Poetica y hermeneutica en la obra castellana de Fray Luis de Leon
Creators: name: Alcántara-Mejía, José Ramón
Publisher: name: University of British Columbia
Year: 2008

description: This thesis examines the Castilian work of Fray Luis de Leon from the perspective of phenomenological hermeneutics as a literary approach. I discuss the lack of serious studies on 16th Century Spanish poetic theory, and propose that Fray Luis de Leon’s work offers a model of literary theory and creation that can be considered a philosophical poetics, in contrast to the rhetorical approach of Renaissance humanistic poetics. I examine the formation of Fray Luis de Leon’s literary work as a process that follows four stages of both hermeneutic understanding and literary creation. I examine the first stage in his translations of Horace and Virgil, his rendering of Tuscan lyric love poetry, and his interpretation of the Psalms. In the literary structuring of his work, I identify images and poetic devices he later expands into all his work. Simultaneously, I suggest that throughout his work, Fray Luis understood the role of language in its literary function as a way to describe reality. In stage two, I analyze Fray Luis de Leon’s biblical expositions, confirming the first stage findings. Fray Luis develops the meaning of poetic configuration, relating it to the literary function of Scripture. The interplay between the biblical text and his reflection on his own reality, forms a sub-text representing a true literary theory. First he attempts a practical literary work in La perfecta casada, a biblical commentary with clear literary pretensions. I extensively analyze Fray Luis de Leon’s main prose work, De los nombres de Cristo as a literary structure resulting from his reflection on literature’s role in understanding reality. Therefore, I approach this important work as literature, not simply as a philosophical treatise or as piece of superb writing. I use Aristotle’s categories, interpreted by Northrop Frye and Paul Ricoeur. Following Frye, literature is a symbolic, verbal structure with different levels of meaning; a structure which in the process of its configuration, gives understanding to the poet and reveals reality. Ricoeur suggests, following Augustine and Aristotle, that the configurating process attempts to redescribe reality to understand it. De los nombres thus expresses the poet’s understanding and insight into the configurative process of the Scriptures, offering it as a way to produce in the reader a poetic experience that is the true experience of reality’s structure. Fray Luis organizes the verbal structures of his work, the “nombres” (names), so the characters of his dialogue, as they discuss the meaning of the names, themselves go through different stages of understanding while literally moving through a physical setting configured by language symbolic of mythical ascent and descent. a practical literary work in La perfecta casada, a biblical commentary with clear literary pretensions. I extensively analyze Fray Luis de Leon’s main prose work, De los nombres de Cristo as a literary structure resulting from his reflection on literature’s role in understanding reality. Therefore, I approach this important work as literature, not simply as a philosophical treatise or as piece of superb writing. I use Aristotle’s categories, interpreted by Northrop Frye and Paul Ricoeur. Following Frye, literature is a symbolic, verbal structure with different levels of meaning; a structure which in the process of its configuration, gives understanding to the poet and reveals reality. Ricoeur suggests, following Augustine and Aristotle, that the configurating process attempts to redescribe reality to understand it. De los nombres thus expresses the poet’s understanding and insight into the configurative process of the Scriptures, offering it as a way to produce in the reader a poetic experience that is the true experience of reality’s structure. Fray Luis organizes the verbal structures of his work, the “nombres” (names), so the characters of his dialogue, as they discuss the meaning of the names, themselves go through different stages of understanding while literally moving through a physical setting configured by language symbolic of mythical ascent and descent.