Things are working here, and let me start by pulling up the board. In
terms of the period of time where we are, we're in the period where there
is an American republic, which is very young, but there isn't an American
sentiment, and there surely isn't an American culture. So the American
republic lacks some things. It lacks its own values, its own culture, and
its own literature. The next two figures that we're going to study, James
Fenimer Cooper and Washington Irving, contribute significantly. To this
necessity of creating an American culture and an American literature. The
problem that America had was that it had been unable of having an identity
that separated it from just not copying the patterns of Great Britain. This
is going to be the definite emancipation, over the course of the next units
we're going to see the cultural emancipation of the American republic. A
cultural emancipation of a territory that was detached from the British
empire in circa 1781, but that took a bit longer to become detached. All
right? from the values and the ideas that came from England. Of course,
this is not going to be a process where good literature is created out of
nowhere. There's going to be references, and as two key references for all
of this period that is about to emerge, all of this romantic period that is
so significant for America, Romanticism is going to stem on several
pillars. The first pillar is the figure of Sir Walter Scott. We're going to
hear how his influence is going to be time and time again very significant
for the... These American authors that want to be independent, they want to
write their own stories, but first they need a mentor. And this
intellectual mentorship comes in the figure of Sir Walter Scott and his
works. The other core value, and especially for this part of Romanticism,
this proto-Romanticism, let's say, where stepping out of an area... that is
purely Puritan and imbued by religion all over. We've even seen with a
slave narrative and with Phyllis Wheatley's poetry how necessary religion
was to explain the American reality. Only with Benjamin Franklin have we
taken a different road and we've taken another approach and we've dipped
our feet for the first time into what could be a secular America. From now
on, we're going to go in an absolutely opposite direction. We're going to
go in a direction where America makes sense independently of a religious
vehicle to drive all of the forces of literary creation and cultural
creation. The cultural identity and literary identity. Literary identity is
going to be based on American principles more and more, and there's going
to be American genres. We've seen that American genres, for the moment,
they were minor genres that had to do more with spectacular events that
took place in America. We had the captivity narratives and we had these
genres, the before, this is a before, and captivity and slavery. and we're
going to need a new way of promoting America as something different. And
this new way is going to be retooling German Gothic, the German Gothic
tradition is going to be basically plagiarized and copied until it turns or
it transforms through a sort of butterfly effect into something that is
distinctly American and one of the biggest contributions of a young
literature to universal literature. American literature is going to become
famous for contributing the short story to universal literature. From now
on, short story is going to command American literature and it's going to
become the driving force that makes American literature not only important
within the English literatures, but an important literature that is going
to be copied and used as a reference by all of the literatures in the
world. It's going to contribute short stories and the short story vehicle
to universal literature. Surprisingly, who can be called the father of the
short story is none other than Washington Irving. If we read Washington
Irving in isolation, we would come to the conclusion that probably his
importance is overstated and his stories are not as interesting or not as
influential as we could believe them to be. But this would be a mistaken
appreciation because Washington Irving not only started to write short
stories and was tremendously successful doing so, he was tremendously
influential for an entire generation that are the big pillars, the big
triumvirates of American literature at the peak of romantic literature.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe. Those three figures
are the key figures of American Romanticism. That's how we're going to
start the second semester. To state it in a certain way, we're done with
the prologue of the course. Now is when the rock and roll starts. This is
the core of this course. American literature is all about Romanticism.
