Teaching Spanish Golden Age: An Alternative

Author(s): Donald T. Dietz

Source: The Modern Language Journal, Vol. 60, No. 5/6 (Sep. - Oct., 1976), pp. 275-278
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the National Federation of Modern Language Teachers
Associations
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/324598
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Teaching

Spanish
A

Golden

Age:

ternative

DONALD T. DIETZ, Texas Technological

MY

ARTICLE, "Literature and Relevance:

Diary of a Spanish Novel Course" (MLJ,
1972), presents a day by day record of what
actually took place in one of my classes in
an attempt to illustrate how literature may be
made alive and relevant to the contemporary
student. The article suggests that the teacher
begin the study of literature with the students
themselves and not with the life of the author,
nor with the sociological, historical, or psychological background of the work itself. In short,
the teacher of literature must motivate the students to speak in the foreign language concerning things with which they relate; he must
aid the students to experience affectively in their
own lives what they are only reading in the
literary work.
The Spanish novel course described in the
"Diary" was my first attempt to use the affective
approach to teach literature. I had chosen as
reading material for the class several Spanish
novels, all of modern or Post-Civil War vintage
and thus, I found relatively little difficulty in
getting the students to relate their contemporary
experiences with the themes of the novels. The
class considered issues such as disillusionment
and suicide in Baroja's El arbol de la ciencia;
war and violence and their effect on youth in
Goytisolo's El duelo en el paraiso; religious crisis
and struggle for immortality in Unamuno's San
Manuel Bueno, martir; the search for self-identity and self-realization in Laforet's Nada;
human sexuality and the human encounter in
Francisco Ayala's El rapto. The question always
remained in my mind whether or not this same
methodology could be employed to teach noncontemporary works, literature from periods
whose very mention seem to turn off students,
names such as Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque.

University

Could students be led to experience in everyday

life today what was written in the literature of
yesterday? In this present article I describe my
efforts to teach Spanish Golden Age literature of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries through
the same affective approach employed in my
novel course.2
The course was the second part of a three-part
survey of Spanish literature at the undergraduate-upper division level which I taught during
the Winter quarter. In the Fall quarter which
preceded, the students covered the Medieval and
early Renaissance period to about 1500 with
another instructor. During the Spring quarter
which followed, they considered the eighteenth,
nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.
From the onset, I decided that I would employ
the same teaching technique in the classroom
that I had successfully used in instructing the
novel course. The students would be given a
reasonable amount of time to complete each
reading assignment but we would seldom, if
ever, spend the class time discussing the text. I
encouraged them to work out difficult passages
among themselves before or after class, or, with
me. Class time would be devoted as much as
possible to free and open dialog in Spanish. The
students would be expected to participate
actively in the discussions and to bring in articles
from newspapers and magazines which relate to
the topic under consideration. They would also
be asked to share with one another relevant
'Donald T. Dietz, "Literature and Relevance: Diary of a
Spanish Novel Course," The Modern LanguageJournal, LVI
(May, 1972), pp. 206-303.
2For an account of an attempt to teach Medieval English
literature through the affective approach see Stanley J.
Kahrl's "Pathways to the Eighth Sphere," Indiana Social
Studies Quarterly, XXIV (Winter, 1971-72), pp. 66-73.
275

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276

DONALD T. DIETZ

experiences from their everyday living such as

movies, plays, chats with parents and friends in
the dorm and at home. There would be no
exams in the course. The grades would be based
on their contribution to the human experience in
the classroom and on the papers they would
write from time to time during the term. Concerning their papers (in which they would be
asked to express their views on certain subjects
under consideration in the class such as love,
death, etc.) I emphasized that what they thought
was not as important as that they thought and
that they were able to express and develop their
ideas coherently in Spanish. In other words, no
matter how apparently trivial or different their
ideas were, they would not be laughed at; they
would be regarded as valid and sincere expressions of a personally honest and creative mind.
Since this was a survey course I felt obligated
to expose the students to what are traditionally
considered the major works in the Golden Age.
At first, I thought it would be difficult to cover
adequately the traditional material and to conduct the class within the framework of the new
methodology. Much to my satisfaction, however,
I found that these two objectiveswere not incompatible if, on the one hand, I put aside the
traditional chronological or genre approaches to
the teaching of Golden Age literature; and on
the other, I treated the works thematically.3
Therefore, instead of beginning the course with
a consideration of pre-Lopean drama, or even
with Lope himself, I chose to begin the course
with Tirso and his El Burlador de Sevilla. The
obvious interest of the Don Juan theme to the
contemporary student with all its ramifications
of the interpersonal relationship (love, sex, and
the human encounter) served as stimulus for
class participation and an excellent beginning
for the course.4 After several periods of very free
and animated discussionin Spanish on the above
themes from Tirso's famous work, we then
shifted gears from the theater to poetry. Still
working within the general framework of the
love motif, the students readily grasped the
significant contrast found in the violent and
passionate encounters of the romantic Don Juan
and the subdued and measured lamentations of
the neoplatonic Salicio and Nemeroso in the
idyllic poetry of Garcilaso's "Egloga primera."
Our encounter with the poetry of Fray Luis de

