Américo Castro

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In this Spanish name, the family name is Castro.
File:AMERICO CASTRO 1885 CRITICO ESPAÑOL (13451217465).jpg
Américo Castro

Américo Castro Quesada (4 May 1885 – 25 July 1972) was a Spanish philologist, cervantist and cultural historian belonging to the generation of 14 or noucentisme.[1]

Biography

Américo Castro was born to Spanish parents on May 4, 1885, in Cantagalo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where his parents owned a business, and where he spent his first five years. In 1890 his parents returned to Spain and bought some land in the Granada municipality of Huétor-Tájar.

He graduated in Letters and Law at the University of Granada in 1904, and did his doctorate in Madrid, where he was a disciple of Ramón Menéndez Pidal; he then went to France to study at the Sorbonne (1905–1907) and, having been orphaned, had to support himself by giving Spanish lessons in Paris. He also studied in Germany, but returned to Madrid in order to do his military service, and then began to collaborate with Ramón Menéndez Pidal in the Center for Historical Studies, as well as with the Free Institution of Education, with whose group he was related.

In 1910 he helped organize the Center for Historical Studies in Madrid, serving as head of the lexicography department; he would later remain linked to this institution even after he became professor of History of the Spanish language at the Madrilenian university in 1915. Two years earlier he had adhered to the manifesto published in 1913 by Ortega y Gasset in defense of a way out of "overcoming the 1890s pessimism" for Spain, which definitively linked him to noucentisme. He also continued to strengthen his ties with Ramón Menéndez Pidal, as well as with Francisco Giner de los Ríos, approaching Krausist ideas. He also frequented José María de Cossío, the novelist Benjamín Jarnés, the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, and the painter Joaquín Sorolla. He was married to Carmen Madinaveitia, daughter of the Guipuzcoan doctor Juan Madinaveitia Ortiz de Zárate, who was closely linked to Krausism. He was the father of the professor Carmen Castro Madinaveitia.

Castro traveled lecturing in Europe and America, and participated in the founding of the Revista de Filología Española, where he published some of his most important studies. During this period he translated Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke, prepared an edition — together with Federico de Onís — of the Fueros leoneses (1916), and wrote an important introduction to Tirso de Molina's The Trickster of Seville (1922). His interest in Erasmism resulted in one of his most important studies, El pensamiento de Cervantes (1925), where he analyzes the relationship of the author of Don Quixote with the Renaissance and this branch of eclectic Humanism; also from these studies were derived two other works, Santa Teresa y otros ensayos (1929; republished in 1972 under the title Teresa la Santa y otros ensayos) and Lo hispánico y el erasmismo (1940–1942).

In 1923 he moved to Argentina, hired by the University of Buenos Aires to direct the newly created Institute of Philology of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters; as the first director, he gave it a general philological stamp, focusing on the study of literary texts, in opposition to the original project of Dean Ricardo Rojas to devote the Institute to descriptive and normative linguistic research.[2] He also taught at the Faculty and at the National University of La Plata and wrote for the newspaper La Nación.

Américo Castro was honorary professor at the universities of La Plata, Santiago de Chile, and Mexico, as well as at Columbia University in New York. As for distinctions, he was distinguished as an officer of the Legion of Honour, and was a corresponding member of the Royal Academy of the Good Writings of Barcelona.

Liberal in politics, he was appointed ambassador to Berlin in 1931, as soon as the Republic was declared. When the Civil War broke out, he went to San Sebastián, where his family was staying. As a republican, he was appointed consul in Hendaye, and from there he was able to save a good part of the diplomatic corps while San Sebastián was bombed.

In 1938 he went into exile in the United States; there he taught literature at the University of Wisconsin (1937–1939), Texas (1939–1940), and Princeton (1940–1953), where he held the chair of Spanish language and literature named after Emory L. Ford,[3] and created a school of important disciples in Hispanism who continued his ideas, such as Russell P. Sebold or Stephen Gilman.

He published in the main magazines of the Hispanic cultural exile: Realidad. Revista de Ideas, Las Españas, Los Sesenta, Cabalgata, Cuadernos del Congreso por la Libertad de la Cultura, etc.

In 1953 he was named professor emeritus at Princeton University, and spent his last years at the University of California, San Diego, on the West Coast, before returning to Spain for family reasons in 1970.

He died in Lloret de Mar of asphyxia by submersion after suffering a cardiac collapse while bathing at Fenals beach.

