Lazarillo De Tormes Research Articles

Una lectura resiliente del "Lazarillo de Tormes"

The aim of this paper is to analyse resilience in a classic literary piece of work such as La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes, y de sus fortunas y adversidades. In order to do this, the article starts by questioning the adequacy of the term “resilience” in relation to the analysis of characters within literary theory and criticism, especially in connection with a possible psychology of the character. Fortunes and adversities are then contextualised, primarily through the role that folklore plays. Subsequently, a detailed analysis is offered through the character’s resilience. Finally, the article concludes with the importance of the concept of “resilience” to understand this literary work.

The Eye as a Symbol of Ill-Fatedness in Two Canonical Picaresque Works: Lazarillo de Tormes and Guzmán de Alfarache

It seemed unimaginable that the eye, denoting visuality and deemed accurate and reliable in accordance with Aristotelian theories in circulation during the Spanish Golden Age could be considered as anything other than a revered hallmark of guidance and intellect. Nevertheless, the literary phenomenon) of the picaresque emerged at the onset of the seventeenth century to defy the chivalric and pastoral fantasies that were masking the real anxieties faced by an era of decline. The picaresque genre brought warning that turning a blind eye to Spain’s already-waning fortunes could not last forever. Yet, by doing so, it lent favour to such blindness, underlining how the eye, both symbolically and substantially, actually evoked a sense of ill-fatedness and misfortune. This paper calls for an exploration of how an ominous utilisation of the eye is presented in the most canonical picaresque works: Lazarillo de Tormes and Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache. From the imperative role of the blind man in opening the eyes of the young protagonist, to the doomed interpolated cosplay of seeing and unseeing throughout Lazarillo’s trajectory, and from Guzmán’s receptivity to appearances and Alemán’s lending of visual lexicon to his picaro protagonist, one must ask: how and why does the bodily organ of the eye, through both notion and function, serve as a depiction of hardship and disaster within these picaresque texts, and how does it reflect the overarching societal views towards intellect and religion during this epoch of “ocularcentrism”?

Chrystal Ann Chemris. The Spanish Baroque and Latin American Literary Modernity: Writing in Constellation

Chrystal Ann Chemris. <i>The Spanish Baroque and Latin American Literary Modernity: Writing in Constellation</i>

A perfect match? A semiotic analysis of the wife figure in four early picaresque novels

Abstract Picaresque fiction, or the so-called tale of roguery, focuses mainly on the adventures of a male protagonist. Although women characters rarely take the lead, they mark significant transitions in the narrative syntax. Mothers, wives, and lovers reject stereotypical role models and are invested with the potential of initiating the picaro to his life stages. This study will concentrate on the wife as a catalyst of semiotic value beyond her appointed role, exploring a corpus of four works published between 1554 and 1626: Lazarillo de Tormes, The Unfortunate Traveller, Guzmán de Alfarache, and El Buscón. In these narratives, wives oppose their fate of pure Objects in a conjugal contract, and become Subjects, Antagonists or Destinators, assertive “actants” (Greimas) in the semiotic grammar of narrative. My purpose is to re-evaluate, in deep-structure narrative terms, the significance of women characters in the largely male-centred, misogynist picaresque.

The Influence of the Picaresque Novel in the Work of Camilo José Cela: Lazarillo de Tormes and the Family of Pascual Duarte as a Sample

The following work consists of the relationships found between the novels El Lazarillo de Tormes, considered the first novel of the picaresque genre published in 1554, and the Family of Pascual Duarte, by the Spanish author Camilo José Cela, whose original publication was in 1942. Four centuries separate these two novels, but when reading the works under analysis we have been able to find many characteristics that they share with the picaresque novel. From the typical structure of this prose genre originated in Spain to the tremendism, a genre initiated by this work by José Cela. In this work we will focus on the comparison of how the protagonists of both stories evolve with the families in the center of attention.

Allegory and the Poetic Self: First-Person Narration in Late Medieval Literature, ed R. Barton Palmer, Katharina Philipowski, and Julia Rüthermann. Gainesville, Tallahasse, et al.: University Press of Florida, 2022, vii, 316 pp.

