Voyage – shipwreck – captivity. Compassion and autobiography in Early Modern Iberia

• Applicant: Dr. Dirk Brunke
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 494081746

The project is based on the observation that Early Modern narrative, in particular a corpus of texts that comprises autobiographical texts of the era of Spanish and Portuguese expansion, features a specific configuration of compassion. The project analysis focuses on voyage, shipwreck and captivity reports of the expansion period, which unfold stories of affliction that aim at arousing pity. Partly explicitly, partly implicitly, these narratives determine the triggering of compassion as an intended aesthetic effect, i.e. they pursue an affective rhetoric which so far has been only theorized and examined for Early Modern Europe with respect to the genre of tragedy and elegy and, in the ecclesiastical context, the topic of passion. In comparison to the rest of Europe, the Spanish and Portuguese literary system of Early Modern Times is in so far different as – due to the dramatist Lope de Vega, who concedes no privileged relevance to the evocation of pity in his paradigmatic poetic Arte nuevo (1609) – there is a striking absence of compassion on the theatre stage and in the poetological discourse. This blank space of dramatic pity is contrary to a conspicuous use of compassion in narrative. In historical perspective, the aforementioned stories of affliction acknowledge the centrality of misery familiar from the religious context of the (com-)passio and the devotio moderna, i.e. the piety movement which, since the Middle Ages, has aspired to strengthen faith (edificatio) also by compassionately reliving the Passion of Christ. In contrast to this specifically religious function of compassion, however, the authors of the texts in question do not make use of their experiences of distress to strengthen their faith, but they employ them pragmatically for individual economic purposes. Due to these pragmatic considerations, the affective rhetoric of pity finds its way into the genre of the report, whose otherwise 'sober' character can be regarded as affect-free. The project therefore explores the culture-generating paradigm of compassion in a form specific to the Iberian Early Modern period, namely the evocation of compassion with narrative means in autobiographical texts. The analysis of the deployed affective rhetoric, including the dimensions of its aesthetic of effect as well as the cultural context of the functions of generating compassion will reveal that a literary dimension of compassion opens up in texts, which are not genuinely poetic. Finally, the fact that the experiences of affliction are put into an affective rhetorical discourse enables the suffering to be emotionally comprehended in the act of reading, and, indeed, that the reading becomes an aesthetic moment of experience for the compassionate or sympathetic reader. Thus, the project promotes Iberian affect research. Its innovative perspective on the emotion of compassion in non-fictional, autobiographical texts opens up a new category for literary studies of Early Modern narrative texts.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants