William P . Childers | Graduate Center and Brooklyn College of the City University of New York (original) (raw)

Papers by William P . Childers

Research paper thumbnail of Destierro del teatro, invención de la novela : la ambientación de la revancha cervantina en territorios de órdenes militares

Research paper thumbnail of Not These Bones: Apocalyptic Satire in Baroque Spain and the Cold War United States

HIOL: Hispanic Issues On Line, 2019

1 online resource (PDF, page 125-164)Part 2. Ghosts in the apocalyptic machine. Article

Research paper thumbnail of Communal Norms and Individuated Desire in Persiles

Research paper thumbnail of 5. Remembering the Future: Cervantes and the New Moroccan Immigration to Spain

University of Toronto Press eBooks, Jan 31, 2014

Research paper thumbnail of Entre el Quijote y la Mancha: Hacia un Persiles del siglo XXI

Research paper thumbnail of “Granada”

Research paper thumbnail of TREVOR J. DADSON, Tolerance and Coexistence in Early Modern Spain: Old Christians and Moriscos in the Campo de Calatrava. Woodbridge: Tamesis. 2014. x + 279 pp

Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 2018

Research paper thumbnail of The Literature of Jealousy in the Age of Cervantes by Steven Wagschal (review)

Calíope: Journal of the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry, 2009

the editor has modernized spelling and punctuation, capitalization, accents, contractions, and ha... more the editor has modernized spelling and punctuation, capitalization, accents, contractions, and has fleshed out abbreviations. At the end of the introduction is a useful bibliography of primary sources of critics or historians of theatre dealing with references to Lope and/or Arte nuevo, secondary works on Lope and his times, as well as studies on the Arte nuevo, capped by a bibliography of editions (111-127). As is often the case, over time some of the links to online editions are no longer functional, but this is a small quibble with an excellent and useful study and edition.

Research paper thumbnail of 6. Chicanoizing Don Quixote

University of Toronto Press eBooks, Jan 31, 2014

Research paper thumbnail of 3. Pilgrimage and Social Change in Persiles y Sigismunda

Research paper thumbnail of Exotic nation: Maurophilia and the costruction of Early Modern Spain". Reseña del libro

Calíope: journal of the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Society, 2010

Research paper thumbnail of Chapter Twelve. Manzanares, 1600: Moriscos From Granada Organize A Festival Of Moors And Christians

BRILL eBooks, 2009

Unlike Moors and Christians festivals, the zuiza does not commemorate the establishment and legit... more Unlike Moors and Christians festivals, the zuiza does not commemorate the establishment and legitimacy of Christian hegemony on the Peninsula, but simply takes advantage, in an improvised way, of the opportunity created by the presence of a group of newcomers associated in the popular imagination with a glorious and exotic past. But it takes advantage of their presence for the purpose of constructing something for the future, a gilded altarpiece that will remain in the church as a testimony to this new group's contribution to the common good, thus converting their cultural difference into an additional resource. This chapter sketches an interpretation of these contrasts between the zuiza in Manzanares and the later development of the Moors and Christians tradition. This interpretation allows us to begin to see in popular maurophilia the possibility of constructing a cultural identity that could have integrated the Moriscos, rather than excluding them. Keywords: Christian hegemony; Christians festivals; Manzanares; maurophilia; Moors; Moriscos; zuiza

Research paper thumbnail of Legal Discourse in

Research paper thumbnail of El discreto encanto de Cervantes y el crisol de la prudencia by Aurora Egido