Narratologically speaking, the emergence of the poetic “I” in late medieval and early modern European literature constitutes a major benchmark of a long-term paradigm shift which ultimately transcended into the Baroque novel written entirely from the first-person perspective, such as the anonymous Spanish Lazarillo de Tormes (1552) and Grimmelshausen German Simplicissimus (1668). However, already high medieval romances such as Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival (ca. 1205) or allegorical narratives such as Hartmann von Aue’s Klagebüchlein (ca. 1180) contain remarkable elements of the playful engagement with the own self. Those are, unfortunately, not even mentioned by any of the contributors to the volume under review here. We also should not forget the strong development of autobiographical poetry in the fifteenth century (cf. A. Classen, Autobiographische Lyrik des europäischen Spätmittelalters, 1991), such as by Oswald von Wolkenstein, Christine de Pizan, Thomas Hoccleve, and Michel Beheim (none of them is considered here). However, the present project excellently edited by two German and one American scholar, aims at the analysis of the conjunction of allegory with the first-person pronoun mostly in late medieval French, some Italian, German, and Spanish allegorizing verse narratives, often in the form of the dream allegory. As the editors emphasize, the exploration of the poetic “I” takes place within a literary discourse, it represents an experimental process, and it reflects the very nature of fictionality (meta-fictionality), which can easily lead to the splitting of the poetic self. Whether this justifies them to call this development transgressive, “oscillating between story and discourse” (15), might be questionable, however.

Lazarillo de Tormes: A Graphic Novel by Enriqueta Zafra

Reviewed by: Lazarillo de Tormes: A Graphic Novel by Enriqueta Zafra Debora Zamorano Zafra, Enriqueta. Lazarillo de Tormes: A Graphic Novel. U of Toronto P, 2021. Pp. 124. ISBN 978-1-4875-2938. Lazarrilo de Tormes, a graphical novel, is an innovative and captivating adaptation of one of the classics of Spanish Literature, the anonymous sixteenth-century work, Lazarillo de Tormes. Lazarillo was the bastard son of a prostitute. He works for various masters who teach him dirty ways to survive. His life with his different masters reveals the corruption in imperial Spain. This work created the picaresque novel, a genre that, according to the author, shows injustice while amusing the reader. Zafra’s graphic novel is based on the first four versions of the book as well as the censored version of 1573. One of Zafra’s objectives in writing her graphic novel is to explain the historical context of the original novel to the modern reader. Therefore, she concentrates the original novel history on different periods of time: before 1554, when the novel was first written; the period when it was first printed; the period when it was censored; and when it was published again after being censored. The author also mentions the combination of its final version and other works. Because the original book had many different editions, there is a chronological disruption of six centuries among these various editions of the book. These disruptions are captured in the structure of the book. The structure includes Zafra’s acknowledgments and the introduction, where she gives the reader an overview of the history of the original novel and the main differences [End Page 632] in her novel. Zafra then dedicates a page to the 1553 book, where she briefly explains the anonymity of the anti-hero. Following this, she displays the history of the first translation of the book and why it was translated from Spanish to English. Next, Zafra shows the readers the illustrations of the four editions of the book, and Lazarillo begins his case as the predecessor of many literary anti-heroes which leads to the first chapter of Zafra’s novel. In this first chapter, Lazarillo gives an account of his childhood. The author believes that the last conversation of the chapter, where Lazarillo accused religious people of robbing their flocks, possibly took place before the publication of the censored version of the book. Lazarillo went against powerful men in Spanish society at the time; hence the need to censor the book. The author then makes a pause in the story and details the characters implicated in Lazarillo’s editorial history. The editorial history is particularly important and clarifying for todays’ readers. As Zafra points out: “Our graphic novel reconstructs his [censor Juan López de Velasco] editorial input in an interactive way so that the reader is able to witness the reasons behind his decisions, his network and alliances and entrepreneurial approach to the export of his version to the American market” (xv). The following section mentions the importance of the year 1599, when the success of the censored Lazarillo version occurred. Through a funny conversation, Zafra depicts Miguel de Cervantes supposedly giving his opinion about the book. In chapter two, Zafra describes how Lazarillo settled down with a priest and what happened to him. Zafra then gives the story another pause to explain the conversations about the versions of the novel in 2019. The illustrations show a professor teaching to his students about the transformations and adversities of Lazarilo’s editorial history. Zafra then goes back to the story in the remaining chapters of her novel. One of the successes of the original book stems from its influencing of other books with similar style, such as works as Guzmán de Alfarache’s and Miguel de Cervantes’s works. Zafra follows the graphic novel Don Quixote (2011) by Rob Davis, adapted from the novel written by Miguel de Cervantes in 1605. This may be a reason why Zafra features Miguel de Cervantes as probably the ultimate reader of Lazarillo de Tormes in her graphic novel. In it, Zafra discusses how Cervantes could have reacted to some issues he might have had with...

