Literature Among Discourses: The Spanish Golden Age, and: Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure (review)

232 the minnesota review both texts add significant new tools to the existing body of works with which we labor towards the eUmination of our oppression. ELIZABETH MacNABB Literature Among Discourses: The Spanish Golden Age edited and introduced by Wlad Godzich and Nicholas Spadaccini. MinneapoUs: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. pp. 181. $12.95 (paper); $29.50 (cloth). Culture ofthe Baroque: Analysis ofa HistoricalStructure by Jose Antonio MaravaU. Translated by Terry Cochran, Foreword by Wlad Godzich and Nicholas Spadaccini. Theory and History of Literature, volume 25. MinneapoUs: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. pp. 330. $14.95 (paper); $39.50 (cloth). In their introduction to Literature among Discourses Wlad Godzich and Nicholas Spadaccini delve into a series of problems which should interest anyone who studies literature from a sociocritical perspective. They begin by correctly insisting that most critics and scholars rarely bother to look at the construct ofliterature itself, as if it were a more or less invariable "given" within the development of human culture (p. x). Having pointed out, for example, that the term "Uteratura" in the Middle Ages simply referred to written matter in general, Godzich and Spadaccini explain how usage of the term became progressively narrower in the eighteenth and ninrteenth centuries, thus preparing the way for its current meaning. This semantic transformation ran parallel with the development of an entire, university-based institution dedicated to the study of this new, restrictively defined object, including its putative "history." Even though the writing of Uterary history has faUen from favor, it is in faa true that its assumptions and premises stiU "haunt" our discipline to this very day. Not only do we accept the definition of literature handed down to us by the founders of "literary studies," but also we tend to classify ourselves as specialists in a genre and/or a period — the "two central axes of Uterary history" (p. x). The two editors of this coUeaive volume propose that it is time to step back and take a critical look at the inherited premises sustaining the project most of us foster, directly or indirectly. Their objective, in sum, is "to effea a breach in the closure that has been imposed upon the field of Uterary studies by the definition of literature inherent in Uterary history, in order to open this field to the study of all verbal praaices, their structures , their interaction, and their inscription in the social sphere, including their relation to other signifying praaices, artistic or not" (p. xi). Their attempt to "replace the very phenomenon of Uterature in a larger verbal luxuriance" (p. xv) clearly falls within a number of trends presently unfolding within criticism, some of which have been tagged as the "New Historidsm" while others form part of the post-strurturaüst and feminist ventures. What makes this attempt esperiaUy noteworthy, according to the two editors, is that it centers on a particular literary era which provided the very justification for the entire enterprise of Uterary history at its inception, that is, the so-caUed Spanish "Golden Age." Roughly embradng the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this period suppUed the German Romantic Uterary theorists with the elements necessary for elaborating the very concept of Uterary history, one which formed part of an ideological project fraught with extraUterary aims. What better place to start dismantling the conventions associated with literary history than that selfsame epoch whose special characteristics made it a paradigm for the disripline's first praaitioners? One can only agree that such an ambitious undertaking would require a coUective effort, and to that end Spadaccini and Godzich have assembled an outstanding group of contributors. The main problem that arises as we read the remarkably soüd series of essays they have written is that only occasionally do they tackle head-on the issues deUneated in the introduaion. It is only on page 41, the first of Godzich's and Spadaccini's own contribution, that we find out why: the essays were not actually commissioned as part of the projea desaibed at the Reviews 233 beginning, but instead were presentations at a conference entitled "Popular Literature in Spain, 1500-1700." Why this is not explained earUer is a mystery, unless the idea was...