Research paper thumbnail of Quixote Gumbo

Research paper thumbnail of Cervantes in Moriscolandia

Cervantes, 2012

Carroll B. Johnson. Transliterating a Culture: Cervantes and the Moriscos. Ed. Mark Groundland. N... more Carroll B. Johnson. Transliterating a Culture: Cervantes and the Moriscos. Ed. Mark Groundland. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2009. Trevor Dadson. Los moriscos de Villarrubia de los Ojos (siglos XV-XVIII): Historia de una minoria asimilada, expulsada y reintegrada. Madrid-Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2007. Manuel E Fernandez Chaves and Rafael M. Perez Garcia. En los margenes de la ciudad de Dios: Moriscos en Sevilla. Biblioteca de Estudios Moriscos 6. Valencia: Universitat de Valencia, 2009. Francisco Moreno Diaz. Los moriscos de la Mancha: Sociedad, economia y modos de vida de una minoria en la Castilla moderna. Madrid: CSIC, 2009. Mercedes Garcia Arenal and Fernando Rodriguez Mediano. Un Oriente espanol." Los moriscos y el Sacromonte en tiempos de Contrarreforma. Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2010. WHEN HE DIED SUDDENLY in March 2007, Carroll Johnson as in the midst, of an ambitious book project taking Cide Hametes virtual manuscript as the entryway for uncovering a web of Morisco references throughout Don Quixote and other Cervantine works. Prompted by Tom Lathrop, Mark Groundland has edited the notes, drafts, and previously published material that, according to a 2004 outline, were to form that book. Caught at different stages in the research/writing process, these materials create an effect akin to visiting on Old Master's studio exactly as he left it: here a large canvas lacking only final touches; there some curious sketches we cannot quite make out, next to a recently exhibited landscape just returned to the studio; scattered about, unfinished portraits and still lives await the one hand that could complete them. On some the paint is still wet; brushes and palette stand ready ... My goal in this review article is, first, to give a sense of the overall project whose current state is the result, not of its author's intention, but of his human frailty. I also wish to establish a dialogue between that project and several major publications in Morisco studies that Johnson did not have the opportunity to read; studies that have appeared precisely during the last five years and which, I will argue, represent a new direction in the field. It is hard to gauge how close he was to finishing this book, and thus how much the finished version would have reflected the new perspective opened by these studies. In any case, he bequeathed the recovery of a Hispano-Islamic subtext in Cervantes to us, his fellow cervantistas, so it is our task now, if we choose to continue it. I What would eventually become Transliterating a Culture began while Johnson was "working through" Carmen Bernis Madrazo's El traje y los tipos sociales en el QUIJOTE (2001), where, "toward the end, in the section devoted to the costume of the Moriscos," he come across "what is identified as a quezote" (Johnson 233). Following the term through various permutations, including quecote, quicote, and quixote ("That's right, quixote" 235), resulted in an article in this journal, "Dressing Don Quijote: Of Quixotes and Quixotes" (Cervantes 24.1 [2004]: 11-21), reprinted as chapter four of Transliterating a Culture (231-38). Johnson posits a double etymology deriving the name Quixote simultaneously from "the Christian, European, feudal-chivalric world" and "the Arab-Islamic cultural orbit, the Other in opposition to which the officially approved Spanish identity was to be constructed" (237). And he argues that this "dialectical opposition" within the protagonist's name should lead us to rethink, among other things, "the relationship among the authorial presences--the Christian first and second authors, and the 'historiador arabigo manchego'" (238). (1) The discovery of a double etymology for "quixote" did indeed lead Johnson to a sustained rethinking of Cide Hamete Benengeli, the main focus of Transliterating a Culture. He concerns himself less with meta-narrative puzzles than with the way Cervantes, through his fictional manuscript, "makes the relation between the Old Christian power structure and the unassimilable Morisco population a fundamental theme of the book we read" (239). …

Research paper thumbnail of Exotic Nation: Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain by Barbara Fuchs (review)

Calíope: Journal of the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry, 2010

Research paper thumbnail of Bienvenido, Mr. Inquisitor: On the Sociocultural Dynamics of Inquisitorial Visits

The title of this essay derives from Luis Garcia Berlanga’s satirical film iBienvenido, Mr Marsha... more The title of this essay derives from Luis Garcia Berlanga’s satirical film iBienvenido, Mr Marshall! (1953), in which the inhabitants of a Castilian town, having heard a rumor that George Marshall, of the Marshall Plan, is to pass through on his way to Portugal from France, fantasize about the advantages his aid will bring.1 Believing the US delegation will expect all Spaniards to behave like the romantic gypsies of Andalusia, they prepare for his anticipated arrival by redecorating the town and dressing up in costumes, transforming even their speech and behavior to resemble the B-movies starring Lola Flores. Berlanga’s subtle film is simultaneously a parody of that gypsy/flamenco genre of Franco-era cinema, a denunciation of socioeconomic conditions in rural Spain, a critique of US foreign policy, and a multilayered analysis of the ways the expectations of various agents converge in the representations that shape their perceptions of themselves and reality. These processes become visible through the anticipated presence of an authority figure, whose power enthralls the local population, leading them to perform their identities in a way they never would otherwise. In the sixteenth century, the arrival of the inquisitor on his visit to the towns of his jurisdiction produced a similar effect, which is to say, a vivid dramatization of the disequilibrium in power relations constitutive of intercultural phenomena.