Leon and San Juan de la Cruz was very contemporary. The stage having been set (with Garcilaso) for a consideration of nature, we now
focused on the beatus ille motif. Concurrent with
our reading of such poems as "La vida retirada,"
"Oda a Francisco Salinas," "Noche oscura," the
students expressed their concern with pollution,
the needless waste of natural resources and the
disappearance of wilderness areas. We also dwelt
on the now generation's penchant for orientalism, spiritualism found in books and movies and
in phenomena such as yoga, etc. In general, the
class saw the mystics' withdrawal from society as
an old expression of modern day's escapism in
hippie-yippie cults, liquor, and drugs.5
From the poetry of the mystics we returned to
drama, Lope de Vega's Fuenteovejuna in which
the students found new and fertile motifs upon
which to center their attention. The students
decided that one of the central themes of
Fuenteovejuna is the individual versus the establishment. They were also attracted to Lope's
spirit of democracy and his concern for the
individual which the students equated as their
concern for "the little guy," the Black in the
ghetto, and the Chicano in the lettuce patch.
The role of women in today's society was also a
topic of discussion. It was here I showed how
Lope's respect for the rebel and his own creativity as an artist, his dare-to-be-different attitude are reflected in his plays and in the new
manner in which he wrote them, creating a new
aesthetic. I assigned excerpts from Lope's Arte
nuevo de hacer comedias and impressed upon
the students Lope's innovative role in Spanish
theater.
3EditheJ. Potter speaking of the traditional survey course
states: "Often a pioneer of chronology, it is geared too much
toward the past and lacks a certain appeal to undergraduates
who seek studies about the contemporary world." See her
article, "Revitalization of Foreign Language Programs in
Higher Education," Foreign Language Annals, V. (December, 1971), p. 208.
4For a brief but comprehensive insight into the various
aspects of Don Juan's character see Gerald E. Wade's "The
Character of Tirso's Don Juan" in the introduction to his El
Burlador de Sevilla y Convidado de piedra (New York:
Charles Scribner'sSons, 1969), pp. 41-53.
5The Spanish poet, Pedro Salinas, saw the writings of Fray
Luis de Leon and San Juan de la Cruz as an escape from the
hustle and bustle of the real world. See his Reality and the
Poet in Spanish Poetry (Baltimore: TheJohns Hopkins Press,
1966), especially pp. 97-128.

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TEACHING SPANISH GOLDEN AGE: AN ALTERNATIVE

Two plays by Ruiz de Alarc6n were next. The

class read the always popular Las paredes oyen
and La verdad sospechosa. In the treatment of
the latter play, the students saw in the father-son
relationship of Don Garcia and Don Beltran the
age-old problem of the generation gap which
was the topic for several classes.6 In addition,
both of these plays functioned as sort of a bridge
for the next theme of discussion, as I was setting
the stage for a major motif in Spanish literature,
one which would involve the next two literary
works to be read in class and one on which we
would spend a great deal of time-fantasy versus
reality. I always begin this important theme by
having the students confess to their latest lie,
usually it is a "white" one, and then I ask them to
reflect on why they lied. We spent two or three
classes thrashing out the function of the mentira.
At this point, I requested that the students
read the initial chapters of the Quijote. I also
assigned other chapters in which the fantasyreality theme is particularly evident, such as the
famous windmill scene, and especially the
famous incidents at the inn which are important
not only to the fantasy-reality theme but also to
the Broadway adaptation of Cervantes' work.7
We ended our section on the Quijote by studying
the music and lyrics of Man of La Mancha and
we considered the popularity of the song "The
Impossible Dream" which the students put into
Spanish.
The culminating discussion on fantasy-reality
took place while we read Calderon de la Barca's
La vida es sueno. Could it be that since we
constantly fabricate little "white lies" and since
we always seem to be engaged at playing
"games," our present life is actually one constant
fantasy or dream? If so, who is to say what is
real? Is fantasy part of reality and is this not a
contradiction in terms? I then introduced the
baroque concepts of desengafo and disillusionment. We studied the exaggerated use of metaphor, simile, and ornate language and we saw in
them an attempt by the seventeenth century
poets to play "artistic games" in an effort to cope
with a difficult and illusive reality. At this point,
I had the students read some very simple poems
by Quevedo and Gongora which reflect desengaho and the idea of tempusfugit in which every
living thing (such as the rose and the flower)
eventually withers and perishes.8 This led us

