Teaching Golden Age Poetry: Modeling Intertextuality Through Hypertext

TEACHING GOLDEN AGE POETRY: MODELING INTERTEXTUALITY THROUGH HYPERTEXT Ignacio Navarrete University of California-Berkeley I. The Evolving Syllabus I have been teaching graduate and undergraduate surveys of Golden Age poetry since 1988; reviewing my syllabi, I can see that my approach has changed considerably. When I began teaching I was a new Ph.D. and a new assistant professor, concerned primarily that my course provide historical coverage, that it reflect what was then current in literary theory, and that it serve me as a vehicle for working out the ideas that eventually came together in my first book, Orphans of Petrarch. Later, I changed my approach, and began concentrating on just a few poets that were explored in greater depth, while at the same time expanding the chronological range to show how the themes and techniques used by Golden Age poets continued to provide a source of inspiration into the 19th and 20th centuries. More recently, reflecting the evolution of my own scholarship and also concerned about the possibility of hypercanonization, I have again begun to include shorter segments on a greater variety of poets, and to consider how the techniques contribute, rhetorically and phenomenologically, to the construction of lyric subjectivity. With undergraduates, in a course entitled “Spanish Love Poetry,” I currently stress intertextuality and close reading of poetic techniques; graduate students need this too, but also a sense of research opportunities and of current debates in the field. Reviewing the class plan from 1988, I found that my very first course on Golden Age lyric began with with an explication of an Herrera sonnet, “Roxo sol, que con hacha luminosa / coloras el purpúreo i alto cielo” (367; Algunas obras # 10), which I used as an excuse for a rather long statement on poetic theory and polyvalency, drawing greatly on Culler and Riffaterre. This was followed by Juan del Encina’s “Arte de poesía castellana,” and the importance of quantitative features CALÍOPE Vol. 11, Number 2 (2005): pages 91-109 92 Ignacio Navarrete D D D D D (“números”) as the distinctive characteristic of the poet; I then moved on to selections from his bucolic and troubadour poetry. This served as a foil to the innovations of Boscán, represented by the preface “A la duquesa de Soma” and by selections from the Castiglione translation, as well as poems from the beginning and the end of book 2, his collection of sonnets and canciones. Together, these poets took up the first two weeks of the course, and they were followed by three weeks in which we studied every poem of Garcilaso’s. The continuing influence of the old forms was represented by two weeks on Castillejo and San Juan de la Cruz, and then another two weeks on the triumph of the Italo-classical Renaissance as represented by Fray Luis de Leon. Herrera’s commentary on Garcilaso and a selection of his poems took another two weeks, and then at the end of the semester there was a very sketchy overview of Góngora (including excerpts from both the Soledades and the Polifemo), and Quevedo, no doubt reflecting that I had not yet decided to extend Orphans into the Baroque era. Students wrote two explication-de-texte-type essays, and a longer paper that was supposed to incorporate secondary criticism. My first graduate survey, a year later, followed the same lines, although the Herrera-based instroduction was dropped in favor of a longer, purely theoretical prologue that added references to formalism, Dámaso Alonso, Curtius, and Harold Bloom. In the course of the semester I also incorporated some additional poets (Acuña sonnets, “La epístola moral a Fabio”), while also sharpening the focus on Garcilaso, San Juan, Herrera, and Góngora; and there was a critical article to be read for each class meeting. Over the next few years, the courses changed slightly: Encina’s prominence was reduced, as Rico’s “De Garcilaso y otros petrarquismos” became the starting-point for the course, as a way of focusing on Petrarchism as a unifying theme while also articulating the nature of Garcilaso’s innovations; students were required to read large chunks of Petrarch, as well as...