Felipe Valencia

• Early modern Spanish literature

• Colonial Latin American literature

• Poetry

• Theory of the lyric

• Melancholy

• Theories of gender

• Gender violence

• Tragedy

• Renaissance poetics and rhetoric

• Early modern medicine

• Pastoral

• Luis de Góngora

• Miguel de Cervantes

• Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

• María de Zayas

My research and teaching focus on the literature and intellectual history of early modern Spain, with an emphasis on poetry, theory of the lyric, melancholy, and sexual violence, and a secondary interest in colonial Latin America. My work also draws from cultural studies and critical theory. I am interested in the specifically early modern ways in which the women and men of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Hispanic world thought of literature—in the way they forged poetics with materials and interdisciplinary sensitivities distinct from our own. My published work has dealt with sixteenth-century Spanish lyric and epic poetry, sixteenth-century political tragedy, pastoral, the early works of Miguel de Cervantes, and the poetry of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

 

My forthcoming first book, The Melancholy Void: Lyric and Masculinity in the Age of Góngora (University of Nebraska Press, 2021) contends that at the turn of the seventeenth century, partly as a response to the rising prestige and commercial success of epic, partly enabled by the idea of melancholy—which had gained great importance throughout Europe during the sixteenth century when it came to think about the physical, ethical, social, and political stakes of creativity—several Spanish poets conceived lyric as a melancholy and masculinist discourse that sings of and perpetrates symbolic violence against the female beloved. The Melancholy Void examines the centrality of gender violence and anxieties about feminization in connection with lyric utterance in influential texts such as La Araucana (1569-1589) by Alonso de Ercilla, Algunas obras (1582) by Fernando de Herrera, and the Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea (1612) and the Soledades (1613-1614) by Luis de Góngora, but also in a lesser-known collection of lyric such as Versos (1612) by Juan de Arguijo, and the pastoral romance La Galatea (1585), the first printed work by Miguel de Cervantes. Through the study of these texts, which offer a wide sampling of styles, themes, and traditions, The Melancholy Void addresses four problems in the scholarship of early modern Spanish poetry: what was the response to and contribution from Spanish poetry to the fledgling theory of the lyric in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Europe, and what consequences did this turn to theory have for Spanish lyric? How did the rise of Spanish epic at that time affect Spanish lyric? What was the impact on Spanish poetry of the heightened interest in melancholy across Europe at the turn of the seventeenth century, so evident in works from other genres, for instance Don Quijote and El médico de su honra? And last, but not least, what was the role of gender violence and the construction of masculinity in key texts of the Spanish poetic tradition, especially in love poetry?

 

Currently I am at work on two book projects and three shorter essays. The first book project is a single-authored monograph, titled A Companion to Luis de Góngora, which aims to provide a broad public—ranging from advanced undergraduates to scholars in early modern Hispanic studies—with an accessible, reliable, and substantial discussion of the verse of Luis de Góngora (1561-1627) and its impact on Hispanic poetry of the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. The second is a collection of essays, co-edited with Professor Elizabeth Rhodes, on the hiddenness of sexual violence in early modern Hispanic literature.

 

A third book project, rather long-term, is a single-authored monograph, titled The Matter with Angelica in Early Modern Spanish Literature, that will examine the issues surrounding gender, ethnicity, sincerity, and satire that Angelica, the character from Boiardo and Ariosto’s epics, raises in Aldana’s “Medoro y Angélica,” Luis Barahona de Soto’s Las lágrimas de Angélica, Lope de Vega’s La hermosura de Angélica, and Cervantes’s La casa de los celos and Don Quijote.

 

As to the shorter essays, one is a long article on melancholy, rape, and the gendering of poetics in the Desengaños amorosos (1647) by María de Zayas. Another, written in collaboration with Professor Imogen Choi, addresses Alonso de Ercilla’s engagement with neo-Senecan tragedy in the third part of La Araucana (1589-90). A third essay, intended for the volume On the Uses and Abuses of Early Modern Spanish Culture edited by Chad Leahy, examines the motives and consequences of the failure of scholarship of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish poems that deploy the myth of Daphne and Apollo to recognize the rape at its core.

 

Born in Colombia of Colombian parents, I also grew up in Spain and the United States. I am a citizen of all three countries and an immigrant above all.

Peer-reviewed monographs

Valencia, Felipe. The Melancholy Void: Lyric and Masculinity in the Age of Góngora. University of Nebraska Press, 2021.

 

Peer-reviewed articles

Valencia, Felipe. “Sincerity, Fiction, and the Space of Lyric in the Silerio Episode of La Galatea (1585) by Miguel de Cervantes.” Hispanic Review, vol. 88, no. 2, 2020, pp. 111-32.

Valencia, Felipe. “The Female Body of Sor Juana's Subject and the Language of Gongorism in Epinicio al virrey conde de Galve (1691).” Theory Now, vol. 2, no. 1, 2019, pp. 103-19.