The Picaresque and the Writing Life in Mexico

The Picaresque and the Writing Life in Mexico

“The Most Unique and Spicy Volume in Existence”: A Picaresque Reappraisal of Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad

ABSTRACT Mark Twain’s first book, The Innocents Abroad (1869), despite being the most widely sold of his works in his lifetime, often baffles more recent readers. Innocents tends to be seen as interruptive, unclassifiable, and valuable mostly as an antecedent to his later novels. Prominent Twain scholars Robert Gray Bruce and Hamlin Hill once belittled Innocents as a “patchwork scissors-and-paste job,” and Bruce Michelson remarks that the “narrative stance” of Innocents is a persistent “mystery and a cause of argument” to contemporary audiences. The author proposes that to appreciate Twain’s travelogue, we must situate it not in a picturesque or burlesque context (both traditional for most travelogues of the nineteenth century), but instead venture further back in the Western canon—to the classic Spanish picaresque. Drawing on the scholarship of Ulrich Wicks and Alexander Blackburn, she embarks on a comparative study of Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), the original picaresque text, and Innocents, making a particular focus on the respective narrators and their use of the aside. She argues that Innocents is modally and symbolically (as opposed to generically) picaresque. Such a reappraisal of Twain’s first monograph opens vistas onto the trickling inheritance of the picaresque mode in curious and unexpected literary places.

Fugitive Freedom: The Improbable Lives of Two Impostors in Late Colonial Mexico

Fugitive Freedom: The Improbable Lives of Two Impostors in Late Colonial Mexico

The problems of reader’s experience and the search for style in V. S. Naipaul's essayistic writing

This article conducts a chronological reconstruction of the key milestones of the reading path of V. S. Naipaul, as well as reviews the problems of his reader&amp;rsquo;s experience and the search for writing style. Emphasis is placed on the creative and personal relationship between V. S. Naipaul and his father S. Naipaul, who was his teacher and mentor, developed his literary taste, aptitude and style of the future Nobel laureate. Their collaboration draws the interest of researchers based on the fact that namely S. Naipaul introduced world literature to his son, affected his choice of books, and helped to understand a different sociocultural context. The author reveals the impact of the Russian writers (Gogol, Tolstoy) and the Spanish picaresque novel (&amp;ldquo;Lazarillo de Tormes&amp;rdquo;) upon writing style of V. S. Naipaul; as well as determines the reading preferences of V. S. Naipaul at a mature age. Among the authors who considerably influenced V. S. Naipaul in different periods of his creative path, the author names R. Kipling, D. Defoe, J. R. R. Tolkien, and J. Conrad. The analytical overview of the &amp;ldquo;writer's library&amp;rdquo; and his reading preferences allows carrying out a more systematic, consistent, and logical examination of V. S. Naipaul's works. The idea of the circle of authors and writings that considerably influenced the creative personality of V. S. Naipaul gives the key to the analysis of quotations, borrowings, allusions and reminiscences, i.e. the problems of intertextuality in his prose fiction. V. S. Naipaul's essayistic writing has not been published in the Russian language; this article introduces it into the Russian scientific discourse in literary studies.