Puritanism is a vehicle that leads us to Romanticism because Romanticism is
where America climbs to a new height and claims a place at the top of
universal literature. It stops copying patterns, it stops looking outwards
in terms of looking for a source of inspiration and it turns into the
source of inspiration for other literatures. Romantic literature and
everything that follows, realism, modernism, post-modernism, American
literature is not only going to have a decent role, it's going to have a
leading role within this world of changing times. So these movements and
the movements that follow Romanticism are going to have one of their most
important centers in American literature. So let's get back to the
presentation. I think I've already stated the importance of the work of
Washington Urban sufficiently in an introductory fashion. And let me
quickly read from this handbook that I sometimes bring here as a secondary
source of information. The quest for a Native American novel progressed
slowly. It moved from Philadelphia to other eastern board cities such as
Boston, Charleston and New York. And today we're going to have an example
of the New York scene. Washington Irving, the Knickerbocker scene which had
nourished the essay in poetry turned as well to fictional forms and found
its voice in Washington Irving. The Goldmethian essays Irving wrote with
Paulding as the Salgamundi papers established him as a New York wit, but
his reputation made his comic history of the city a history of New York by
Diedrich Knickerbocker. He's already using a frame narrator. A work of mock
learning and literary parody much admired for its technical skill and wits
by Scott, Byron and Coleridge. The work of fiction that Washington Irving
is starting to splash a bit in New York is already calling the attention of
enormous names across the Atlantic. It's already attracting the attention
and they are eager to read stories, not any figures, Sir Walter Scott anir
Rod Byron and Coleridge. prose was neoclassical. So when we read it, we get
the feeling of come on, this is a bit old-fashioned, okay? So we have this
neoclassical feeling that you may have had when you read the difference
between Olaudah Equiano's prose and Phyllis Wheatley's poetry, I think was
very clear. The poetry of Wheatley is sometimes a bit too elaborate. I
don't know if you had that feeling, that it was too sophisticated for
anybody to enjoy, and it was only for a select audience. Whereas Olaudah
Equiano's prose, or Mary Rawlinson's prose, or even William Bradford's
prose is written for everybody to understand in an accessible way. With
Washington Irving and with the Romantics, we reach a different type of
reality. I mean, literature has always had a dispute with what had to be
the tone for the story. Whether literature had to be written for the masses
or it had to be written for the people that were educated and that would
finally appreciate that work. So there was always this dilemma to know if
the correct way of creating a work of art was to elevate the tone and
that's where the neoclassical style kicks in, or to lower the tone and make
it very sparse and very easy to understand. Romantics took the twist of
normally opting for a prose that was from medium-level difficulty to highly
difficult and sometimes archaic. When we read the authors at the beginning
of the second semester, we can't avoid enjoying the work, but at the same
time wondering if that could not have been written in a simpler way, in a
more sparse way. And when you reach the end of the course, you're going to
be able to contrast it with realists, that they do have the mission to make
people understand exactly what they're saying. So they eliminate any space
for ambiguity and they try to deliver a picture that is as an image that is
as real as possible. As real as if you were seeing a picture. So that
difference of style is going to be a constant advantage for every time you
move from one movement to the next, you're going to see how that is
normally one of the elements in dispute. Whether to choose a higher loftier
diction or whether to choose a more simplistic, understandable sparse
style. So in let me continue reading from here, his style was a search for
a balanced voice that would let him be both American and European. So he
had a very difficult job. He had to appeal both to the Americans that were
not extremely literate and to the Europeans that were sometimes extremely
elitist. So he had to tread that middle ground and apparently he was
successful because Washington Irving is the first American celebrity that
the early American republic has that belongs to the realm of writing. He's
the first blockbuster writer, to put it in a certain way. He recurs to
sources from which he borrows heavily. Remember that what we say in the
18th century and the 19th century, borrow heavily in the 20th and 21st
century, we would say he plagiarizes blatantly. So the practices of the
authors of two centuries ago would simply not be admissible by current
standards. It would be considered that he's plagiarizing a different work.
For example, one of his most famous works, Rip Van Winkle, is a work that
is extremely famous, but that is based on a German tale that takes place in
Germany. And he just transferred this German tale to American territory,
retold it, rethought the purpose of the symbolisms, and created a truly
American story that is highly celebrated as one of the pinnacles of early
Romantic literature. But it doesn't make it less of a copy. He's copying a
German story. He's copying a German tale. Was he the only one doing that?
No, of course we've heard about the fairy tale writers like the Grimm
Brothers or other writers that just borrowed from the popular folklore and
retold stories that they had heard. They hide the fact that it was told to
them and they retold it. They never hid that fact. What was Washington
Irving's mechanism to avoid any action or accusation of being plagiaristic?
He put in front a framed narrator. By not telling the story himself, yes
and no, because the Knickerbocker is a word that became a name for
Manhattan. Yes, it's true. But the Knickerbocker scene, I think, preceded
from Wikipedia. Okay, if Wikipedia says so. The Knickerbocker scene
preceded Washington Irving and he only took the name that was already
popular as a way of referring to the people that live in New York and
that's probably what he's talking about, made it famous. And by him making
it famous through his framed narrator, Diedrich Knickerbocker, it became a
synonym of New York inhabitants. So I would say in that case, it's a yes
and a no. I'm sure that I'll have a look at that afterwards to see the
sources and try to read on that topic because it's really interesting.