Valencia, Felipe. “‘Amorosa violencia’: Sor Juana’s Theory of the Lyric.” Sor Juana y su lírica menor, edited by Francisco Ramírez Santacruz, special issue of Romance Notes, vol. 58, no. 2, 2018, pp. 299-310.

Valencia, Felipe. “Furor, industria y límites de la palabra poética en La Numancia (1585) de Cervantes.” El teatro profano del siglo XVI, edited by Julio Vélez-Sainz, special issue of Criticón, vol. 126, 2016, pp. 97-110.

Valencia, Felipe. “‘No se puede reducir a continuado término’: Cervantes and the Poetic Persona.” Calíope: Journal of the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry, vol. 21, no. 1, 2016, pp. 81-106.

Valencia, Felipe. “Las ‘muchas (aunque bárbaras)’ voces líricas de La Araucana y la índole poética de una ‘historia verdadera’.” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, vol. 49, no. 1, 2015, pp. 147-71.

Valencia, Felipe. “‘Acoged blandamente mi suspiro’: El beso de almas en la poesía petrarquista española del siglo XVI.” Dicenda: Cuadernos de Filología Hispánica, vol. 26, 2008, pp. 259-90.

Book reviews in academic journals

Valencia, Felipe. Review of The Potency of Pastoral in the Hispanic Baroque, by Anne Holloway. Bulletin of the Comediantes, vol. 72, no. 1, 2020, pp. 157-59.

Valencia, Felipe. Review of Love in the Poetry of Francisco de Aldana: Beyond Neoplatonism, by Paul Joseph Lennon. Creneida: Anuario de Literaturas Hispánicas, vol. 8, 2020, pp. 353-58.

Valencia, Felipe. Review of Poesía y materialidad, edited by Albert Lloret and Miguel Martínez. Ecdotica, vol. 16, 2019, pp. 285-91.

Valencia, Felipe. Review of Garcilaso de la Vega and the Material Culture of Renaissance Europe, by Mary E. Barnard. Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures, vol. 71, no. 2, 2017, pp. 108-11.

Valencia, Felipe. Review of Love Poetry in the Spanish Golden Age: Eros, Eris and Empire, by Isabel Torres. Revista de estudios hispánicos, vol. 48, no. 3, 2014, pp. 43-46.

Valencia, Felipe. Review of Baroque Horrors: Roots of the Fantastic in the Age of Curiosities, by David R. Castillo, and Hyperboles: The Rhetoric of Excess in Baroque Literature and Thought, by Christopher D. Johnson. Calíope: Journal of the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry, vol. 18, no. 3, 2013, pp. 165-70.

Valencia, Felipe. Review of An Erotic Philology of Golden Age Spain, by Adrienne Laskier Martín. Dicenda: Cuadernos de Filología Hispánica, vol. 29, 2011, pp. 331-33.

My teaching combines introductory courses to the Spanish major and minor, surveys, and advanced courses on special topics. I have also taught literature courses in English (on Don Quijote and on colonial Latin American texts in a Native American and European context) and courses throughout the language sequence in a liberal arts setting. At Utah State, each semester I teach an introduction to Hispanic literature and literary analysis for Spanish majors and minors, and each spring I offer a survey of medieval and early modern Spanish literature. In the fall I teach an advanced topics course. So far this course has been dedicated to Cervantes’s Don Quijote, where we read the book in full and place it in its historical and literary context while also looking ahead to the theory of the novel; to melancholy, where we combine readings in the dazzling tradition on melancholy (from the Pseudo-Aristotle to Freud, including Cicero, John Cassian, Ficino, Huarte de San Juan, Agamben, and Schiesari) and early modern Spanish plays and novellas, such as Lope’s El caballero de Olmedo, Calderón’s La vida es sueño and El medico de su honra, Zayas’s “La inocencia castigada” and “Estragos que causa el vicio,” and Tirso’s El condenado por desconfiado, among others; and to early modern Spanish poetry, where we take six deep dives into as many clusters: cancionero poetry, the lyric of Garcilaso, the mystical canticle of San Juan de la Cruz, the New World epic of Alonso de Ercilla, poetry written by women in the seventeenth century, and the verse of Luis de Góngora. In the future, I plan to offer advanced topics courses on Góngora’s poetry; and on dialogues between twenty-first-century Spain and the Spanish Golden Age, where we combine Velázquez’s Las meninas and Santiago García and Javier Olivares’s graphic novel, Cervantes’s Rinconete y Cortadillo and Alberto Rodríguez and Rafael Cobos’s TV show La peste, or the Inquisitorial trial of Elena/Eleno de Céspedes and Cabello/Carceller’s mixed media project Un presente sin memoria: A/O (Caso Céspedes).

On Access Utah of Utah Public Radio to discuss “Supreme Stakes: Understanding Sexual Violence,” a teach-in on October 9, 2018 surrounding the confirmation of Associate Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh: https://www.upr.org/post/supreme-stakes-understanding-sexual-violence-access-utah-and-utah-women-2020