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Beyond Mimesis: Aristotle's Poetics in the Medieval Mediterranean

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Karla Mallette
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Extract

La imagen que un solo hombre puede formar es la que no toca a ninguno. … El tiempo, que despoja los alcázares, enriquece los versos.

—Jorge Luis Borges, “La busca de Averroes” (586)

The image that a single man can form touches no one. … Time, which despoils fortresses, enriches poetry.

How should literary historians aiming to describe literary traditions that predated the modern nation use the methodological tool kit developed contemporaneously with the European nationalisms? Can philology be separated from the logic of the nation and from the teleological vanishing point—the languages and literatures of (for instance) modern France, Spain, or Italy—that has traditionally provided a rationale for readings of medieval literature (and jobs for philologists)? Medieval literary historians have known for some time that we must get out of the habit of thinking in terms of the national literatures that would emerge centuries after the texts we study were written. And we have absorbed the lesson that the nineteenth-century philologists on whose shoulders we stand worked (frequently, if not systematically) under the influence of the nationalizing movements emerging as they wrote, so that their pronouncements on medieval texts must be read with appropriate caution. We have not, however, yet produced new geographic and historical formulations to replace the narrative that traces the origin of the modern European nations to a medieval Latin Christian crucible.

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Information
PMLA , Volume 124 , Issue 2 , March 2009 , pp. 583 - 591
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2009

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