The Marriage of Art and Honor: Anamorphosis and Control in Calderón's La dama duende
Anamorphosis, broadly speaking, refers to visual tricks and conceits that arise with the invention and development of Renaissance single point perspective. The plays of Calderón de la Barca not only make generous use of visually anamorphic strategies to simultaneously illuminate and hide the progress of their intriguing plots, the language of painting and baroque theories of representation are important structural and narrative elements in his dramatic practice. This study examines Calderón's use of anamorphosis in his drama of intrigue La dama duende, concluding that the playwright dramatizes the relationship between art and the human faculties of the imagination and judgment in order to circumscribe the production of marvelous artistic spectacles within the social and political arena of honor. (BJN)
Devil, Converso, Duende: Anamorphosis and the View of Spain in Luis Vélez de Guevara's El diablo cojuelo
This essay examines Luis Vélez de Guevara's El diablo cojuelo through the lens of a scene that other scholars have neglected, in which the title character jumps into a writer's yawning mouth and is regurgitated. I extend previous approaches to the novel that focus on satire and perspectivism to theorize that Cojuelo's body and language exemplify and enact anamorphosis, the hidden perspective. This representational tool challenges readers to readjust their spatial, sensory, and cognitive engagement with the text and, by extension, the extrafictional world. Applying this procedure, Vélez also draws on and reorients baroque Spain's obsession with scrutiny, including experiences familiar to him such as converso heritage, court patronage, and literary academies. Using theories of vision, perspective, and demonic influence contemporary to Vélez, as well as Federico García Lorca's "Juego y teoría del duende," I posit a connection between Cojuelo and duende to investigate the role of supernatural inspiration in the creative process. Through anamorphosis, the text creates an image of Spain that is fragmented socially (in the civitas) and spatially, and the writer's ingestion and expulsion of Cojuelo is an enactment of Lorca's duende in liberating the creative force as it purges the demons haunting Vélez and the nation.
The distinctiveness of Belfast medicine and its medical school.
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