I'm doing work, I promise, I just had to shout out to the void! I really love to read Melveena McKendrick's work. (If nothing else, she has an awesome name!) She has a strong voice, and doesn't take her academia so seriously as to make her writing obtuse. She writes on cross-dressing women in Golden Age plays, a number of feminist theoretical concerns, and history of Spain in general.
Today, though, there are two quotes that are why I love to read this woman:
(She's talking about Lope's "El castigo sin venganza," a really good [never thought I'd put THAT adjective with the genre following...despite the unfortunate plot, great writing] wife-murder play)
"And although each of us may, quite legitimately, favour a specific interpretation, it is impossible categorically to deny validity to any of the carefully thought-out and observed readings so far offered us." (82)
"There is something about Spanish Golden Age plays that encourages us to try to become their master rather than their servant, whereas a great many of them, I suspect, are far more resistant to domination than we like to think. [...] If we try to stop trying to squeeze the play into the comfortable corset of our own moral perceptions and literary predilections, what we are left with is an ambiguous play and our own feelings of discomfort and puzzlement. Since we cannot very convincingly ascribe this to incompetence on Lope's part, we have to assume that he has achieved more or less what he set out to achieve. The play then stands as an aging man's statement on what he has learned about life - that there often are no reassuring solutions, no neat apportionings of blame." (93-4)
From BCom 35.1 (1983):79-95.
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4 comments:
McKendrick is amazing. Have you read her "Woman and Society in the Spanish Drama of the Golden Age"? So awesome.
Nope, it's next on the list. At some point (the point that I'm reading other people who are NOT so great...which will be in about a week) I'm sure that I'll regret that I'm reading everything by her first....but I'm enjoying it.
I'll have to take a look at some of her works. Sounds interesting!
She is great. She didn't get the chaired professorship; it went to the younger and flashier Paul Julian Smith (the god of theory's gift to comedia studies).
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