Research paper thumbnail of <i>Cervantes' Epic Novel: Empire, Religion, and the Dream Life of Heroes in</i> Persiles (review)

Modern Language Notes, 2011

Research paper thumbnail of <i>Discourses of Empire: Counter-Epic Literature in Early Modern Spain</i> (review)

Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, 2004

This groundbreaking study establishes "counter-epic" as a category that mediates betwee... more This groundbreaking study establishes "counter-epic" as a category that mediates between literary genres by placing them in contact with historical reality. As Simerka explains, the mock-heroic poetry, comedies with indiano characters, and history plays on military subjects that she brings together here have in common their engagement with the political and social consequences for Spain of rhe Hapsburg empire. She brings historians' accounts to bear on a rich array of under-studied texts by both major and minor authors (Lope, Tirso, Cervantes, Quevedo, Rojas Zorilla, and González de Busros), producing a series of readings rhat amply demonstrate her main thesis, that seventeenth-century writers inscribed their responses to Spanish imperialism into their texts in innovative ways, even where overt content does not address rhose circumstances directly. The book culminates with an insightful examination of mock-epic aspects of Don Quixote, confirming that this approach sheds new light on the complex interaction berween literature and the historical circumstances under which it is produced. In methodological terms, however, Simerka promises more than she delivers. Pursuing a "materialist poetics of genre," she claims to emulate Leonard Tennenhouse's juxtapositions of Shakespeare's plays and non-literary texts (9). Yet in practice, she relies exclusively on the reconstructions of a few modern histo-

Research paper thumbnail of Destierro del teatro, invención de la novela : la ambientación de la revancha cervantina en territorios de órdenes militares

Research paper thumbnail of Not These Bones: Apocalyptic Satire in Baroque Spain and the Cold War United States

HIOL: Hispanic Issues On Line, 2019

1 online resource (PDF, page 125-164)Part 2. Ghosts in the apocalyptic machine. Article

Research paper thumbnail of Communal Norms and Individuated Desire in Persiles

Research paper thumbnail of 5. Remembering the Future: Cervantes and the New Moroccan Immigration to Spain

University of Toronto Press eBooks, Jan 31, 2014

Research paper thumbnail of Entre el Quijote y la Mancha: Hacia un Persiles del siglo XXI

Research paper thumbnail of “Granada”

Research paper thumbnail of TREVOR J. DADSON, Tolerance and Coexistence in Early Modern Spain: Old Christians and Moriscos in the Campo de Calatrava. Woodbridge: Tamesis. 2014. x + 279 pp

Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 2018

Research paper thumbnail of The Literature of Jealousy in the Age of Cervantes by Steven Wagschal (review)

Calíope: Journal of the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry, 2009

the editor has modernized spelling and punctuation, capitalization, accents, contractions, and ha... more the editor has modernized spelling and punctuation, capitalization, accents, contractions, and has fleshed out abbreviations. At the end of the introduction is a useful bibliography of primary sources of critics or historians of theatre dealing with references to Lope and/or Arte nuevo, secondary works on Lope and his times, as well as studies on the Arte nuevo, capped by a bibliography of editions (111-127). As is often the case, over time some of the links to online editions are no longer functional, but this is a small quibble with an excellent and useful study and edition.

