Amazement and the Experience of Transformation in the Romances of Cervantes and Shakespeare.

摘要

This dissertation explores the use of amazement as a transformative experience capable of reframing traumatic memory in the romances of Cervantes and Shakespeare. Romance offers a structure to moblilize emotion and fantasy to deal with traumatic events. Focusing on the experience of amazement and its effect on literary content and form allows the critic to see the connections between romance and tragedy, and specifically between Renaissance romance and ancient tragedy, comedy, and romance. The three parts of this project provide a reading of amazement that is historically grounded in the period between 1550 and 1640. Although modern psychoanalytic theory and trauma studies are engaged in a limited way, the methodology of the thesis is to use the explicit, detailed, and ancient traditions available to Cervantes and Shakespeare as interpretive tools. Renaissance literary theory, popular romance models, and early modern psychology all focus on the dynamic between the fantasy and emotions to demonstrate how amazement responds to trauma.;Part I begins by analyzing ancient tragedy and romance to show how genre limits or makes possible the management of painful events, and how amazement is the central experience marking these limits and possibilities. Then it synthesizes Renaissance literary theory of the Aristotelian and the Neoplatonic schools, and the other strains of thinking those schools subsume. This synthesis focuses on the various treatments of the role of amazement in the process of transformation. Neo-Platonism offers the possibility for transformation from a debased state in an imperfect world to an exalted position in a world remade. Part I concludes by showing how early modern psychoanalysis, which also draws on literary tragedy and romance for its conclusions, presents a model of amazement as breaking down the psyche and causing depression and anxiety through its effects on the fantasy.;Part II examines Cervantes' use of different kinds of amazement to turn around the tragic experience of slavery into a story of hope in El trato de Argel, Los banos de Argel, and "The Captive's Tale" in Don Quixote Part I. Cervantes portrays the impossibility of completely erasing trauma and the limited, but still significant, success of romance in containing it. This section hinges on the idea of the trato, a form of torture in Algeria a punishment in which the hands were tied behind the back, the body lifted up into the air, and then allowed to fall to the ground, so that the bones were dislocated from the shoulders. The word also meant double-dealing and referred to any kind of commercial bargaining. Thus, the first play, El trato, depicts a typical Renaissance chaos of love in which lovers long for those who spurn them, but the plot of deliverance literally cashes in on the love of a Moorish couple for their Spanish slaves. There are two strands to this play: stories of martyrdom, torture, and butchery balanced by a comical love plot.;Part III demonstrates how the feminine becomes the focal point for the emotional oscillation between amazement as terror and amazement as wonder. Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale manipulate three feminine archetypes: the evil queen, the sacrificed maiden, and the redeemer to forge a pathway for redemption. The sacrificed maiden Polyxena from Seneca's The Trojan Women, which the chapter proves was a direct influence on Shakespeare, is the central character in this pattern of redemption. This chapter also demonstrates the classical influences of Apuleius and Heliodorus on Shakespeare's treatment of the various kinds of amazement, his employment of legal themes, and his use of feminine archetypes to dramatize how the male protagonists' amazement as terror can be transformed into amazement as wonder.;This dissertation contributes to the body of work on early modern amazement by including the full range of emotions from terror to wonder that constitute amazement. The range of literary texts allows for a concrete connection between romance and tragedy, centered on affect. Because amazement is cognitive and emotional, aesthetic and psychological, so the study of it must necessarily be interdisciplinary. The intent of the project is to study romance as a mode, rather than as a grab bag of motifs and dramatic devices on which we can impose a theological or philosophical pattern. Rather, the affective aim of these stories is directly related to the limitations and possibilities of literary form. What comes across as episodic or meandering is actually the attempt to provide a structure for the rapprochement of the subject and the dreams and nightmares caused by trauma. The argument demonstrates the interplay between literary form and psychological healing. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).