Avatares de lo invisible: Espacio y subjetividad en los siglos de oro by Luis F. Avilés

Reviewed by: Avatares de lo invisible: Espacio y subjetividad en los siglos de oro by Luis F. Avilés Aliza Levenson (bio) and Ana Laguna (bio) Luis F. Avilés. Avatares de lo invisible: Espacio y subjetividad en los siglos de oro. Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2017. 228 pp. ISBN: 978-84-16922-04-8. Luis Avilés's title, Avatares de lo invisible, alludes to the wide range of figurative and literal spaces that manifest their weight in the fluid subjectivities (racial, ethnic, and gendered) portrayed by Spanish Golden Age literature. If some loci are unsurprising in this spatial inquiry—the house, the court, the battlefield—the nuanced analysis of how selected texts position their subjects existentially, socially, and politically results in new and refreshing revelations. Avilés illustrates the experiential consequences of these spatial appropriations, demonstrating how both physical spaces and invisible liminalities shape literary characters and topoi in the early modern cultural tradition. The interwoven relationship between self and space is revealed in the idea of "amor distante y de oídas," explored in the first chapter. Avilés reads texts like Ibn Hazm de Córdoba's El Collar de la paloma, Razón de Amor, and Don Quijote, highlighting a spatially mediated concept of love that recalls classical referents like Cicero's De amicitia. In the second chapter, Avilés leaves love behind to focus on the view of the court presented by Antonio Guevara in his Menosprecio de corte y alabanza de aldea (1539). Here, he deconstructs the idea of self-fashioning through a granular exploration of how the court's public and private spaces determine the internal and external selves of courtly subjects, who are painfully aware of the official processes and "invisible" machinations that might approve of, support, or betray them. For Avilés, the weight of this pressured awareness is akin to a yoke, un yugo, that severely limits the subject's freedom of movement. Avilés reads a similar environment in Guevara's idea of aldea: an external space almost as threatening to one's internal self as the court, despite the apparently greater liberties that this rural escape affords. In his third chapter, Avilés complicates the idea of an external and "prescriptive" space of conflict by focusing on the Christian and Moorish frontier of Granada, which he reads as a hybrid space shaped as much by dialogue and exchange as by conflict and warfare. In El Abencerraje, those opposing forces are manifested in the warring antagonists, Abencerraje and Abindarráez, who, despite being formidable opponents, are able to craft—thanks to the erosion of war and the vulnerability of exile—an intimate space conducive to mutual understanding, and even kinship. Contrary to historical reality, and to Covarrubias's view of the borderland as a site of clear division between lands [End Page 206] and political jurisdictions (107), Avilés sees the frontier as a porous, liminal space full of varying possibilities for dialogue and cooperation. The last chapter explores, through Lazarillo de Tormes, a much different space: the domestic environment that signifies both a shelter and a social achievement (un buen puerto). Avilés insists on the shelter dimension, since the domestic space allows the early modern subject a place to hide, to remain invisible from the social pressures or external expectations that surround him. This notion that the subject is an aspiring, autonomous entity shaped in relation to others is supported by critics like Judith Butler and Nietzsche and correlated, on a purely literary level, to the anonymity of the novel. For Avilés, such anonymity is not coincidental, as it provides the author a larger narrative autonomy, and even shelter from social and moral constraints (157). Specialists and students of the Spanish Golden Age will appreciate the wide array of literary sources and theoretical approaches employed in Avilés analysis, which includes—besides Cicero, Butler, and Nietzsche, critics like Foucault and Claudio Guillén. Through this eclectic framework, the author provides an intriguing view of early modern subjectivity in constant dialogue with its surrounding spatial demarcation. Rather than presenting a world turned into a stage, Avilés uncovers the disparate worlds of separate stages that determine...

피카레스크 소설에 나타난 서사적 장치로서 음식과 그로테스크한 변형 -『라사리요 데 토르메스 Lazarillo de Tormes』와 『사기꾼 El Buscón』을 중심으로-

피카레스크 소설에 나타난 서사적 장치로서 음식과 그로테스크한 변형 -『라사리요 데 토르메스 Lazarillo de Tormes』와 『사기꾼 El Buscón』을 중심으로-

Subject, Structure, and Imagination in the Spanish Discourse on Modernity by Christopher Soufas Jr

