The personal memoir in the Catalan lands (16th-19th centuries) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Writing of the self. Iberian diary writing
Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages, 2016
Iberian autobiography When inquiring about autobiographical writing in the Iberian Peninsula one cannot but take into account the infamous words by a major Spanish philosopher, who expressed total distrust in the ability of his fellow countrymen to practice this kind of writing. José Ortega y Gasset argued that "memoirs are a symptom of complacency in life […]. The scarcity of Memoirs [in Spain] ought not to surprise us if we realize that the Spaniard considers life to be a universal toothache!" Commenting on this assertion, James Fernández stated "this is curious and specious reasoning, no doubt, which mysteriously attributes silence to the victim of a toothache" (qtd in J. D. Fernández 1992, 2). Ortega's justification does not hold water when confronted with reality. A closer look at what has been published in the last thirty years, since the disappearance of the dictatorships in Portugal and Spain, reveals a sudden increase in publication of autobiographical texts. Among them, diaries account for more and more of the activity of senior and young writers alike. The advent of the internet and the development of blogs have sparked a new boom in autobiography. During the years of political oppression there was no refusal to write autobiography, but rather an impossibility of doing so. Censorship and other obvious editorial difficulties led to a severe restriction of texts, such as autobiographies, since they might reflect too closely the reality experienced by the Portuguese and Spaniards alike, and were thus perceived as contrary to the political interests of Salazar's or Franco's regime. This is, unfortunately, the condition of literatures that have to develop under harsh dictatorship conditions. As Silvia Molloy once pointed out, the lack of autobiography in Spanish-speaking countries should be related to an attitude of self-protection adopted by most writers. In a politically unstable climate, most writers do not dare to write the "truth" about themselves, but instead prefer to write autobiographical books under the umbrella of history or fiction (Molloy 1991, 2). Anna Caballé also underscored the fact that in Spanish literature authors have been negating for decades the existence of autobiography in their own country. This attitude founded such unfortunate assertions as that by Ortega y Gasset about the inherent "psychological" impossibility of Spanish authors writing any autobiography at all. This has created a historically absurd negation of the existence of this genre, a negation that appears even more incongruous when one takes into consideration the abundance of such texts in Spanish literature (Caballé 1995, 42-43). In the Iberian Peninsula, because of decades of living under extremely repressive political regimes, autobiographical writing has had a difficult existence. Nevertheless, there have been significant examples of this kind of writing (see Bou 1993, Caballé 1995, Gabilondo 2006a, Rocha 1992). Ángel Loureiro, in his book on Spanish autobiography, has stated that "a considerable number of autobiographical works have been published in Spain in the last two centuries, yet only a small number of them veer from a safe memoristic pattern" (2000, xiv). At the end of the book,
Popular Autobiography in Early Modern Europe: many questions, a few answers
Memoria Y Civilizacion Anuario De Historia, 2002
This article deals with diverse aspects of what may be called a "second autobiographical revolution" -the rise of autobiography to the status of most favored source among historians. This new situation of privilege is due in large measure to the tendency to attribute to these sources the all too little discussed condition of "witness". Following some remarks on the work of Marc Bloch, a historian who devoted distinctive attention to the question of witness, it examines the specific case of artisans who wrote autobiographical texts during the early modern era. To that end it summarizes several strategies for the study of these documents, particularly those contextual approaches aimed at reconstructing the wide range of motivations of artisan autobiographers.
Historicizing Life-Writing and Egodocuments in Early Modern Europe
Ceride: Journal of Ego-Document Studies, 2023
A book review of Historicizing Life-Writing and Egodocuments in Early Modern Europe, edited by James R. Farr of Purdue University and Guido Ruggiero of Miami University. The book aims to historicize two anthropocentric genres, "Life-Writing" and "Ego-Documents," in the context of Early Modern Europe. It is a promising work for those who are interested in Early Modern European history and ego-documents.
Si no fuere tu hija ilustre': Women Writers' Social Status in Early Modern Spain
Cuadernos de Historia Moderna, 2019
The numbers of women writers of the early modern Spain currently identified have risen to over five hundred, with their writings catalogued and systematized by the Spanish data base Biblioteca de Escritoras Españolas (BIESES). The data base's findings demonstrate the kinds of genres women writers selected, and includes archival documents, correspondence, and other kinds of documentation that reveal much more biographical information than previously obtained. What has yet to be studied more in depth, however, is the social status of the writers, as social origins were a crucial means of identifying one's self, both from a psychological perspective as well as within society. This article examines the social stratification of writers to weigh their contributions, and arrives at the conclusion that while non-noble women tended to dedicate their time to writing literary works, whether poems, theater, or prose fiction; the few women of the titled nobility who wrote instead authore...
Arms and Letters: Military Life Writing in Early Modern Spain
University of Toronto Press, 2020
Arms and Letters analyzes the unprecedented number of autobiographical accounts written by Spanish soldiers during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These first-person, retrospective works recount a range of experiences throughout the sprawling domain of the Hispanic Monarchy, from the disease and disorder of the Spanish Road from Italy to the Low Countries, to the terrors of traversing the contested waterways of the Mediterranean, Atlantic, and Pacific. Reading representative autobiographies in contemporary historical context, including the coalescing of the first modern armies, which were partially populated by forced recruits and the urban poor, against a backdrop of economic crisis, imperial decline, and controversies surrounding the conduct of war, the book shows how soldiers exploited a capacious concept of honor and contributed to the development of the nascent autobiographical form. Honor, as a means of mediating the growing divide between the public and private realms, was inevitably gendered, relational, intersubjective, and performative, and as such, it functioned as one of the overarching metrics of value that early modern men and women applied to themselves and others. In charting how non-elite subjects rendered their lives legible through an eclectic appropriation of bureaucratic and literary genres, the book contributes both to a critical genealogy of honor and the history of life writing.
2019
Las escritoras son una especie extraña, difícil de visibilizar. Omitidas de las posiciones centrales del canon, desplazadas hasta sus márgenes o sencillamente borradas, su recuperación para la historia pasa primero por la obtención de datos. Sin embargo, en su aparente excepcionalidad y aislamiento, poco significan si no podemos articularlos como parte de un panorama cultural que les dé coherencia. Si cuando disponemos de información abundante, los géneros, estilos, temas, ediciones, mecenazgos son algunos de los elementos tradicionales en la historia literaria que nos permiten crear sentido, cuando estamos ante una escasez mezquina, es necesario aceptar que después de la exhumación trabajosa, la proximidad cronológica y geográfica, el ambiente o los usos de la época forman parte imprescindible de su interpretación. Como en la arqueología, son los vestigios los que sirven para dibujar el mapa de lo que pudo ser, trazando líneas sutiles que alguna vez los unieron.