USA Cervantes: 39 cervantistas en Estados Unidos ed. by Georgina Dopico Black and Francisco Layna Ranz (review)

Volume 33.1 (2013) 223 Reviews Reviews Georgina Dopico Black and Francisco Layna Ranz, eds. USA Cervantes: 39 cervantistas en Estados Unidos. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas / Ediciones Polifemo, 2009. 1220 pp. ISBN: 987-84-96813-22-9. In sheer size and scope, this volume represents an undertaking of immense proportions, equaled perhaps only by the symbolic significance of its ambition to strengthen the transatlantic ties which, despite a history of often divergent critical approaches and methodologies, unite Peninsular and North American literary scholars through the works of Cervantes. While the ultimate effectiveness of such a formidable yet worthy goal is necessarily difficult to measure, USA Cervantes: 39 cervantistas en Estados Unidos undoubtedly succeeds in its principal objective of highlighting the valuable contributions of American scholarship to the study of Cervantes. By providing an autobiographical entry, bibliography, and original article for each of the thirty-nine scholars featured in the volume, Georgina Dopico Black and Francisco Layna Ranz clearly demonstrate the continuing originality, vibrancy, and diversity of Cervantes scholarship in the United States. USA Cervantes begins with a preliminary introduction in which Dopico Black and Layna Ranz concisely summarize the historical trajectory of North American cervantismo, placing particular emphasis on the broader debate between the philological and theoretical traditions that distinguished literary scholarship in Spain and the US, respectively, for a large part of the last century. As they observe, however, recent trends on both sides of the Atlantic suggest that this division has diminished considerably: “En España la tradición filológica sufre un severo menoscabo, y en Estados Unidos las nuevas generaciones viven un desconcertante regreso a los archivos, al legajo y al documento exclusivo” (11). These new points of convergence likewise offer the opportunity—and for the editors, indeed, the obligation—to revalue the critical contributions of the former ‘enemy’: “Despreciar la labor del enemigo era parte de nuestra estrategia, obligación del crítico de pro. Pero la rencilla parece perder tono a cada día que pasa, y la reconciliación es un asunto de agenda y compromiso académico” (12). A similarly conciliatory tone spans much of the rest of the volume, beginning with the two prologues—written by Enrique García Santo-Tomás and Alison Weber—that follow the editors’ introduction. García Santo-Tomás 224 Cervantes Reviews further contextualizes the history of Cervantes studies in the US by sketching a brief yet enlightened critical genealogy that begins with the contributions of Américo Castro and continues through the most recent efforts to explore, disseminate, and digitally archive the Cervantine oeuvre. His prologue concludes on a prescriptive note by advocating for a continued engagement with Cervantes in the American academy, but one which follows a more selective criterion of “menos y mejor” instead of the “criterio de abundancia” that, for García Santo-Tomás, has tended to dominate the last several years (55). Weber, on the other hand, details the well-known debate among Cervantes scholars regarding the Romantic or “soft” versus the historical or “hard” approaches to Don Quijote, which have further colored the traditional allegiances to Peninsular and American interpretive paradigms. Citing liberalism, postmodernism , and pragmatism as the three most salient influences on the American academy, Weber’s prologue ends with a call to forge a new kind of Cervantine scholarship, one that subsumes the divisions of the past under a new critical rubric that is “a la vez acomodaticia e históricamente válida” (85). The remainder of USA Cervantes is dedicated to individual scholarly contributions that, to one extent or another, evidence the vitality and heterogeneity of cervantismo in the US today. In fact, it is this very diversity of critical approaches that, while lauded in the opening pages of the book, nevertheless confounds a lucid criterion for organizing a collection of this magnitude. Be that as it may, the editors’ introduction offers an avowedly provisional attempt (“USA Cervantes excede—en el mejor sentido—la posibilidad de nítida categorización” [15]) at demarcating the various contributions according to a common theme or approach, including: comparative studies; genre or formal aspects; gender studies; transnational and border studies; political approaches; methods of close reading...