Reviewed by: Subject, Structure, and Imagination in the Spanish Discourse on Modernity by Christopher Soufas Jr William Viestenz Soufas, Christopher, Jr. Subject, Structure, and Imagination in the Spanish Discourse on Modernity. Palgrave, 2015. 192 pp. The Spanish resistance to the Enlightenment modality of a self-determinant, autonomous subject in Golden Age and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature is the focus of Christopher Soufas Jr.'s welcome study, Subject, Structure and Imagination in the Spanish Discourse on Modernity. Soufas frames Spain's primary contributions to the unfolding of modernity as a dialectical engagement with the primacy of the subjective capacity for reason, and an objection to the repurposing of the imagination from serving as a conduit for a dialogic relation with the world, to becoming a rival of the intellect in the act of consciousness and elaboration of reasoning practices. Through a wide-ranging and convincing exegesis of canonical texts from Spain's Golden Age and fin de siècle periods, Soufas demonstrates that Spanish attitudes towards subjectivity and imagination remained predicated, to varying degrees, on an early-modern epistemology "which assigns greater value to the concrete physical world (the 'body' of nature as opposed to the 'mind' of a subject) and which continues to depend upon a structural model that resists subject-centered discourse" (7). In lieu of proposing that Spanish authors advocate for one model of the imagination over another, Soufas's tenet is that the discourse on modernity in Spain has roots that precede the epistemological and aesthetic notions of Descartes, Burke, and Kant, to name a few frequently cited names in the text. In his elaboration of the emergence of modernity in Spain as a phenomenon to be understood in both historical and philosophical terms, Soufas's study serves, for Hispanists, as a useful companion to Anthony Cascardi's major study, The Subject of Modernity. Cascardi challenges Jürgen Habermas's contention that the specificity of the modern subject can be understood as a function of philosophy and advocates for studying an intersectionality of discourses, some contrasting with, and others extrapolating upon what came before in the Ancient and Medieval periods. Cascardi's approach, though committing considerable space to Cervantes, is amply theoretical, whereas Soufas's work offers an expanded meditation focused on two important historical periods in Spain, and a series of close readings of essential literary texts, which helps scholars distil a more concentrated understanding of how the tensions and contradictions of the discourse of modernity developed on the Iberian Peninsula. Soufas notes that the majority of writers, including Fredric Jameson with his influential work on the intellectual signposts of modernity's emergence, locate the articulation of the Cartesian cogito as one of the primary fault lines in the transition from a subjectivity intimately associated with the physical and sensorial world, to an autonomous, self-reflexive subject. In the first chapter of the book, [End Page 318] Soufas proposes from this approach that Lazarillo de Tormes constitutes not only an exercise in the picaresque genre, but also an interrogation of the negative fallout from the emergence of an autonomous thinking subject, in contrast to a mode of being attuned to pre-modern and early-modern value systems. This chapter, taken together with contributions focused on Don Quijote, La vida es sueño, El burlador de Sevilla, and Velázquez's "Las meninas," comprises the first section of the text, and demonstrates how the pre- and early-modern Spanish authors exhibited an allegiance to superseded value systems in the face of Europe's transition to modernity. The second chapter dedicated to Cervantes's magnum opus asserts the provocative claim that Quijote's madness was a consequence of modernity's emergence and the demand to exert reasoning practices upon the world in lieu of dialoging with external reality via the senses. Madness, then, becomes less a longing for a past, as documented in the books of chivalry, to which the protagonist is famously attached, and more the end result of an imagination that can no longer direct reason, in a predictable fashion, to "physical and moral circumstance" (44). In the following chapter, Soufas interprets the concluding act of La vida es sueño as a disavowal of...

Utopias, Dystopias and Heterotopias: The Coming of Age in Post-Civil War Spain in Almudena Grandes’ El lector de Julio Verne

In 2012 Almudena Grandes published El lector de Julio Verne, the second instalment of her Episodios de una guerra interminable series. This work offers the reader a unique view of post-Civil War Spain from the perspective of young Nino who lives in the Andalusian village of Fuensanta de Martos in the Province of Jaén. Through this character, Grandes explores the conflictive world that developed under the Franco regime and how Nino attempts to make sense of the institutionalized oppression and cruelty that dominate his world. In a narrative style reminiscent of Lazarillo de Tormes, a mature Nino guides the reader through his adolescent world from barracks to libraries, gristmills to anti-Fascist homes where he recalls the people, events and ideas that moulded his personality and political ideology. Fundamental to this novel is the development of the aforementioned heterogeneous spaces and places. Within this setting, Nino encounters varying manifestations of utopic models that contribute to his coming-of-age experience.

Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is: Early Modern Economics, Comedy, and Point of View in Lazarillo de Tormes

Este trabajo propone que el análisis detenido del uso de una determinada terminología económica en dos episodios del primer tratado de Lazarillo de Tormes, el de las medias blancas y el de la longaniza y el nabo, indica que el texto es tanto una obra de entretenimiento cómica como una sátira de los mercaderes-banqueros que formaban parte de la burguesía ascendente de la Castilla de mediados del siglo XVI. Así, Lazarillo emplea el humor y la ironía para desarrollar, no una celebración de la incipiente burguesía castellana, sino una sátira de la clase financiera por su avaricia e hipocresía.

La posición crítica literaria de Francisco Ayala en Lazarillo de Tormes

المقال يعرض نموذجا للنقد الأدبي ل )أيالا( في رواية بيكاريسكو)وهي نوع من الروايات الأدبية التي تروي حياة ومأساة متشرد( التي تحمل أسم )لاثاريو دي تورمس (..إما سبب اختيار العمل للدراسة هو إظهار جانب جديد ومختلف في الإبداع النقدي لأيالا، ولذكر القواعد الأساسية التي يتبعها المؤلف في عملية نقده للأعمال الأدبية التي لها علاقة في البناء الهيكلي والشكلي للعمل؛ في هذه الدراسة نحاول تسليط الضوء على أهم وأبرز النقاط التي تظهر في نقد رواية لاثاريو دي تورمس. أن الكاتب والناقد الأدبي فرانسيسكو أيالا معروف في موقفه النقدي الشامل المطبق على عمله وأعمال المؤلفين الآخرين، وفقا للباحثين الذين اظهروا اهتمام في دراسة أعماله الأدبية، مثل البروفيسور أنطونيو تشيتشارو وأندريس أموروس ان المؤلف كان يتبع معيار هامًا جدًا في عمله كناقد هو أهمية استيعاب وفهم العالم الأدبي وهنا يشير إلى فهم الواقع أو تاريخ العمل الأدبي مما يجعله أكثر قابلية للفهم للقراء.

"Hablillas o Lazarillo de Tormes": On the Early Modern Limits of Literature and History

The essay focuses on a reference made to Lazarillo de Tormes in a historiographic dispute at the royal court, involving Jeronimo Zurita's Anales de la Corona de Aragon. It is argued that in the polemic on history-writing there are important clues as to how early moderns conceived and elaborated distinctions between historical and literary writing. The articulation of that difference developed in close association and engagement with discourses of fact, rooted as they were in the Spanish legalistic tradition. The analysis of the interrelation of history and fiction offers evidence of how contemporary readers interpreted Lazarillo de Tormes in the early 1560s.

Domesticating the Picaro: Lazarillo de Tormes in England, 1688–1789

Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), the first work of Spanish picaresque fiction, maintained a lively presence in England throughout the eighteenth century. This essay focuses on two English versions which radically altered the tale in ways that reflected new developments in English prose fiction. Between 1688 and 1789 the picaro is first transformed into a sentimentalized protagonist who longs for the comforts of domesticity, and then into one who seems to prefigure the heroes of the nascent Bildungsroman. These transformations repeatedly cast Lazarillo anew as a forerunner of the latest trends in novelistic fiction, revealing in the process not just the abiding relevance of this old Spanish tale, but an emergent literary history of the novel that was beginning to coalesce along with the genre itself.

Juan López de Velasco, la "Descripción universal" and other subtle works

Juan Lopez de Velasco was a complex character, whose job in the Consejo de Indias culminated in a major work, the Descripcion universal de las Indias, a powerful document which did not see the light until 1894. Besides, in a life devoted to work and study, Velasco sought to gauge length through the observation of Lunar eclipses, but, at the same time, he acted as censor, removing a couple of treatises on Lazarillo de Tormes and giving to the printer a Lazarillo castigado which was in force for three hundred years, keeping the book for posterity. On the other hand, Velasco dallied with orthography and orthology and proposed measures which are still in place since they lay the foundations for the later orthographic norm, sanctioned by the RAE. He was concerned with children’s education and presented to the king Philip II proposals which were followed up some years afterwards. We may consider Velasco the first polygraph of the Spanish Renaissance.