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Abstract
This dissertation explores the form of the frame in Iberian literature from 1250 to 1650. Through close readings, the project studies the network of orientations between bodies, texts, and knowledge that the frame enacts through its unique affordances. Chapter one argues that the confluence of exemplarity and injury in the anonymous Castilian Calila e Digna collection points to the frame’s formal capacity to produce and replicate embodied subjectivity. Chapter two and three focus on Juan Manuel’s Libro de los estados and posit that the location of exemplary knowledge in the body of named persons— primarily Don Juan Manuel but also importantly his mother— shows an appropriation of the form that takes place through a novel configuration of the matrix between text and body. I argue that the deployment of a textual cipher at what could be thought of as the deepest layer of the text produces dramatic moments of frame breaking in the form of affective explosions. These explosions reveal the text’s presentation of Juan Manuel’s body —and body of writing— as a location of exemplary knowledge. Chapter four focuses on Cervantes’ oeuvre and shows how Cervantes’ Prologues in the Novelas ejemplares and the Ocho comedias function as frames for the contained stories “La gitanilla” and “El celoso extremeño” and “El retablo de las maravillas,” respectively. The chapter also argues that the intercalated story of “Curioso impertinente” in Don Quijote shows the author deconstructing and undermining exemplarity’s universalism and pointing to the impossibility of discerning truth through the affordance of multivalence of the frame.
