del cuarto centenario de las obras mayores del poeta. Al ofrecer una perspectiva general de este “boom”, quiero asimismo definir y analizar tres áreas de producción crítica. Me centro primero en el nuevo libro sobre las Soledades de Mercedes Blanco, una obra cuyas controvertidas e importantes contribuciones se valorarán en el contexto de la bibliografía existente sobre el poema. Reviso después algunas intervenciones críticas recientes sobre el Panegírico al duque de Lerma, con especial atención a una notable tesis doctoral española y al concepto de “inacabamiento estratégico” de John Beverley, objeto ahora de renovado interés. Examino también las cuestiones de eros y alteridad con el fin de encuadrar otro grupo de trabajos. Finalmente, desarrollo algunas observaciones sobre la tensión metodológica entre el nuevo historicismo y el marxismo - evidente en el contraste entre Beverley y Blanco - y entre las diferentes academias nacionales, divididas entre la filología y la crítica basada en la teoría contemporánea.
This paper for the 2015 biennial Meeting (Amherst) of the Society for Renaissance and Baroque His... more This paper for the 2015 biennial Meeting (Amherst) of the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry is an early oral presentation of the material published in “Góngora, the Moriscos, and the Falconry Episode of the Soledades.” Symposium 70.1 (2016): 11-23.
El universo de Góngora: orígenes, textos y representaciones. Ed. y coord. Joaquín Roses. Córdoba, Spain: Diputación de Córdoba, 2014. 235-48.
Homenaje a Melchora Romanos
“Carlos Fuentes y el barroco: el caso de Zona sagrada.” Carlos Fuentes en el siglo xxi. Una lectura transatlántica de su obra. Comp. Julio Ortega. Xalapa: Editorial Veracruzana, Universidad Veracruzana, 2015, 117-32
Solicited Spanish translation of “The Baroque and Carlos Fuentes’s Zona sagrada."
INTI: Revis... more Solicited Spanish translation of “The Baroque and Carlos Fuentes’s Zona sagrada."
INTI: Revista de Literatura Hispánica 75-76 (2012): 46-57. Special issue on Carlos Fuentes, ed. Julio Ortega and Roger B. Carmosino.
INTI: Revista de Literatura Hispánica 75-76 (2012): 46-57. Special issue on Carlos Fuentes, ed. Julio Ortega and Roger B. Carmosino.
“A Note on Female Agency and the Éfire Figure in Góngora’s Soledad segunda,” Studies in Honor of Denah Lida, Mary G, Berg and Lanin A. Gyurko, eds. Potomac: Scripta Humanistica, 2005. 96-102.
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Books and edited Collections by Crystal Chemris
Publications by Crystal Chemris
In this essay I propose a comparison between Luis de Góngora and Miguel de Cervantes, focusing on the Soledades and the Persiles, and demonstrating their common use of literature as a utopian imaginary to engage the political problems of their historical moment.
Keywords: Luis de Góngora, Soledades, Miguel de Cervantes, Persiles, Moriscos
Keywords: Luis de Góngora, Moriscos, judeoconversos, Sacromonte, Escorial
(This article began as a paper for the LALISA (LATIN AMERICAN, LATINO, AND IBERIAN STUDIES ASSOCIATION) conference in April 2016 on "New Temporal Regimes in Literature, History, and the Social Sciences").
https://www.revistadelauniversidad.mx/download/2cd34fb7-3557-431a-930b-509299cd122a?filename=el-algoritmo-barroco
INTI: Revista de Literatura Hispánica 75-76 (2012): 46-57. Special issue on Carlos Fuentes, ed. Julio Ortega and Roger B. Carmosino.
In this essay I propose a comparison between Luis de Góngora and Miguel de Cervantes, focusing on the Soledades and the Persiles, and demonstrating their common use of literature as a utopian imaginary to engage the political problems of their historical moment.
Keywords: Luis de Góngora, Soledades, Miguel de Cervantes, Persiles, Moriscos
Keywords: Luis de Góngora, Moriscos, judeoconversos, Sacromonte, Escorial
(This article began as a paper for the LALISA (LATIN AMERICAN, LATINO, AND IBERIAN STUDIES ASSOCIATION) conference in April 2016 on "New Temporal Regimes in Literature, History, and the Social Sciences").
https://www.revistadelauniversidad.mx/download/2cd34fb7-3557-431a-930b-509299cd122a?filename=el-algoritmo-barroco
INTI: Revista de Literatura Hispánica 75-76 (2012): 46-57. Special issue on Carlos Fuentes, ed. Julio Ortega and Roger B. Carmosino.
Students write a short analytical essay early in the course (on 2-3 poems or a short story), a take-home midterm essay with in-class identifications, and a directed final research paper on Pedro Páramo. Both original essays are preceded by short oral presentations (on topics or articles of criticism) intended to jump-start the writing process. I assign criticism selectively and provide students with a bank of articles relevant to their paper.