Of Poets and Barbarians: Challenging Linguistic Hierarchies in Cervantes’s Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda
Is style an ornamental feature of writing separate from the content or can it be a vehicle of political and ethical expression? This essay takes as point of departure the incipit of Miguel de Cervantes’s posthumously published epic novel, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda (1617) to argue for a richer understanding of style. More specifically, it shows how through the use of a high epic style in the Persiles Cervantes questions central humanist tenets and assumptions about the relation of language to humanity, of individual speakers and linguistic communities, as well as the expectations of a linguistic chain of being that would unflinchingly equate clarity of speech with civilization. By focusing on the representation of barbarian speech, this essay examines the ways in which Cervantes’s work offers a more ethical alternative to classical and Renaissance epic models that would either deny speech to barbarians or limit barbarian speech to the enabling curse that will get the heroic adventures going. By making the barbarian’s words intelligible through translation and more daringly, by making that very act of translation effect a change in the very texture of the receiving language itself, barbarolalia in Persiles emerges as poetry’s twin.
Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda
Yo, Jeronimo Nunez de Leon, escribano de Camara del rey nuestro senor, de los que en su Consejo residen, doy fee que, habiendose visto por los senores del un libro intitulado Historia de los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, compuesto por Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, que con licencia de los dichos senores fue impreso, tasaron cada pliego de los del dicho libro a cuatro maravedis, y parece tener cincuenta y ocho pliegos, que al dicho respeto son docientos y treinta y dos maravedis, y a este precio mandaron se vendiese, y no a mas, y que esta tasa se ponga al principio de cada libro de los que se imprimieren. E, para que de ello conste, de mandamiento de los dichos senores del Consejo, y de pedimiento de la parte del dicho Miguel de Cervantes, doy esta fee. En Madrid, a veinte y tres de deciembre de mil y seiscientos y diez y seis anos. Geronimo Nunez de Leon. Tiene cincuenta y ocho pliegos, que, a cuatro maravedis, monta seis reales y veinte y ocho maravedis.
The order of things : an archaeology of the human sciences
Publishers Note, Forward to the English Edition, Preface Part I: 1.Las Meninas 2.The Prose of the World: I The Four Similitudes, II Signatures, III The Limits of the World, IV the Writing of Things, V The Being of Language 3.Representing: I Don Quixote, II Order, III The Representation of the Sign, IV Duplicated Representation, V The Imagination of Resemblance, VI Mathesis and 'Taxinoma' 4. Speaking: I Criticism and Commentary, II General Grammar, III The Theory of the Verb, IV Articulation, V Designation, VI Derivation, VII The Quadrilateral Language 5. Classifying: I What the Historians say, II Natural History, III Structure, IV Character, V Continuity and Catastrophe, VI Monsters and Fossils, VII The Discourse of Nature 6. Exchanging: I The Analysis of wealth, II Money and Prices, III Mercantilism, IV The Pledge and the Price, V The Creation of Value, VI Utility, VII General Table, VIII Desire and Representation Part 2 7. The Limits of Representation: I The Age of History, II The Measure of Labour, III The Organic Structure of Beings, IV Word Inflection, V Ideology and Criticism, VI Objective Synthesis 8. Labour, life, Language: I The New Empiricities, II Ricardo, III Cuvier, IV Bopp, V Language Became Object 9. Man and His Doubles: I The return of Language, II The Place of the King, III The Analytic of Finitude, IV The Empirical and the Transcendental, V The 'Cogito' and the Unthought, VI The Retreat and the Return of the Origin, VII Discourse and Man's Being, VIII The Anthropological Sleep 10. The Human Sciences: I The Three Faces of Knowledge, II The Form of the Human Sciences, III The Three Models, IV History, V Psychoanalysis and Ethnology, VI In Conclusion