Thanks for the comment, Douglas. Really interesting stuff. In terms of his
work, Diedrich Knickerbocker was not his only framed narrator. He used
another framed narrator called Jeffrey Crayon. So he had a combination of
different elements but always using the same narrative form. Somebody told
me this and I'm telling you. And that way, he avoided being in direct
contact with the story and that aspect, that framed narrator aspect is
something that is absolutely typical of Washington Irving and that you can
use as one of the elements to describe Irving and his work. Washington
Irving is the actual representation or the epitome of American
neoclassicism. There isn't another example that is as neoclassic as
Washington Irving and that has such literary height. And he is also the
transition of neoclassicism towards an Americanized romanticism that
borrows heavily from a German tradition, that borrows heavily from this
mentorship that Sir Walter Scott openly gives him. Because in the case of
Washington Irving, it's not just a neoclassicism. Washington Irving is
directed to read German Gothic, German folklore by Walter Scott. He meets
Walter Scott and Walter Scott is the person that introduces him to this
type of literature and Washington Irving finds an enormous source of
inspiration there to start his career as a storyteller. He is therefore
considered the father of American fiction. He's considered the father of
the short story and in Spanish literature he's extremely relevant. You
can't walk through a street of Granada without bumping into a copy on any
window case of his works, Tales of Alhambra or The Alhambra, which are a
set of stories inspired by his stay in Alhambra that focuses on many
aspects from sketches at the start, to the end of the story, to the end of
the story. He's described the building, described the lifestyle of Spanish
people, described the customs of the time, to actual stories. Stories that
have to do with legends and mythological stories that I would guess that
they're partially invented and partially taken from other sources. He
always says that this is something that he read somewhere. He never takes
direct authorship for his stories. So this is his specific style for
writing. This framing the narrator as an element. The year that he was born
is the early American Republic. America has won the War of Independence and
George Washington is the national hero. He's trying to be convincing to
take in office as the first president. In the meantime they have like
temporary presidents until Washington takes office. George Washington takes
office. Washington Irving is a baby at that time. He is the eleventh child
of a wealthy merchant, so absolutely opposite lifestyle to Benjamin
Franklin. He studied and... at the age of seven. 16, he went to Manhattan
to study law for two years, the kind of studying that was popular at the
time. And he turned into a travel writer. We're going to see this
frequently. We're going to see it next week when we talk about when we talk
about James Fenimore Cooper. We're going to see it in the case of Henry
David Thoreau. Traveling and writing about the trips especially in a period
where there remain enormous amounts of territory that is unknown,
unexplored, and especially unaccounted for. Maybe people know where it is
on a map, but they've never read descriptions. They've never read about it
in detail. That's going to be the type of work that he's going to do in his
earlier life. He traveled up the Hudson at the beginning of the at the turn
of the century. He visited Montreal and he was sent to Europe. In that trip
to Europe, I think it's a life-changing trip. He traveled for health
reasons, but at the same time, he became acquainted with several European
cultures. One of which, the Spanish one specifically, is the one that is
going to interest him the most. Studying the Spanish language, Spanish
culture, Spanish history, and he's going to turn into a writer that is very
interested in writing about Spain and Spanish history. In fact, when he
came and he started to write Alhambra, his purpose was to write a biography
of Christopher Columbus. At the same time, he worked on these different
works. As I said before, Sir Walter Scott is the author that mentors Irving
when they meet in England and introduces Irving to German folk and fairy
tales that he would use to write the sketchbook. The sketchbook is from
1819, 1820, and creates his own lifestyle. So during the first 30-35 years
of his life, he's looking for his, well, yeah, 30-35 years of his life,
he's looking for his own style. He's learning to tell the stories that he
wants to tell, and it's only when he comes upon German mythology and German
folklore that he finds this cornerstone that is going to help him be able
to tell the story in the way, tell the stories in the way that he wishes to
tell them. He returned to Spain in 1842 as a minister to Spain during the
times of Queen Isabella II, and in his last years, his attempts were
distinctly focused to recover the appeal of an American readership that was
sort of annoyed with how much he seemed to favor European setting over
American setting. If there is a shortcoming in Washington Irving's literary
career, it's that he failed to understand that Americans wanted to read
about America because they wanted to feel proud about America. They wanted
to establish that American narrative. The first writers in American
literature will tell you that this is an extremely complicated task because
there was nothing to write about in words of James Fenimore Cooper, and it
was Benjamin Franklin who said before that that it was prime and it was
fundamental, it was a priority for America to find its own voice to be able
to express its importance to the world until it hadn't found its literary
voice, its cultural voice. It was going to be a secondary country in the
global scene of things. So this search for tradition, this search for an
own identity that I think America fully finds thanks to Washington Irving
is something that had been an obsession already for a few decades. It
doesn't come with Washington Irving, it's something that already comes from
the times of Benjamin Franklin when it seemed to be obvious that there was
going to be an American republic. Let's talk about American Romanticism for
a while. American Romanticism as a term derives from romance, and romance
does not mean a sentimental story. It means a short story. So a romance is
a post-novella. Novels or novellas, well, I would say that novels are full
length, novellas are medium length, and romances are short stories. In
Spanish they were called romantas in the same way. It was something that
was used as a device all around the world. Romanticism is normally set
between 1770 and 1860. I think it peaks around 1840 to 1850. We'll see what
works take place in that period. And after 1860 American Romanticism begins
to decline very quickly because there are new ways of expression, and
realism takes over as a predominant movement in literature all around the
world, but very significantly in America. Romances are normally they have
some features that are very specific and with each writer we're going to
redefine these elements. For the rest of the world, this is a period of
cultural if the Renaissance had been a bit before this, I think that
romanticism is a sort of cultural renaissance for people. There are many
literatures that reflourish. In the case of America, it would be more like
a naissance, not renaissance, because there's nothing to be reborn from.
America is finding its own feet. It's trying to create a literature of its
own and therefore, when we refer to the cultural renaissance, we shouldn't
include America in that terminology because there was nothing to be reborn
from. It's absolutely new and everything seems fresh and that's why very
soon, once American literature finds its own voice, it's going to be highly
appreciated by the mainstream or the most important literatures of the
world because it has that sense of freshness and amplitude of topics that
other literatures seem more constrained and lacking in some cases. Romantic
writers and artists saw themselves as revolting against the age of
enlightenment, funnily enough. So, they're going to to a certain extent,
they're going to embrace whatever goes beyond the science. So, they're
going to embrace the metaphysical, the supernatural and the fantastic. It's
very common in romantic stories, to be reading something that makes perfect
sense and all of a sudden, the chain of events stop making sense under the
rules of the world. From the age of enlightenment, what is especially
annoying for the core romantic writers is the neoclassical touch that is so
reminiscent of the previous century and therefore there's an attempt to
depart and to evolve the structures that are typically neoclassical. The
movement, the romantic movement began in Germany, thus the reason why it
was a huge source of inspiration for Washington Irvin with Goethe and it
continued in England with Blake, Coleridge, Woodworth, Shelley, Byron,
Keats and Sir Walter Scott that is not named there but is as important.
Romanticism does not appear in the U.S. until two major intellectual
figures that are respected both inside America and outside America,
Washington Irvin Unit 9, Ralph Waldo Emerson Unit 11 appear in the scene.
Emerson is going to be a very strange figure to approach because his
influence is enormous but the knowledge that we have about Emerson is
practically inexistent. If we talk about Washington Irvin, well, Spaniards
at least remember Tales of Alhambra but if we talk about Ralph Waldo
Emerson I challenge anyone in the room both at home or here to tell me that
they've read something by Ralph Waldo Emerson or that they even knew about
Ralph Waldo Emerson before stepping into the classroom today. Emerson is
going to be one of those really important pivotal figures that makes a lot
of sense in the time but that has left that has probably not been able to
leave an enduring literary artifact for which to be remembered. He's
remembered for his influence on an entire generation from Walt Whitman to
Nathaniel Hawthorne to Henry David Thoreau to Herman Melville sometimes
because they agreed fully with their ideas, sometimes because they opposed
the ideas openly like in the case of Ed Blondin. So Emerson is going to be
a very important figure but before Emerson Irving is also going to be a
very important figure. We don't have direct proof that Irving was a source
of inspiration for the generation that came afterwards of romantic writers
all the writers that we're going to read in the next semester but it is
obvious because of the way they create their art that Washington Irving was
the golden standard against which they tried to evolve the form and they
tried to go beyond what Washington Irving had achieved. American romantics
tend to venerate nature so it's a very weird combination. It's
supernatural, things sometimes get paranormal, mysterious and at the same
time a love for nature and ideas that seem to go directly against the
manifest destiny because if you're in favor of nature, in favor of seeing
nature as something that shouldn't be touched, you shouldn't be civilizing
that territory. You should be leaving it there as something that is more
important than us and especially when we get to Emerson, you're going to
say, see how nature is at the center of everything. Emerson and Henry David
Thoreau are within romanticism a special style of romanticism called
transcendentalism that we will see in a couple of weeks or we will start to
see in a couple of weeks and American romantics used symbols, myths and
fantastic elements so be prepared to read things that seem feasible and
things that don't seem feasible, things that don't seem to be possible.