Research paper thumbnail of 6. Chicanoizing Don Quixote

University of Toronto Press eBooks, Jan 31, 2014

Research paper thumbnail of 3. Pilgrimage and Social Change in Persiles y Sigismunda

Research paper thumbnail of Exotic nation: Maurophilia and the costruction of Early Modern Spain". Reseña del libro

Calíope: journal of the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Society, 2010

Research paper thumbnail of Chapter Twelve. Manzanares, 1600: Moriscos From Granada Organize A Festival Of Moors And Christians

BRILL eBooks, 2009

Unlike Moors and Christians festivals, the zuiza does not commemorate the establishment and legit... more Unlike Moors and Christians festivals, the zuiza does not commemorate the establishment and legitimacy of Christian hegemony on the Peninsula, but simply takes advantage, in an improvised way, of the opportunity created by the presence of a group of newcomers associated in the popular imagination with a glorious and exotic past. But it takes advantage of their presence for the purpose of constructing something for the future, a gilded altarpiece that will remain in the church as a testimony to this new group's contribution to the common good, thus converting their cultural difference into an additional resource. This chapter sketches an interpretation of these contrasts between the zuiza in Manzanares and the later development of the Moors and Christians tradition. This interpretation allows us to begin to see in popular maurophilia the possibility of constructing a cultural identity that could have integrated the Moriscos, rather than excluding them. Keywords: Christian hegemony; Christians festivals; Manzanares; maurophilia; Moors; Moriscos; zuiza

Research paper thumbnail of Legal Discourse in

Research paper thumbnail of El discreto encanto de Cervantes y el crisol de la prudencia by Aurora Egido

Research paper thumbnail of Quixote Gumbo

Research paper thumbnail of Cervantes in Moriscolandia

Cervantes, 2012

Carroll B. Johnson. Transliterating a Culture: Cervantes and the Moriscos. Ed. Mark Groundland. N... more Carroll B. Johnson. Transliterating a Culture: Cervantes and the Moriscos. Ed. Mark Groundland. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2009. Trevor Dadson. Los moriscos de Villarrubia de los Ojos (siglos XV-XVIII): Historia de una minoria asimilada, expulsada y reintegrada. Madrid-Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2007. Manuel E Fernandez Chaves and Rafael M. Perez Garcia. En los margenes de la ciudad de Dios: Moriscos en Sevilla. Biblioteca de Estudios Moriscos 6. Valencia: Universitat de Valencia, 2009. Francisco Moreno Diaz. Los moriscos de la Mancha: Sociedad, economia y modos de vida de una minoria en la Castilla moderna. Madrid: CSIC, 2009. Mercedes Garcia Arenal and Fernando Rodriguez Mediano. Un Oriente espanol." Los moriscos y el Sacromonte en tiempos de Contrarreforma. Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2010. WHEN HE DIED SUDDENLY in March 2007, Carroll Johnson as in the midst, of an ambitious book project taking Cide Hametes virtual manuscript as the entryway for uncovering a web of Morisco references throughout Don Quixote and other Cervantine works. Prompted by Tom Lathrop, Mark Groundland has edited the notes, drafts, and previously published material that, according to a 2004 outline, were to form that book. Caught at different stages in the research/writing process, these materials create an effect akin to visiting on Old Master's studio exactly as he left it: here a large canvas lacking only final touches; there some curious sketches we cannot quite make out, next to a recently exhibited landscape just returned to the studio; scattered about, unfinished portraits and still lives await the one hand that could complete them. On some the paint is still wet; brushes and palette stand ready ... My goal in this review article is, first, to give a sense of the overall project whose current state is the result, not of its author's intention, but of his human frailty. I also wish to establish a dialogue between that project and several major publications in Morisco studies that Johnson did not have the opportunity to read; studies that have appeared precisely during the last five years and which, I will argue, represent a new direction in the field. It is hard to gauge how close he was to finishing this book, and thus how much the finished version would have reflected the new perspective opened by these studies. In any case, he bequeathed the recovery of a Hispano-Islamic subtext in Cervantes to us, his fellow cervantistas, so it is our task now, if we choose to continue it. I What would eventually become Transliterating a Culture began while Johnson was "working through" Carmen Bernis Madrazo's El traje y los tipos sociales en el QUIJOTE (2001), where, "toward the end, in the section devoted to the costume of the Moriscos," he come across "what is identified as a quezote" (Johnson 233). Following the term through various permutations, including quecote, quicote, and quixote ("That's right, quixote" 235), resulted in an article in this journal, "Dressing Don Quijote: Of Quixotes and Quixotes" (Cervantes 24.1 [2004]: 11-21), reprinted as chapter four of Transliterating a Culture (231-38). Johnson posits a double etymology deriving the name Quixote simultaneously from "the Christian, European, feudal-chivalric world" and "the Arab-Islamic cultural orbit, the Other in opposition to which the officially approved Spanish identity was to be constructed" (237). And he argues that this "dialectical opposition" within the protagonist's name should lead us to rethink, among other things, "the relationship among the authorial presences--the Christian first and second authors, and the 'historiador arabigo manchego'" (238). (1) The discovery of a double etymology for "quixote" did indeed lead Johnson to a sustained rethinking of Cide Hamete Benengeli, the main focus of Transliterating a Culture. He concerns himself less with meta-narrative puzzles than with the way Cervantes, through his fictional manuscript, "makes the relation between the Old Christian power structure and the unassimilable Morisco population a fundamental theme of the book we read" (239). …

