| In Calderón
y las quimeras de la Culpa, Viviana Díaz Balsera
examines the autos sacramentales of Calderón
in the light of modern theories of allegory. She focuses on
the seductive power of the dramatic, visible level of the
allegorical auto and questions the widely held assumption
that Calderón’s autos harmonize the
dramatic and religious discourses that constitute them. In
her readings of Los encantos de la Culpa, El jardín
de Falerina, La nave del Mercader, La vida es sueño,
and Lo que va del Hombre a Dios, she instead finds
a disjunction between the literal, poetic level and the religious,
theological meaning.
Seduction implies a displacement of truth by the surface
pleasures of the image. With its splendid scenes, poetic fables,
and elaborate music, the auto ironically has the
potential to reproduce the seductive function it frequently
attributes to the character of the Devil or other forces of
evil, that of deferring truth by fostering desire for the
dazzling and the sensuous. Rather than the dogmatic champion
of the Catholic Church, the auto that emerges in
this book is conflictive, ambivalent, yet profoundly moving,
participating in the very dangers of sensual pleasure it so
earnestly seeks to warn against.
Basando su examinación en teorías modernas
de alegoría, Viviana Díaz Balsera se enfoca
en la energía seductiva del nivel dramático
y visible de los autos, y pone en cuestión la idea
que los autos de Calderón establecen una armonía
entre los discursos dramáticos y religiosos que los
constituyen. En español.
"...a well-argued and provocative book which challenges
traditional scholarship that has kept the auto
a preserve of specialists and that has failed to attract
a wider readership for this genre.... it is a most welcome
addition and deserves the attention of everyone involved
in comedia studies.... well-researched, well-documented,
insightful, and offers a reading of the auto that
promises to bring this often overlooked genre more fully
into literature, where it belongs." —Teresa S. Soufas,
Revista de Estudios Hispánicos
For full review see Revista de Estudios Hispánicos
32.3 (Oct. 98): 629-30.
"The study benefits from the application of recent
theoretical models, which allow the critic to keep the
interplay of drama and theology as the center of her focus
while acknowledging the instability of that center."
—Edward H. Friedman, Indiana University
Viviana Díaz Balsera, University of Miami, has
written on the drama and prose of sxteenth- and seventeenth-century
Spain and Colonial Latin America.
1-55753-098-X In Spanish.
1997. PSRL 13. viii, 237 pp. Cloth $29.95 PRICE REDUCED
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