Regarding the work of Washington Irving, he's the first internationally
acclaimed author and he's the first American literary artist to earn his
living through writing, something that is really important because it's
going to open the possibility of being a writer for people that are not
wealthy. In the case of Irving, his father was very well set off but
Washington Irving was able to make a living through writing. His early love
for travel would feed his cosmopolitan imagination throughout his entire
life. Current criticism sorry, the criticism of the time is that he was a
writer and writing about foreign themes with a light-hearted way. Something
that Washington Irvin never did was write a full-length novel. And you will
see that full-length novels are not seen as an achievement. They're seen as
trials of complete success or complete failure. We're going to see in the
next unit how a novel can catapult your career towards undisputed success
or it can determine your career a failure even though the work that you
publish that is not understood at the time becomes a masterpiece over the
course of the years. We're going to see those cases. His vehicle of writing
was very soon adopted as the American literary canon. The short story and
its various forms. Two of his stories have outlived him internationally and
I think that they're very well known not only in America but all over the
world. Rip Bang Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow are both stories
that are included in that 1819-1820 sketchbook where Washington Irvin finds
his voice and finds a style of writing It accompanies him all his life. In
Spain he is well known due to The Alhambra or Tales of the Alhambra. He
resorts to the well-known method of telling a story through an intermediary
or second-hand account inventing a frame narrator with the narrator
mediating. So everything is told through the eyes of a different person as
if it wasn't him who was taking responsibility for the narrative voice.
There is a combination of narrative modes. We have description, report,
speech and comment. Remember that we talked about the narrative modes in a
previous class and we said how depending on how authors favored one or the
other or completely ignored one of these four narrative modes you could
clearly see the style of the writer. In this case there is a combination of
the narrative modes of the four narrative modes. Just a couple of slides to
go. I'm talking about The Alhambra something that we don't need even though
the story that we read in the book The Legend of Don Muno de Hinojosa I
think is the name of the story. I'm talking from the top of my head from
The Alhambra The Legend of Don Muno de Hinojosa. Yeah. It is probably one
of the lesser known tales of Washington Irving. It's definitely a
surprising selection for a course book that has so many of the relevant
works of the author to select this legend and it's probably a way to
address the Spanish importance of Washington Irving. After completing a
biography of Christopher Columbus in 1828 Washington Irving traveled from
Madrid to Granada. The writer was granted permission to stay in the
Alhambra Palace for three months. Being a celebrity allowed Washington
Irving to travel to Granada and stay in the palace. Irving was researching
for a book called A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada A History of the
Years 1478 to 1492 and the book combines description, myths and narrations
of real historical events. If you read about it you're going to read very
nice stories that have a very doubtful factual claim and that sound like
absolute inventions. I mean when you read these stories you say it's a very
nice story. It seems like it's 0% real and 100% fiction. Especially the
story of Don Sancho Muñoz de Hinojosa. Since we're not going to have time
to read the entire thing I would like to point out some elements of the
story. The story is told based on a worn out sepulcher that is found in a
church and the story of the representation of what that sepulcher means is
the story that the frame narrator tells in the time. And the work focuses
very much on the virtues of the people that inhabited Spain at the time.
How the main spirit was goodwill and a peaceful lifestyle amongst wars
which is a very strange way of putting it of coexistence of religions of
cultures in Spain or in Spanish territory opposed to in the rest of Europe
where Muslim culture was not present at all and Jewish culture was not seen
with good eyes. Spain is used as an example of a territory where harmonious
and peaceful civilization took place or a lifestyle took place between
people from different cultures based on principles of chivalry and
goodwill. I don't know how accurate that is to stories but besides the
story of the meal feed I can't think of other examples where the Moorish
and the Christian civilizations receive a great degree of importance inside
the literature from the point of view of having heroes that belong to
Moorish tradition and heroes that belong to Christian tradition. That way
of surprising and maybe shocking the expectations of readers that are
normally used to a historicist point of view that confers all of the
positive elements to Christian religion and all of the negative elements to
any other religion. I think that's something that makes Washington Irving's
work especially interesting because it's a view of the world that is
absolutely different to everything that was taking place at the time.
