Art Of The State: The “Academias Literarias” As Sites Of Symbolic Economies In Golden Age Spain

Abstract

The analysis of economic exchanges shows that the notion of the pure symbol, in the sense of a disaffected substitute that can be perfectly arbitrary, conventional, and unmotivated, emerges of its own accord from circulation and thus from the intensification of social exchanges.Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies Estos fueron los versos que se pudieron leer; los demás, por estar carcomida la letra, se entregaron a un académico para que por conjeturas los declarase. Tiénese noticia que lo ha hecho, a costa de muchas vigilias y mucho trabajo . . . Miguel de Cervantes, Don QuixoteTo liferated Cervantes' in early likely modern satisfaction, Spain, the and academias which he literarias gleefully that paro-pro-liferated in early modern Spain, and which he gleefully parodied under the parochial rubric of the "Academia de Argamasilla," have been all but forgotten by modern academics. Aside from the research carried out by Aurora Egido, who has focused mainly on the Aragonese academies, the last major studies, by José Sánchez and Willard F. King, date back more than thirty years. While essential sources of the varieties of literary groups established throughout Spain, these studies in large part neglect the academies' affiliations and associations with the burgeoning centers of power and their competitive positionings during the period. Indeed, while King acknowledges the academies as "a powerful force in the background of the cultural scene," she perceives them as "private" despite their overwhelmingly public function and their patronage by major political figures ("The Academies" 367).In this essay I address the academies' historical and sociopolitical determinants in order to situate them within a more broadly construed cultural field, whose boundaries separating the public

Simposio, Arcadia y Academia Antártica

“…Sin embargo, considero que en La Galatea el problema estructural y temático tiene en la tradición clásica del simposio una fuente no solamente más antigua y de mayor prestigio, sino que es un campo de proyecciones idealizantes y utópicas respecto a la comunicación intelectual muy superior al contexto oportunista, intrigante, competitivo, cortesano, adulador, burocrático y, muchas veces, mediocre y frustrante, de las academias contemporáneas a Cervantes (Cfr. Sánchez, 1961;King, 1963;Cruz, 1995). Recuérdese las parodias de academias que Cervantes realizó en el Coloquio de los perros y en la primera parte del Quijote.…”