Research paper thumbnail of Exotic Nation: Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain by Barbara Fuchs (review)

Calíope: Journal of the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry, 2010

Research paper thumbnail of Bienvenido, Mr. Inquisitor: On the Sociocultural Dynamics of Inquisitorial Visits

The title of this essay derives from Luis Garcia Berlanga’s satirical film iBienvenido, Mr Marsha... more The title of this essay derives from Luis Garcia Berlanga’s satirical film iBienvenido, Mr Marshall! (1953), in which the inhabitants of a Castilian town, having heard a rumor that George Marshall, of the Marshall Plan, is to pass through on his way to Portugal from France, fantasize about the advantages his aid will bring.1 Believing the US delegation will expect all Spaniards to behave like the romantic gypsies of Andalusia, they prepare for his anticipated arrival by redecorating the town and dressing up in costumes, transforming even their speech and behavior to resemble the B-movies starring Lola Flores. Berlanga’s subtle film is simultaneously a parody of that gypsy/flamenco genre of Franco-era cinema, a denunciation of socioeconomic conditions in rural Spain, a critique of US foreign policy, and a multilayered analysis of the ways the expectations of various agents converge in the representations that shape their perceptions of themselves and reality. These processes become visible through the anticipated presence of an authority figure, whose power enthralls the local population, leading them to perform their identities in a way they never would otherwise. In the sixteenth century, the arrival of the inquisitor on his visit to the towns of his jurisdiction produced a similar effect, which is to say, a vivid dramatization of the disequilibrium in power relations constitutive of intercultural phenomena.

Research paper thumbnail of <i>Cervantes' Epic Novel: Empire, Religion, and the Dream Life of Heroes in</i> Persiles (review)

Modern Language Notes, 2011

Research paper thumbnail of <i>Discourses of Empire: Counter-Epic Literature in Early Modern Spain</i> (review)

Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, 2004

This groundbreaking study establishes "counter-epic" as a category that mediates betwee... more This groundbreaking study establishes "counter-epic" as a category that mediates between literary genres by placing them in contact with historical reality. As Simerka explains, the mock-heroic poetry, comedies with indiano characters, and history plays on military subjects that she brings together here have in common their engagement with the political and social consequences for Spain of rhe Hapsburg empire. She brings historians' accounts to bear on a rich array of under-studied texts by both major and minor authors (Lope, Tirso, Cervantes, Quevedo, Rojas Zorilla, and González de Busros), producing a series of readings rhat amply demonstrate her main thesis, that seventeenth-century writers inscribed their responses to Spanish imperialism into their texts in innovative ways, even where overt content does not address rhose circumstances directly. The book culminates with an insightful examination of mock-epic aspects of Don Quixote, confirming that this approach sheds new light on the complex interaction berween literature and the historical circumstances under which it is produced. In methodological terms, however, Simerka promises more than she delivers. Pursuing a "materialist poetics of genre," she claims to emulate Leonard Tennenhouse's juxtapositions of Shakespeare's plays and non-literary texts (9). Yet in practice, she relies exclusively on the reconstructions of a few modern histo-