Jealousy in cervantes: Emotion, cognition and the novel

Sarah Gretter, Purdue University

Abstract

Recovering the Iberian Peninsula from the Moorish occupation of seven hundred years (711-1492), Spaniards attempted to project new self-images of Spain with nationalistic zeal. From the late 15th century to the 16th century, the Spanish patriotic passion was further heightened by the Renaissance and the Discovery of America. A variety of ways to celebrate the political and cultural dominance of Spain were explored; nevertheless, no other than the concept of honor neatly encapsulated the national obsession of Spanish Gold Age literature. Among all the authors of this period, Miguel de Cervantes epitomized this prominent fascination of Spanish literature. As Antonio Maravall pointed out, Spanish Baroque authors, poets, and playwrights were preoccupied with repression, power, and authority during the transition from the plenitude of the Renaissance to the instability of the Baroque period. The 17th century literature embodies ideological, social and artistic discourses that underscore social conditions of crisis and conflicts, in which each human being desperately searches for liberating forces of the individual existence. Miguel de Cervantes uniquely condenses those sociopolitical predicaments into the theme of jealousy in his writings. This historical context is also one that has been witness to the rise of the novelistic genre, with Don Quijote being considered the first modern novel. Cervantine scholars have mostly focused on novelistic concepts in the study of Don Quijote, and I argue in this presentation that those elements are inscribed in many of Cervantes's other works, thanks to his capacity to integrate and describe characters' senses and their psychological effects. In his works, the concept of jealousy is always present, and I propose that the roots of the novel as a genre were supported by his use of this particular sensory emotion, which is novelistic in nature. Indeed, in Cervantes, jealousy brings together novelistic components: it can trigger humor, as fictional cuckoldry can be a source of laughter in some texts; it also revolves around dialogue, as jealousy plots always involve at least three perspectives; and it is open-ended, as it allows revisiting traditional plots in innovative ways. By viewing emotion and cognition as a path toward human subjectivity, this presentation opens up multidisciplinary and holistic perspectives to interpret jealously in Cervantes. Within both a historical and cognitive framework, we can shed light on the importance of this emotion not only in the field of Early Modern literature but also in the new interdisciplinary field of cognitive science and literary studies. In the spirit of a call for consilience among the sciences and the humanities, my theoretical approach is grounded in affective and cognitive science, a field of research that aims to explain the mechanisms underlying intelligent behavior by modeling psychological systems that considers the mind and body as a single entity. In light of this cognitive conception of senses, jealousy can be recognized not only as a literary emotion, but also as a mean to explore its effect as both narrative and psychological mechanism in a historical context that generated the birth of the novel, therefore modifying readers' minds and thoughts as they faced new ways of experiencing characters' personal and emotional lives.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Mancing, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Literature

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