We found a match
Your institution may have rights to this item. Sign in to continue.
- Title
Ambivalencia emblemática: autorrepresentación y moral en Mateo Alemán.
- Authors
Ehrlicher, Hanno
- Abstract
Mateo Alemán presented in all his works an authorial portrait, an etching made by Pedro Perret and used as a personal logo all over to strengthen his authorship. It can't surprise that the portrait uses the emblematic tradition, since about 1600 this was a common feature in the Madrid circle of writers that he frequented and that formed a network of mutual support. However, compared with the use of emblematics in the cases of de Herrera (Amparo de pobres), Hernado de Soto (Emblemas moralizadas) o Alonso de Barros (Proverbios morales), the authorial portrait of Mateo Alemán is caracterized by its special programmatic ambivalence: the picture shows the struggle between a spider and a snake whose meaning, however, is not clarified in an explanatory subscriptio, but has to be searched and extracted from a reading of the entire text, a reading procedure that is conceived as a pilgrimage ("legendo simulque peragrando") and the experience of subjetive interpretation. Thus, the author's emblematic portrait does not serve to illustrate a moral, but rather questions such a moral and turns it into an enigma which structures, beyond the image itself, the text of Guzmán de Alfarache and the work of Mateo Alemán as a whole.
- Subjects
ALEMAN, Mateo, 1547-ca. 1614; EMBLEM books; SPANISH novelists
- Publication
eHumanista, 2016, Vol 34, p305
- ISSN
1540-5877
- Publication type
Article