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  • 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...

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