Works

Américo Castro commented, prefaced and annotated editions of Lope de Vega (El Isidro, La Dorotea and several comedies),[4] Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla (Cada cual lo que le toca and La viña de Nabot), Tirso de Molina (El condenado por desconfiado, El burlador de Sevilla and El vergonzoso en palacio), Quevedo (La vida del Buscón) and the Fueros leoneses de Zamora, Salamanca, Ledesma y Alba de Tormes, and has prefaced, annotated and translated Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke's Introduction to Romance Linguistics.

He published several works, especially a Vida de Lope de Vega (1919) and El pensamiento de Cervantes (1925). In the latter book, he defended Cervantes' quality as a thinker and argued that "not everything" had been said about him (this statement was a response to the words of Francisco Rodríguez Marín). His major work was España en su historia. Cristianos, moros y judíos (1948), considerably recast under the title La realidad histórica de España (1954), but also El elemento extraño en el lenguaje (1921), La enseñanza del español en España (1922), Lengua, enseñanza y literatura (1924), El nuevo Diccionario de la Academia Española (1925), Don Juan en la literatura española (1924), Juan de Mal Lara y su "Filosofía vulgar" (1923), Los prólogos al Quijote (1941), Lo hispánico y el erasmismo (1942), Antonio de Guevara (1945), Semblanzas y estudios españoles (1956), Hacia Cervantes (1958), Origen, ser y existir de los españoles (1959) and De la edad conflictiva (1961).

Castro pointed out the importance that religiosity had in Spanish culture, and specifically the Jewish and Muslim minorities that were marginalized by the dominant Christian culture. He especially studied the social aspects of this segregation in Spanish literature and its consequences through the problem of the Judeo-Converts and the Marranos, which germinated a conflictive identity and a problematic concept of Spain born in the Golden Age, which he called "conflictive Age". He pointed out the persistence of separate castes even after the massive conversions to which the reign of the Catholic Monarchs gave rise and the role played in this by the statutes of cleansing of blood. In this regard, he argued fiercely with another historian, also a Republican, Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, in one of the most vivid episodes of the so-called debate on the being of Spain.

The Spanish medievalist Eduardo Manzano Moreno was critical of Castro's historical works. Regarding the alleged harmony between Moors, Jews and Christians in the Caliphate of Córdoba, Manzano wrote that Castro had not followed the rules of historiography and had no historical evidence for the notion of a peaceful convivencia.[5] Mark R. Cohen, a professor at Princeton, also criticized the theory as a myth based on the work of Heinrich Graetz about a supposed period of peaceful coexistence, as well as the myth of a peaceful Jewish-Arab coexistence under Islam, which was only shaken by Zionism.[6] Castro's thesis of a period at least temporarily devoid of persecution is, however, supported by Bernard Lewis[7] and David Wasserstein,[8] but generalization is difficult because of marked regional differences.

Castro developed two categories to properly interpret the history of ideas in Spain:

  • The morada vital (vital dwelling place): "It can designate the fact of living before a certain horizon of possibilities and obstacles (intimate and external)" (La Realidad..., p. 109). This is the objective element, the concrete situation of occupying a human space.
  • The vividura (living functioning) or conditions of subjective consciousness with respect to the morada vital: "The way men manage their life within this abode, they become aware of living in it" (La Realidad..., pp. 109-110).

The morada vital is the environment, with its limitations, obstacles and possibilities, in which the act of living takes place; the vividura, the determined perception and position we have in front of this act.

Américo Castro was also interested in Ibero-America in Ibero-America, su presente y su pasado (1941). Other books of his are Aspectos del vivir hispánico (1949), and La realidad histórica de España (1954). His thought has inspired writers such as Juan Goytisolo, with whom he corresponded between 1968 and 1972.

In contrast to the defense of Américo Castro's thought by Hispanists trained by him at Princeton and his friend and admirer, Juan Goytisolo, it has been customary in Spain to consider Américo Castro's thought in contradiction with that of the historian Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz. In this respect, some important books are worth mentioning, such as Guillermo Araya's Evolución del pensamiento histórico de Américo Castro (1969) and El pensamiento de Américo Castro (1983), José Luis Gómez Martínez's Américo Castro y el origen de los españoles: historia de una polémica (1975) and that of Eugenio Asensio, La España imaginada de Américo Castro (1976).

A minor polemic, but also quite noisy, had to do with the Eurocentric view of the Spanish language offered in his book La peculiaridad lingüística rioplatense y su sentido histórico (1941), highly criticized by Jorge Luis Borges in an article entitled "Las alarmas del doctor Américo Castro". There Borges triesd to refute the arguments used by Castro to establish a position of inferiority of Rioplatense Spanish with respect to the other variants of the Spanish language.