Moorish tradition was normally not used as something at the center of
things as something as heroic as noble as possible of goodwill as Christian
tradition. So this story is is a rarity or I would say that Washington
Irving's perspective is a rarity among the mainstream version of the
western civilization and Washington Irving did seem to believe in a past
where the Moorish civilization the Christian civilization and even the
Jewish civilization had lived in harmony and that that was a better past.
And that's what he tries to expose in this story. The slide that I prepared
here it gives a couple of details more. The book combines description, myth
and narrations of real historical events. Washington filled notebooks and
journals with descriptions and observations though he did not believe his
writing would ever do it justice. He wrote how unworthy is my scribbling of
the place. Yalamra a series of tales and sketches of the Moors and
Spaniards was published in May 1832 in the United States by publishers Lee
and Carey and concurrently in England by Henry Colburn. In 1851 Irving
wrote an author's revised edition also titled The Tales of Alhambra. That's
the version that has reached the mainstream audience especially in Spain.
When you buy a copy of this you normally get The Tales of Alhambra which by
the way does not include the story that we read in the book. In today's
unit I have a copy of Tales of Alhambra at home from when I went to Granada
for the first time and it does not have the Munoz legend there which is
nice but at the same time you have the feeling that it's difficult to
understand the entire body of Washington Irving's story. I think I have one
more no, that's it. We have 20 minutes left because they're going to call
us to leave the room five minutes before. Let me start by giving you some
interesting details that you might be able to appreciate. From the Alhambra
what we read is on page 147 we read an entire set of two pages where this
is all going to be description. The entire page is description from
beginning to end. The latter part of my sojourn in Alhambra I made frequent
descents into the G. Swites library of the university and relished more and
more the old Spanish chronicles which I found there bound in parchment. I
delight in those quaint histories which treat of the times when the Muslims
maintain a foothold in the peninsula with all their bigotry and occasional
intolerance they are full of noble acts and generous sentiments and have a
high spicy oriental flavor not to be found in other records of the times
which were merely European. In fact Spain even at the present day is a
country apart severed in history habits manners and modes of thinking from
all the rest of Europe. It is a reality a romantic country but its romance
has nothing of the sentimentality of modern European romance. It is chiefly
derived from the brilliant regions of the East and from the high-minded
school of Saracenic chivalry. The Arab invasion and conquest brought a
higher civilization and a nobler style of thinking into Gothic Spain. The
Arabs were a quick-witted sagacious proud-spirited and poetical people and
were imbued with oriental science and literature. Wherever they established
a seat of power it became a rallying place for the learned and ingenious
and they softened and refined the people whom they conquered. So this
absolutely this is where the word fits romantic view of the Moorish
conquest of the peninsula is something that doesn't seem to be very close
to reality it seems a bit detached from reality. By degrees occupancy
seemed to give them an hereditary right to their foothold in the land. They
ceased to be looked upon as invaders and were regarded as rival neighbors.
