Poiesis and Modernity in the Old and New Worlds ed. by Anthony J. Cascardi and Leah Middlebrook (review)

197 Reviews Anthony J. Cascardi and Leah Middlebrook, eds. Poiesis and Modernity in the Old and NewWorlds. Hispanic Issues 39. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2012. xv + 314 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8265-1835-4. This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Wlad Godzich and Nicholas Spadaccini’s The Institutionalization of Literature in Spain, the first publication in a new series with the somewhat open-ended title of Hispanic Issues. Since then, several hundred scholars have contributed essays to the series, whose broad scope has encompassed critical analyses of texts and time periods ranging from medieval Spain, to colonial Latin America, to the twenty-first century Internet. In fact, the title of Anthony Cascardi and Leah Middlebrook’s new contribution to the series, Poiesis and Modernity in the Old and New Worlds, serves as an elegant and appropriate reminder of the scholarly breadth and depth of the books that have preceded it. Cascardi and Middlebrook’s new book is the39th entry in the series, and (as its title suggests) it carries on the Hispanic Issues tradition of wide-ranging , diverse considerations of intriguing problems and questions faced by researchers in the area of Spanish and Latin American cultural and literary studies. Here, the editors have gathered together a collection of essays that examines the Platonic concept of “poiesis” (broadly defined as meaning something akin to creating, doing, or making) as used by writers and thinkers of early modern Spain and Latin America. The book consists of an introduction by Cascardi and Middlebrook, thirteen critical essays, and a short afterword by Bradley Nelson which successfully ties the book’s essays together into a coherent whole. For the purposes of this review, I would like to highlight the chapters that will be of most interest to cervantistas. These are: chapter 1 (“Poiesis and Modernity at the Turn of the Spanish Sixteenth Century: Luis Alfonso de Carvallo and the Cisne de Apolo (1602)” by Leah Middlebrook); chapter 2 (“‘Orphic Fictions’: Poesía and Poiesis in Cervantes” by Anthony Cascardi); and chapter 4 (“Encyclopedia, Poiesis, and Modernity” by Marina Brownlee). 198 Cervantes Reviews Middlebrook’s opening essay on the Cisne de Apolo engages with several of the overarching themes of the collection. First, the editors propose the reconsideration of—and challenge to—the Hegelian notion of the “prosification of the world” in the modern era. Second, as the editors point out in their introduction, “formulations of the foundations of modernity and discussions of the ‘legitimacy’ of the modern age can appear stubbornly deaf to the centrality of Spain within early modern Europe” (x). Finally, emerging organically from these discussions comes a consideration of what Middlebrook deems the sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century “breakdown in traditional ways of conceiving of relationships between people, language, and the cosmos ” (4). Middlebrook underscores the hybrid nature of Carvallo’s “defense of poetry,” noting that it consists of a prose colloquy interspersed with short, memorizable poems aimed at summarizing the main points of his argument. Middlebrook suggests that the Cisne de Apolo, with its emphasis on the insecurity of poetry’s role in early modern Spain, “might be considered the obverse of Don Quijote” (5). She also draws other parallels between Carvallo’s text and those of Cervantes. Near the conclusion of her essay, for instance, she notes the contradictory nature of Carvallo’s goals in the Cisne: Carvallo seeks (quixotically?) to restore poetry to the position of social prestige it had in ancient times, an enterprise which runs the risk of limiting his ability to participate in the “prosaic” political and cultural arena of the early seventeenth century. Perhaps, she concludes, “the best figure for the Poet might be Cervantes’s licenciado vidriera, the glass graduate, the fragile figure of the manic accumulation of knowledges, permanently alienated from an essential human core” (15). Cascardi’s essay is the only one in the book to be primarily centered on Cervantine texts and themes. He begins his discussion of the theme of poes ía and poiesis in Cervantes by noting the previously-mentioned Hegelian concept of “prosification” of/in the modern age. It would be tempting, given the iconic status of Cervantes’s prose works, to classify him as a “demystifier...