Major publications

  • Vida de Lope de Vega (1919; with Hugo A. Rennert)
  • El elemento extraño en el lenguaje (1921)
  • La enseñanza del español en España (1922)
  • Juan de Mal Lara y su "Filosofía vulgar" (1923)
  • Lengua, enseñanza y literatura (1924)
  • Don Juan en la literatura española (1924)
  • El nuevo Diccionario de la Academia Española (1925)
  • El pensamiento de Cervantes (1925)
  • Santa Teresa y otros ensayos (1929)
  • Glosarios latino-españoles de la edad media (1936)
  • Los prólogos al Quijote (1941)
  • Lo hispánico y el erasmismo (1940–1942)
  • La peculiaridad lingüística rioplatense (1941)
  • Antonio de Guevara (1945)
  • España en su historia (1948; reprinted as La realidad histórica de España, 1954; 1962; 1966)
  • Aspectos del vivir hispánico (1949)
  • Hacia Cervantes (1957)
  • Santiago de España (1958)
  • Semblanzas y estudios españoles (1956)
  • Origen, ser y existir de los españoles (1959)
  • De la edad conflictiva (1961)
  • La Celestina como contienda literaria (1965)
  • Cervantes y los casticismos españoles (1967)
  • Español, palabra extranjera (1970)
  • De la España que aún no conocía (1971; 3 volumes)
  • Españoles al margen (1972)
  • Epistolario Américo Castro y Marcel Bataillon (1923-1972) (2012)

Notes

  1. ↑ Valdeón Baruque, Julio. "Américo Castro Quesada," Diccionario biográfico español.
  2. ↑ Gramuglia, Pablo Martínez (2018). "'In Search of an “Argentine Philology': The Instituto de Filología at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, 1923-1929," Philological Encounters, Vol. III, No. 1/2, pp. 34–66.
  3. ↑ King, Edmund L. (1979). "The Emory L. Ford Chair of Spanish at Princeton and Its First and Latest Incumbents," Romance Philology, Vol. XXXIII, No. 1, pp. 9–13.
  4. ↑ King, Willard F. (1988). "Américo Castro y Lope de Vega," Boletín de la Real Academia Española, Vol. LXVIII, No. 243, pp. 169–76.
  5. ↑ Manzano Moreno, Eduardo (2013). "Qurtuba: Algunas reflexiones críticas sobre el califato de Córdoba y el mito de la convivencia," Awraq, No. 7, pp. 225–46.
  6. ↑ Cohen, Mark (1994). Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
  7. ↑ Lewis, Bernard (1984). The Jews of Islam. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
  8. ↑ Wasserstein, David (1985). The Rise and Fall of the Party-Kings: Politics and Society in Islamic Spain, 1002–1086. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

References

  • Armistead, Samuel G. (2010). "Américo Castro en América." In: Sebastiaan Faber & Cristina Martínez-Carazo, eds., Contra el olvido: el exilio español en Estados Unidos. Alcalá: Universidad de Alcalá , Instituto Universitario de Investigación en Estudios Norteamericanos Benjamin Franklin, pp. 161–74.
  • Castro, Americo (1954). The Structure of Spanish History. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
  • Gómez Martínez, José Luis (1972). "Américo Castro y Sánchez-Albornoz: Dos posiciones ante el origen de los españoles," Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica, Vol. XXI, pp. 301–20.
  • Laín Entralgo, Pedro (1971). Estudios sobre la Obra de Américo Castro. Madrid: Taurus.
  • Marino, Nancy F. (1989). "Américo Castro en Houston: 1955-59," Azafea, No. 2, pp. 131–96.
  • Martín, Marina (1989). "Juan Goytisolo en duda con Américo Castro," Letras peninsulares, Vol. II, No. 2, pp. 211–24.
  • Rubia Barcia, José; Selma Margaretten (1976). Américo Castro and the Meaning of Spanish Civilization. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
  • Sicroff, Albert A. (1972). "Américo Castro and His Critics: Eugenio Asensio," Hispanic Review, Vol. XL, No, 1, pp. 1–30.
  • Sotelo Vázquez, Adolfo (1985). "Américo castro y la generación del 14," Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, No. 426, pp. 29–50.
  • Surtz, Ronald E.; Jaime Ferrán & Daniel P. Testa (1988). Américo Castro: The Impact of His Thought: Essays to Mark the Centenary of His Birth. Madison: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies.
  • Valero Moreno, Juan Miguel (2010). "Américo Castro: la invención de la tolerancia." In: Francisco Bautista Pérez & Jimena Gamba Corradine, eds., Estudios sobre la Edad Media, el Renacimiento y la temprana modernidad. San Millán de la Cogolla: CiLengua-Instituto Biblioteca Hispánica/La SEMYR/El SEMYR, pp. 393–414.

External links

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