277

neatly into the last theme of the course--death

and dying. The students reacted to their own
feelings on death and reflected upon the attitudes of American society concerning the same.
Discussion ended with a general consideration of
the disappearance of civilization, or the plausibility of total annihilation through the bomb,
over-population, air pollution, or all three.
During the ten weeks of the course, the students wrote in Spanish a number of small papers
on topics related to discussion in class and the
readings. The objectives of the written exercises
were twofold, to make the students write in the
language and to encourage them to relate creatively their reading of Golden Age literature to
their own contemporary experiences. Customarily topics on which students write are not preconceived by me; they arise more or less spontaneously from considerations in class and from
the natural course of events in the classroom.
The very first session with the class was a general
warm-up for Tirso's play and the discussion in
the classroom led me to ask the students to jot
down in Spanish their preconceived notion of
what is meant by a DonJuan type. Subsequently,
during the several classes that followed on the
Burlador de Sevilla, students expressed their
ideas in two other written exercises: one entitled
"My Idea of Perfect Love," another called
"Tirso's Play and I." Upon reading Fray Luis de
Leon's "Vida retirada" and his "Oda a Pedro
Salinas," the students compared in a brief paper
6For a discussion of the generation gap as a motif in
another Golden Age drama see Everett W. Hesse's article
"Lope's La discreta enamorada and the Generation Gap,"
Hispanbfila 44 (1972), pp. 1-12.
7For one of the best studies of the problem of fantasyreality theme in the Quijote see Salvador de Madariaga's
Guza del lector del "Quijote" (Buenos Aires: Editorial
Sudamericana, 1943). The English version is entitled Don
Quijote: An IntroductoryEssayon Psychology (London: The
Oxford University Press, 1961).
8Foran excellent selection of poetry by Quevedo, G6ngora,
and other Golden Age writers about time, change, disillusionment, and death see Bruce Wardropper's Spanish
Poetry of the Golden Age (New York: Appleton-CenturyCrofts, 1971), especially pp. 75-92. Poems such as "A una
rosa," "Alegorfa de la brevedad de las cosas humanas," "De
la brevedad enganosa de la vida" by Gongora, and "Rosal
menos presuncion," "Todo tras sf lo Ileva el aniobreve," "A
Roma sepultada en sus ruinas"by Quevedo, are neatly categorized and are accompanied by helpful notes and commentaries.

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278

RENATE A. SCHULZ

the mystic's poems with contemporary poetry

and musical lyrics. Similar projects were written
as a result of our discussion in class on Lope's
Fuenteovejuna and Ruiz de Alarcon's La verdad
sospechosa in which students related the themes
of the individual against society and the generation gap to their own life. The two writing assignments that occurred from the reading of Cervantes' Quijote were especially exciting and stimulating for the class. For one paper, the students
chose some individual from their own acquaintances who was to them the embodiment of the
quixotic; in another, they compared Don Quijote with Christ. In the last section of the course,
the students expressed their personal views on
death and immortality and reacted to society's
usual attitude toward death. The final exam
itself was of the take-home kind in which the
students were asked to develop in Spanish an
essay on how Golden Age sixteenth-and-seventeenth century literature could be meaningful
and relevant to contemporary life. The final
exam served as a recapitulation of the develop-

ment and goal of the entire course and might

well be considered the raison d'etre of this article.
This article illustrates how the affective or
Socratic approach successfully used to teach
contemporary literature can likewise be applied
to literature from the past. By diminishing the
traditional role of chronology with its thrust on
the historical and sociological and by focusing
instead on the human element in literature with
its emphasis on the interpersonal and archetypal
such as the beatus ille, fantasy versus reality,
death, etc., seemingly irrelevant literary periods
such as the Spanish Golden Age can acquire a
new and significant dimension for the contemporary student. A literary work from any epoch,
whether present or past, if it is worthy of being
read and studied by students in the humanities,
can only survive because it is considered a successful artistic expression of some human concern. The human in literature is that element
common to all men which transcends time and,
therefore, which most easily bridges the past
with the present.

ConferenceReports
Sprit of '76:Freedomto Communicate:
The 1976 CentralStatesConference
RENATEA. SCHULZ,State University College of New York at Buffalo
THE EIGHTH ANNUAL meeting of the Central
States Conference on the Teaching of Foreign
Languages was held at the Detroit-Cadillac Hotel in
Detroit, Michigan from April 22-24, 1976. Constance
Knop (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Program
Chairperson for the Conference, organized an outstanding program consisting of three general sessions,
twenty-one special interest sessions, six language sessions (German, French, Spanish, Latin, English as a
Second Language, and Slavic languages), and six
workshops. Naida Dostal (Detroit Public Schools)
served as Local Chairperson, assuring the smooth
organization of the Conference with the help of a competent team of Michigan foreign language teachers.
Each conference participant received a copy of the
published conference proceedings entitled Teaching

for Communication in the Foreign Language Classroom (National Textbook Company, 1976) as part of
his registration fee. The proceedings book contains
ten selected papers representative of the theme and
spirit of the Conference. As was the case with the past
three proceeding books, Student Motivation and the
Foreign Language Teacher (National Textbook Company, 1973), Careers, Communication and Culture in
Foreign Language Teaching (National Textbook
Company, 1974), and The Culture Revolution in Foreign Language Teaching (National Textbook Company, 1975), all speakerswere invited to submit a written version of their presentation to a panel of readers
who made the final selection for publication.
Reflecting our nation's 200th birthday celebration,
the theme selected for this year's Conference was

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