The peninsula broke up into a variety of states both Christian and Muslim
became for centuries a great campaigning ground where the art of war seemed
to be the principal business of man and was carried to the highest pitch of
romantic chivalry. The original ground of hostility of difference of faith
gradually lost its rancor neighboring states of opposite creeds were
occasionally linked together in alliances offensive and defensive so that
the cross and crescent were to be seen side by side fighting against some
common enemy. I don't know how accurate this is to the truth whether it was
as easy to see a Christian rebellions against Muslim ones or Christians and
Muslims fighting together against other parties that had either Christians
or Muslims or both but this forms part of this point where the narrator is
so unreliable that we really don't know what part is fiction what part is
true because it all looks plausible but our understanding of history makes
us think otherwise. Neighboring states of opposite creeds were occasionally
linked together in alliances offensive and okay I already read that in
times of peace too the noble use of either faith resorted to the same
cities Christian or Muslim to school themselves in military science even in
the temporary cruises of sanguinary war the warriors who had had recently
striven together in the deadly conflicts of the field lay aside their
animosity met at tournament jousts and other military festivity and
exchanged the courtesies of gentle and generous spirits I really don't know
how this can be something that we can call realistic or reliable but and
from that point of view the rest of this paragraph would be something that
we have to take into consideration that Washington Irvin's purpose is
probably not to be accurate but to be entertaining and he puts
entertainment and the story in front of reliability and sticking to the
facts if you go on to read the beginning of page 149 you'll see that
paragraph is comments from beginning to end with these preliminary
suggestions the fruit of a morning reading and rumination in the old
Jesuit's library of the university I will give a legend and point drawn
forth from one of the venerable chronicles alluded to so in this in this
first paragraph of the legend of Don Muno Sancho de Hinojosa we're going to
read a very detailed description in the first paragraph in the cloisters of
the ancient Benedictine convent of San Diego at Silos in Castile are the
moldering yet magnificent monuments of once powerful and chivalrous family
of Hinojosa among these reclines the marble figure of a knight in complete
armor with the hands pressed together as if in prayer on one side of his
tomb is sculptured in relief a band of Christian cavaliers capturing a
cavalcade of male and female moors on the other side the same cavaliers are
represented kneeling before an altar the tomb like most of the neighboring
monuments is almost in ruins and the sculpture is nearly unintelligible
excepting to the keen eye of the antiquary the story connected the story
connected with the sepulcher however is still preserved in the old Spanish
chronicles and is to the following purports and you really don't know if
there is something true or something that or if everything is a fabrication
from here on unless we're an expert in this period of time the legend of
Don Muno Sancho de Hinojosa continues from there in the form of reports so
we have description in that first paragraph comment at the end of the
preface and a description of Spanish romance on the previous page we've
already covered three narrative modes of the form in all times and I'm
going to continue reading until the bell sounds and then well I'll just
I'll just apologize again for the brevity of the time that we have to read
let's see how far we get into the story in the first in old times several
hundred years ago there was a noble Castilian cavalier named Don Muno
Sancho de Hinojosa lord of a border castle which had stood the brunt of
many amorous foray he had several horsemen as his household troops all of
the ancient Castilian proof stark warriors hard riders and men of iron and
with these he scoured the Moorish lands and made his name terrible
throughout the borders his castle hall was covered with banners and
scimitars and Muslim helms the trophies of his prowess Don Muno was
moreover a keen huntsman and he rejoiced in hounds of all kind steeds for
the chase and hawks for the towering sport the falconry moreover when not
engaged in warfare his delight was to beat up the neighboring forests and
scarcely ever did he ride forth without hound and horn a boar spear in the
hand or a hawk upon his fist and an attendant train of huntsmen his wife
Doña Maria Palafin was of a gentle and timid nature little fitted to be
the spouse of so hardy and adventurous a man a knight and many a tear did
the poor lady shed when he sallied forth upon his daring enterprises and
many a prayer did she offer for his safety as this doughty cavalier was one
day hunting he stationed himself in a thicket on the board on the borders
of a green glade of the forest and dispersed his followers to rouse against
him again and drive it towards the sand he had not been here long when a
cavalcade of moors of both sexes came frankling over the forest law they
were unarmed and magnificently dressed in robes of tissue and embroidery
rich shawls of India bracelets and anklets of gold and jewelry that
sparkled in the sun at the head of this gay cavalcade wrote a youthful
cavalier superior to the rest in dignity and loftiness of demeanor and in
splendor of a tile besides himself was a damesel whose eyes sorry whose
veil blown aside by the breeze displayed a face of surpassing beauty and
eyes cast down in maiden modesty yet beaming with tenderness and joy his
eyes so even though this framework seems to be modern in some aspects in
other aspects such as the role of the woman as if it were a prize of men is
as traditional as we would expect and with that I have to leave it there
because the story is much longer I would like to just notice that from line
163 the end of the story it resorts back to comment after having been
report for an extremely long time the whole story is report except for this
final paragraph which is a comment and I think that's really interesting
for you as an element of analysis if you had to talk about Washington
Irving in a potential exam I hope that the computer problems that have a
potential exam that have tested us today do not do so in the future and
thank you very much for the patience to the four of you that have managed
to stay online and for the three that have endured the trials and
tribulations with me here have a fantastic week Douglas for everybody
asking I've already posted all of the recordings in the forum you can
access all of them I'll do the same with this one today have a great