HUM383 - Comunicaciones Congresos, Conferencias, ... Tue, 20 Aug 2019 08:45:30 GMT 2019-08-20T08:45:30Z The picaresque, translation, and the history of the novel The picaresque, translation, and the history of the novel Pérez Fernández, José María The picaresque novel as a generic category originated in the Spanish sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It then spread all over Europe, exerting a particularly important influence towards the end of the seventeenth, and above all the eighteenth century in Germany, France and England. Given its status as one of the founding narrative discourses of modernity, it appears inextricably tied to the emergence of the novel: hence its importance when it comes to an assessment of the origins and evolution of certain varieties of European late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century prose fiction. The fate of the picaresque after the eighteenth century is subject to controversy, but there is no doubt that its influence and presence diminished. Like the concept of the picaresque itself, the role of the international picaresque in the development of prose fiction must be studied in parallel with different national traditions that addressed similar concerns and responded to the same early modern stimuli. The picaresque crystallizes in its plots and in its language concerns and paradoxes that are inherently modern and transnational. These include the moral, political, and economic foundations for the values that regulate the relations between the early modern self and society. The main concerns of the picaresque include poverty, vagrancy, crime, prostitution and in general the struggle of individuals for material survival and social legitimacy in a social environment which upholds lofty ethical standards as it also requires the reckless pursuit of self-interest for mere survival. Its autobiographical, first-person narrator also brings to the foreground the paradoxes of narrative representation, and the intricate strategies that the picaresque devices to verbalize all these concerns constitute founding moments in the history of the novel. Students and researchers will find that, after a general survey of the existing scholarship, the best model for an approach to the picaresque is one that contemplates it as part of a larger network. This heterogeneity requires an interdisciplinary approach that must include literary theory and semiotics, the history of translation, cultural and gender studies, as well as social, political and economic history. A lecture for a seminar on "Intercultural Communication", at the Centro Mediterráneo, University of Granada, June 28th 2013. Los problemas de Villalobos: Medical Humanism, Translation and Early Modern Prose Fiction Los problemas de Villalobos: Medical Humanism, Translation and Early Modern Prose Fiction Pérez Fernández, José María The Spanish doctor Francisco López de Villalobos (1473-1549) shared an interest in translation with fellow humanist physicians like Andrés Laguna or François Rabelais. His Spanish rendering of Plautus’s Amphitryon, first published in Alcalá de Henares by Brocar in 1517, was printed again as part of Los problemas de Villalobos: que tracta de cuerpos naturales y morales, y dos dialogos de medicina: y el tratado de las tres grandes y una cancion y la comedia de Amphitrion (Zamora, 1543). As its unwieldy title reveals, this new volume included a large variety of texts. Next to Plautus’s comedy the reader could find moral and political treatises, essays on natural philosophy, dialogues peppered with comic stories, and passages that verged on the picaresque. Villalobos’s abundant comments to his translation of Amphitryon moralized the plot, provided contextual information, and glossed the medical import implicit in some of its passages. This colourful array of texts is interspersed with autobiographical episodes which displayed his disenchantment with life at the Castilian court where he served, and also hinted at the harassment that Villalobos arguably suffered because of his Jewish converso background. Its tragicomic satura of serious and humorous matter, its combination of poetry, dialogue, narrative episodes and essayistic prose turns Los problemas into a fascinating text that defies categorization. This paper aims to explore how this peculiar admixture responded to a growing demand from an increasing readership that sought to be both enlightened and amused, and how it also coincided with a crucial moment in the early modern canon that pointed to the development of prose fiction as an essentially protean and heterogeneous genre. A previous version of a paper presented at the "Translation and the Circulation of Knowledge in Early Modern Science" Colloquium, at the Warburg Institute, London, Friday 28 June, 2013. Traducción cultural y relaciones internacionales Traducción cultural y relaciones internacionales Pérez Fernández, José María Las diferencias inherentes a las lenguas y las convenciones culturales que éstas articulan pueden afectar a las relaciones internacionales en ámbitos tan diversos como la diplomacia, las relaciones políticas, o el comercio. Dichas relaciones suelen estar reguladas por códigos legales, y por tanto la transferencia de significados y de normas se ha de llevar a cabo no sólo entre lenguajes, sino también entre los sistemas legales que éstos articulan. Existen además otros factores íntimamente relacionados con estos procesos: los valores sociales, estéticos, políticos o religiosos constituyen una constelación de significantes que con frecuencia complican la comunicación entre diferentes comunidades lingüísticas y culturales. Esta conferencia se propone explorar algunos ejemplos históricos como casos de estudio para arrojar alguna luz sobre temas actuales, para identificar áreas potenciales de conflicto, y finalmente para explorar algunas estrategias que puedan abordar estas cuestiones. El documento es el texto de una conferencia impartida en julio de 2013 dentro de los cursos organizados por el Centro Mediterráneo de la Universidad de Granada.