Frederick A. de Armas

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Frederick A. de Armas (born 1945) is a literary scholar, critic and novelist who is

Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor in Humanities at the University of Chicago
.

Biography

Frederick A. de Armas was born in Havana, Cuba on February 9, 1945. He attended elementary school at La Salle and when his parents moved to France, he went to boarding school at

Le Rosey
in Switzerland.

Frederick A. de Armas in November 2023

After his family lost their possessions as a result of the Cuban Revolution, he moved to the United States.[1] De Armas holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1969), and has taught at Louisiana State University (1969–1988), Pennsylvania State University (where he was Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature) (1988–2000) and has been a visiting professor at Duke University (1994).

Since 2000 he has been at the

University of Neuchatel.[2] In 2023 he received the Norman Maclean Faculty Award for his teaching and service to the University for over twenty years.[3]

Career

De Armas' publications focus on early modern Spanish literature and culture, often from a comparative perspective. His interests include the politics of astrology, magic and the Hermetic tradition,

Astraea
is in many cases a figure that serves to praise the regime. His interest in Golden Age Theater has led him to publish several book collections: The Prince in the Tower: Perceptions of "La vida es sueño" (1993), Heavenly Bodies: The Realms of "La estrella de Sevilla" (1996) and A Star-Crossed Golden Age: Myth and the Spanish Comedia (1998).

One of his main interests throughout his career has been the relationship between the verbal and the visual in early modern Spanish literature and Italian art. In recent years, this subject has become central to his research, as evinced by the book, Cervantes, Raphael and the Classics (Cambridge, 1998). This study focuses on Cervantes' most famous tragedy, La Numancia, showing how it is engaged in a conversation with classical authors of Greece and Rome, especially through the interpretations of antiquity presented by the artist Raphael. This book was followed by the collections Writing for the Eyes in the Spanish Golden Age (2004) and Ekphrasis in the Age of Cervantes (2005). In the introduction to this last collection he establishes a typology of ekphrasis, including definitions for allusive, collectionist, descriptive, dramatic, interpolated, narrative, shaping, and veiled ekphrasis, as well as meta-ekphrasis and ur-ekphrasis. He applies these terms in his book: Quixotic Frescoes. Cervantes and Italian Art (Toronto, 2006).

After his book on Cervantes and Italian art, he co-edited two collections on Spanish Golden Age theater. The first one, on tragedy, is entitled Hacia la tragedia: Lecturas para un nuevo milenio (Madrid, 2008); and the second one, on a specific writer is called Calderón: del manuscrito a la escena (2011). At the same time, he continues to work on Cervantes, having published an edited volume, Ovid in the Age of Cervantes (2010). His Don Quixote among the Saracens: Clashes of Civilizations and Literary Genres (2011) has received the American Publishers' Association PROSE Award in Literature, Honorable Mention (2011).

clash of civilizations and asks: Why is Don Quixote
at peace among the Saracens? The second has to do with Don Quixote as an "imperial" vehicle for the assimilation or destruction of literary genres.

He co-edited Women Warriors in Early Modern Spain (2019), an essay collection dedicated to the scholarly work of Bárbara Mujica,[9] a volume that attests to his continuing interest in issues of proto-feminism in the Iberian Peninsula. A brief excursus into the relations between China and Spain followed, Faraway Settings: Chinese and Spanish theaters of the 16th and 17th Centuries (2019). Shortly after penning a co-edited collection, The Gastronomical Arts in Spain: Food and Etiquette (2022), he published a book prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic,Cervantes' Architectures The Dangers Outside (2022). The volume takes as a point of departure Yi-Fu Tuan's ideas of space as freedom and danger versus place as safety, and how this opposition plays out in Cervantes' fiction.

Starting around 2008 De Armas became increasingly interested in the cultural and literary productions of the maternal side of his family, publishing essays on Ana Galdós, Domingo A. Galdós and

transvestite and in the belief that some revolutionaries look like wolves, thus espousing the belief in the werewolf [12]

Bibliography

Bibliography: fiction

See also

References

  1. ^ See his autobiography included in a volume entitled ¿Por qué España? Memorias del hispanismo estadounidense, eds. Anna Caballe Masrorroll and Randolph D. Pope. Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2015.
  2. ^ https://www.unine.ch/unine/home/luniversite/Evenements/dies-academicus/dies-academicus-2018.html
  3. ^ https://news.uchicago.edu/taxonomy/term/33857
  4. ^ Carrie L. Ruiz, "Oscillating trends: A Reflection of the Status of Seventeenth-Century Studies Today: Interview of Frederick A. de Armas" Transitions. Journal of Franco-Iberian Studies 5 (2009), pp. 9-25
  5. ^ The Perception of Women in Spanish Theater of the Golden Age. Ed. Anita K. Stoll and Dawn L. Smith. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1991, p. 19
  6. ^ Santiago Fernández Mosquera, "El significado de las primeras fiestas cortesanas de Calderón," Calderón y el pensamiento ideológico y cultural de su época: XIV Coloquio Anglogermano sobre Calderón, eds., Manfred Tietz y Gero Arnscheidt, Stuttgart, Steiner, 2008, p.224.
  7. ^ Margaret Rich Greer, The Play of Power. Mythological Court Dramas of Calderón de la Barca.Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991, pp. 88ff.
  8. ^ "2011 Award Winners".
  9. ^ Reviews of Women Warriors in Early Modern Spain
  10. ^ Frederick A. de Armas, "Una conversación trasatlántica: Pérez Galdós y el cubano Domingo A. Galdós en La estrella de Panamá (1889-1902)" Revista de Literatura77.154 (2015): 371-97. https://doi.org/10.3989/revliteratura.2015.02.002
  11. ^ Jose María Pozuelo Yvancos, "El abra del Yumuri: La Habana antes del fin," ABC Cultural, enero 2017. http://www.abc.es/cultura/cultural/abci-abra-yumuri-habana-antes-201701130220_noticia.html
  12. ^ "Para leer: "Sinfonía salvaje" de Frederick A. De Armas". September 17, 2019.

Further reading