Frederick A de Armas

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. After his family lost their possessions as a result of the Cuban Revolution, he moved to the United States. 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 Chicago where he is Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Romance Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature. He has served as Chair of Romance Languages and Literatures (2006–2009; 2010–2012). In addition he has been Vice President and President of the Cervantes Society of America (2003–2009); and President of AISO Asociacion Internacional Siglo de Oro (2015-2017).

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, ekphrasis, verbal and visual culture, etc. His early books evince an interest in the relationship between mythology and literature, between the classics and Spanish Golden Age works. They include: The Invisible Mistress: Aspects of Feminism and Fantasy in the Golden Age (1976), which contains some of the earliest discussions of proto-feminism in early modern Spain, and The Return of Astraea: An Astral-Imperial Myth in Calderón (1986), which is one of the first studies that approach Calderón from a historicist perspective and is also deeply influenced by the writings of the Warburg Institute. For example, he interprets the figure of Circe in one of Calderon's plays as critiquing the policies of Philip IV's minister, the Count-Duke of Olivares. On the other hand, 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 latest book, 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). The book has a double focus. The first has to do with a 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.

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 Benito Pérez Galdós. He has also started to publish fiction while continuing to work on the literature and culture of early modern Spain. His novel, El abra del Yumuri, takes place in Cuba during the last three months of 1958, just before the fall of Fulgencio Batista and the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. It focuses on the lives of five women, most of them from the upper bourgeoisie, and how they deal with political and social upheaval, as well as the dangers of a serial killer that preys on women of means. For some critics, the novel combines two very different trends: that of the social novel inspired by Benito Pérez Galdós, and that of magic realism embodied by Alejo Carpentier.