Workshop 27

27.
The Dialogue as Structure and Strategy
in Court and Convent Literature

Organizers:

Dr. Elizabeth A. Pallitto, English, Boston University
Dr. Electa Arenal, Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Description:

We have organized our workshop in such a way as to maximize the dialogic quality of an in-depth discussion on how the Italian Tullia d’Aragona (in 1547) and the Spaniard María de San José Salazar (in 1585) addressed issues of epistemology and power through their literary dialogues. D’Aragona (15150-1556) was known as an intellectual courtesan in works by prominent authors and celebrated for her own prose and poetry. María de San José (1548-1603) was a leading follower of Saint Teresa of Avila’s in the founding of the reformed—Discalced—Carmelites and her earliest biographer. Saint Teresa referred to María as her letrera, her scholar.

The focus for our exploration will be short but exemplary excerpts from works by these two proto-feminist sixteenth-century authors who adopt, adapt, and subvert the Neo-platonic dialogue. Participants will converse on points suggested by their reading of the selected pages. Mikhail Bakhtin theorized that dialogic forms offer: “. . . the corrective of laughter and criticism to all existing straightforward genres, languages, styles, voices; to force men to experience beneath these categories a different and contradictory reality…”(The Dialogic Imagination, 59). Bakhtin provides a starting point to our inquiry; the wit and wisdom of assertions by the two authors in question, however, will allow us to illustrate and adapt his significant critical pointers to our own purposes. Consider: (1) “Socrates adopted a learning stance, whereas you are imparting lessons.” (“Tullia” to Benedetto Varchi in d’Aragona’s The Dilaogue on the Infinity of Love). (2) “Now drop all these expressions of humility,” said Justa [to an older nun, Atanasia]; I know perfectly well what you are” (in San José Salazar’s Book for the Hour of Recreation).

Questions to pose to these texts might include: What are the ways in which the dialogic form itself, encompassing a polyphony of voices and a multiplicity of points of view, is more open and inclusive than other genres? How is it particularly suited to the representation of the experience of women and other “subaltern” groups? If the group is interested we may even consider the pedagogical/curricular potential of these particular dialogues for survey courses and other electives in the humanities.

Format:

Short 10–minute introduction to the session:
Participants will introduce themselves, their work, and their interest in the workshop. We’ll ask each member of the group for a single question/comment they hope will be addressed.
Two 30-minute sections of dialogue/conversation:

1. Divide into two groups in which one discusses the dialogue which takes place in the atmosphere of the court, and the other, the dialogue whose setting is the convent.
2. Divide each group in half and create two new groups composed of half and half (half of the court group and half of the convent group).

Finally, a 20-minute wrap-up: we will go around the room to highlight some of the most provocative insights and, where appropriate, to refer back to initial questions/comments in the light of the hour of dialogue/discussion. We hope there will also be time to share thoughts on potential pedagogical and scholarly applications.

Some further questions the workshop might address:

How do the two women writers speak through the rhetorical conventions of their day?
How does the dialogue manifest polyglossia: i.e., heterogenous types of speech acts?
What is to be gained by the multiple loci of knowledge/power found in the dialogue?
What philosophical and theological notions are being interrogated in the given texts?
Can we locate epistemological perspectives specific to the dialogue form?
How is knowledge gendered in the Ciceronian subgenre of the dialogue?
How does the parodic-travestying discourse mentioned by Bakhtin create a space for dissent, for the expression of alterity of experience and being beyond the “official” reality?
How does a close focus on the texts impact upon traditional interpretations of dialogue and lead to a new perspective on women’s roles in the construction of knowledge?

Preliminary List of Readings and Images:

Arenal, Electa and Stacey Schlau, Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in their Own Works trans. Amanda Powell, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989, 36-44.
d’Aragona, Tullia, Dialogue on the Infinity of Love, trans. Rinaldina Russell and Bruce Murray, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997, 55-57, 80-83, 89-91.
Salazar, Maria de San José, Book for the Hour of Recreation, introduction and notes by Alison Weber; trans. Amanda Powell, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002, 16-17, 20-21, 87-100.
Excerpts from relevant secondary sources, theoretical and scholarly writing on the dialogue:
Bahktin, Mikhail, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist and transl. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981, 53-61.
Cox, Virginia, “Seen but not heard” in Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society. Ed. Letitzia Panizza. Oxford: European Humanities Research Centre, 2000 (5 pages, TBA).
Jones, Ann Rosalind, The Currency of Eros, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990, 79-82.