Germanistische Mediävistik ed. by Volker Honemann, Tomas Tomasek (review)

Abstract

MLRy 98.1, 2003 231 in literary reconstructed childhood memories are more mental than real spaces. An example analysed at length is the country house Binifullat in Maria de la Pau Janer's Natura d'anguila (1995), the recollectionof which is transformed during the narration from Paradise to horror castle (p. 120). The final two literary papers concern poetry and narrative respectively. In 'Villena and Mesquida: Materializingthe Platonic Body', Juan M. Godoy compares the repre? sentation ofthe male body and homoerotic desire in the post-Franco poetry of Luis Antonio de Villena and Biel Mesquida. Informed by an identitarian politics which dates from the late 1970s and 1980s, the approach here seems innocent of discourses surrounding queer politics and the writings of the likes of Kosofsky. At times it is almost patronizing to heterosexual readers, suggesting they will react with repulsion to poetry depicting gay sex. Nevertheless, it neatly demonstrates how, while Villena prefers a Platonic beauty (within both Graeco-Roman and Hispano-Arabic tradi? tions), for the Catalan writer Mesquida the male body is 'not a vehicle of spirituality, but the final object of [. . .] desire' (p. 128). Theatricality is the subject of Marta E. Altisent's 'Theater and life in Eduardo Mendoza's Una comedia ligera'. After a some? what bewildering account of a complex plot further complicated by the interpolation ofeight rehearsals fromthe play, the paper demonstrates how, much like Valle-Inclan' s esperpento, Mendoza's 'Comedia ligera is a systematic avoidance of tragedy' (p. 184). There follow three linguistic papers: 'The Evolution of Word-Internal Clusters in Ibero-Romance: Some Evidence from Catalan', by Donna M. Rogers, which adopts a comparative approach to a set of reflexes in Castilian and Portuguese, adding Catalan to the study; 'Quilombo, "bordello;': A Luso-Africanism in the Spanish and Catalan of Modernist Barcelona', by Philip D. Rasico, engages in some speculative etymological detective work on the existence of a Luso-African word for brothel in the travel journals of a turn-of-the-century Catalan historian; 'Aspects ofthe Spread and Boundaries of Catalan Lexicon in Andalusia', by Juan A. Sempere-Martinez, looks at the existence of Catalanisms in Andalusia, comparing the coastal regions (more given to accepting new lexical items) and the rural areas (more conservative in their lexicon). The final two essays take music as their topic. 'Manuel de Falla and the Barcelona Press: Universalismo, Modernismo,and thePath to Neoclassicism',by Carol A. Hess, charts de Falla's evolution from espanolismo to universalismo and the support he found forthis trajectory among the critics of Barcelona, in contrast to the more isolationistnational Madrid, and 'Community Ensemble Music as a Means of Cultural Expres? sion in the Catalan-Speaking Autonomies of Spain', by Richard Scott Cohen, is an in? troduction to the sardana and its place as an incarnation of Catalan cultural identity,as well as an outline ofthe history ofchoirsand concert bands in Catalan-speaking Spain. This volume contains some fascinating work and testifies to the breadth of Catalan studies in the USA, though it will disappoint those who are expecting to read about more European or internationalistmulticulturalism. Royal Holloway, University of London Mark Allinson Germanistische Mediavistik. Ed. by Volker Honemann and Tomas Tomasek. 2nd edn. (Miinsteraner Einfiihrungen: Germanistik, 4) Miinster, Hamburg, and London: LIT Verlag. 2000. xiv + 37opp. ?25.90. ISBN 3-8258-2269-9(pbk). This collaborative venture by Germanists at the University of Miinster aims to introduce students to medieval German literature through a series of contributions devoted mainly to individual texts which represent leading literary genres, and which raise broader issues in an exemplary way. The texts are treated in chronological order from the ninth to the sixteenth century, from Otfrid von Weissenburg's Evangelienbuch through the St. Trudperter Hohelied, Hartmann'sZTm:, two songs by Morungen, 232 Reviews the Nibelungenlied, Stricker's Der kluge Knecht, a song by Neidhart, and dawn-songs by Wolfram and Oswald von Wolkenstein, to the facetiae of Heinrich Bebel. Some weighting towards the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries in the choice of texts is compensated for by three contributions that range across texts and periods: an introductory survey of the history,material, and methods of German medieval literary studies, and closing discussions...