My old friend and mentor Pío Baroja, who was not awarded the Nobel Prize, for the flame of fame does not always light up the right man's head, had a clock whose face displayed some wise words, a frightening maxim that referred to the passing of the hours: They all hurt, the last kills. Well, those hands that move only ahead have marked the tolling of many hours in my heart and soul, and today, with one foot in the considerable life I have left behind and the other in hope, I come before you to speak of words and, in good faith and perhaps with good luck, to discuss freedom and literature. I am not sure where the border checkpoint of old age is, but just in case I have already passed through, I will take refuge in something Francisco de Quevedo once said: we all want to live to a ripe old age, but we all deny we have gotten there. Since I am very well aware that we cannot ignore the evidence, and since I am also not unaware that the calendar is a relentless tool, I am ready to say all that I should without leaving anything up to inspiration or improvisation, two notions I despise.

Fernando de Herrera carefully crafts in his Anotaciones a version of literary history that redefines the position of Garcilaso de la Vega, who had been seen as the only national poet worthy of imitation and as an aristocrat who attained an exemplary combination of literary and military glory. Herrera directs the reader's intertextual location of Garcilaso's poetry for polemical purposes: the profusion of source citations stresses Garcilaso's imitations and undermines the perception that the poems are acts of sprezzatura. Herrera also inserts himself into the intertext through translations, quotations of his own poems, and the sheer quantity of annotations, which dwarfs the original texts. Furthermore, the overly learned citations have a countereffect, as the mass of contradictory information subverts the very notion of literary authority and thus of canonicity. Today the Anotaciones is read as promoting Garcilaso's canonization, but the responses of Herrera's earliest readers show they understood the work's subversive aims.

Historiography in Francoist Spain (1939-75) sought to affirm the morally and historically correct role of the regime within the flow of Spanish history. As an important vehicle of dissidence, the novel of memory stands in sharp contrast to Francoist history: it explores the past largely eschewed or appropriated by the regime and contests the so-called truths that Franco shaped through the discourse of myth. This essay examines the role of subjective memory as a challenge to historiography and discloses the narrative strategies novelists used to counter the government's myths. Unlike Francoist historiography, the novel of memory lays out history as a series of disruptions and undermines the referential illusion of truth and wholeness in our understanding of the past.

Mario Vargas Llosa's La tía Julia y el escribidor consists of the rigorous alternation of two textual registers that nonetheless appear to have little in common. A careful reading reveals that these seemingly unrelated tracts can be taken jointly as a fantasy depicting the triumph of oedipal desire and configuring a tale of the author's coming into being. This fantasy provides an insight into the ideology of writing that underlies Vargas Llosa's entire textual production. The phantasmatic empowerment of the writing subject thus identified is linked finally to Vargas Llosa's widely disseminated pronouncements regarding economic and political agency in Latin America and to his equally influential views on the nature of the literary act.

This paper seeks to elucidate the complex interaction of aesthetics, ethics, and politics in El jardín de al lado by using a heuristic and dialogic approach—that is, by counterpointing Donoso's novel and one of its implicit subtexts, Thomas Mann's “Death in Venice.” Focusing on the aesthetic contradiction between modernism and postmodernism brought on by the rise of the culture industry, El jardín de al lado dramatizes an artistic crisis that has ethical and political implications. The narrator's traditional discourse of value is subverted by the ethics and aesthetics of the marketplace, which create contradictions (bourgeois versus bohemian subjectivity, production of the text versus reception of it) similar to those Mann deals with in “Death in Venice.” Ultimately, El jardín de al lado is a response to political crisis from the standpoint of autonomous literature.

In the 1620s the disgraced Francis Bacon turned increasingly to France for an audience. Yet his 1625 volume of essays, which offers wry homage to Montaigne, seeks to undermine the authority of France and particularly of Montaigne. In the Novum Organum (1620) Bacon opposed the unlimited skepticism of “The Apology for Raymond Sebond” and rejected the Democritean tone of the rest of Montaigne's essays. In “Of Truth,” the first of the 1625 essays, he restates these views more forcefully, covertly depicting Montaigne as a “jesting Pilate.” In “Of Simulation and Dissimulation” he voices more vigorously his opposition to the unlimited openness of Montaigne, an opposition first expressed in the De Augmentis (1623). Furthermore, he ascribes the extremism of Montaigne to French society in general and, in “Of the True Greatnesse of Kingdomes and Estates,” acclaims England as a land paradoxically “great” in its “middle” people. Still the French remain, he believes, more likely to listen.

Recently, Jerome McGann has criticized The Ruined Cottage's fostering of “the grand illusion” of Romanticism, “the idea that poetry, or even consciousness, can set one free of the ruins of history and culture.” But to characterize Wordsworth's poem in this way is to overlook its direct engagement with one social field, the literary marketplace; as an experiment with genre the poem sharply confronts a public taste for sensational literature. This confrontation is also a form of collusion, for the technical innovations that distinguish Wordsworth's poetry of suffering from popular sensational literature deploy the tactics and create the effects of that literature. The Ruined Cottage at once entices and reproves the public taste. Intended to appeal to a public of feminized readers, it also creates the readers-to-be of high Romantic poetry—an audience whose pleasure it is to distance itself from the captivated feminine heart.

Histories of rhetoric have characterized Plato as an opponent of rhetoric and have seen Gorgias primarily as a negative critique of rhetorical abuses. Such an understanding ignores the dialogue's own rhetoric and slights Plato's insight into the problem of inescapable and inadvertent injury that confronts anyone who uses language. But it is such injury that makes rhetoric philosophically interesting. Socrates's claim that the value of rhetoric lies in its ability to allow us to attack our loved ones is not an ironic dismissal of rhetoric but part of his attempt to develop the ethical point of refutation, as Gorgias itself is not an attempt to prove the obvious point that rhetoric can be abused but rather an eloquent argument as to why rhetoric should be taken seriously.

The canon of biblical books is frequently cited as a parallel to a unitary literary canon that, though often presumed, is in fact not to be found. The biblical canon was created for the purpose of forestalling change and exiling competition. There are at least ten kinds of literary canons, all ultimately resulting from selections made for such distinct purposes as providing models, transmitting a heritage, creating common frames of reference, logrolling, legitimating theory, historicizing, and pluralizing. Canons formed for any of these purposes necessarily yield to change over time and compete with one another at any given time. We can reasonably expect neither the abolition of selective canons nor agreement on a single one; we can, however, seek clarity about purposes.