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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Spanish literature in the Golden Age was a primary literature that produced an impressive number of new literary forms that were admired, copied, and naturalized throughout the rest of Europe. Rojas' La Celestina, Torres Naharro's Comedia Serafina, the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes, Tirso de Molina's El condenado por desconfiado, and Don Quixote provide examples of the “imaginative authority” of the older literature of Spain. This power of a piece of writing to assume a life of its own, its power to lead the audience wherever it pleases, is best understood in a religious context, since the authors of the works themselves wrote in a religious context. The end of literary study is not theological or moral instruction but elucidation of the intrinsic meanings of the work. Nevertheless, the proper model for the relation of the elucidator to the work is not that of the scientist to physical objects, but that of one man to another in charity. If the critic approaches the poem with this kind of reverence for its integrity, it will respond to questioning and take its part in the dialogue between reader and work which is the life of literary study.
* The Presidential address delivered at the 83rd annual meeting of the MLA, in New York, 28 December 1968.
1 Gilbert Highet, The Anatomy of Satire (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1962).
2 Gustave Reynier, Le Roman réaliste au XVIIesiècle (Paris, 1914); reviewed by Ernest Martinenche in Revista de filología espariola, ii (1915), 82–86.
3 On Beginning from Within (New York and London, 1943).
4 “The Search for the Heroic Poem,” in Univ. of Pennsylvania Bicentennial Conference, Studies in Civilization (Philadelphia, 1941), pp. 89–103.
5 “Linguistic Perspectivism in the Don Quijote,” in Linguistics and Literary History: Essays in Stylistics (Princeton, 1948).
6 “La Celestina” como contienda literaria (Castas y casticismos) (Madrid, 1965).
7 “ Propalladia” and Other Works of Bartolomé de Torres Naharro, Vol. iv: Torres Naharro and the Drama of the Renaissance, by Joseph E. Gillet. Transcribed, edited, and completed by Otis H. Green (Philadelphia, 1961), pp. 484–485, et al.
8 La novela picaresca espanola, ed. with important introd. by Francisco Rico, Vol. i (Barcelona, 1967).
9 Alexander A. Parker, Literature and the Delinquent: A Study of the Picaresque Novel (Edinburgh, 1967).
10 Dámaso Alonso, De los siglos oscuros al de oro (Madrid, 1958).
11 Otis H. Green, Spain and the Western Tradition: The Castilian Mind in Literature from “El Cid” to Calderôn (Madison, Wis., 1963–66), ii, 271–276; iv, 51, 253.
12 Alonso Lopez Pinciano, Philosophía antigua poéti1ca, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1953), ii, 183–184.
13 Otis H. Green, “Realidad, voluntad y gracia en Cervantes,” Ibérida: Revisla de filología, iii (1961), 113–128; “A Hispanist's Thoughts on The Anatomy of Satire” (by Gilbert Highet) RPh, xvii (1963), 123–133; “El Licenciado Vidriera: Its Relation to the Viaje del Parnaso and the Examen de ingenias of Huarte,” Linguistic and Literary Studies in Honor of Helmut A. Hatzfeld (Washington, 1964), pp. 213–220.
14 Oxford, 1962.
15 Un gran inspirador de Cervantes: Juan Huarte (Madrid, 1905).
16 El doctor Huarte de San Juan y su “Examen de ingenios” (Madrid, 1939 and 1948).
17 Nora I. Kirchner, “Don Quijote de la Mancha: A Study in Classical Paranoia” (unpub. diss., Illinois State Univ., ca. 1966).
18 Don Quixote's Profession (New York, 1958).
19 James Thorpe, ed., The Relations of Literary Study: Essays on Interdisciplinary Contributions (New York, 1967), pp. 125–126.