It has been two years, soon three, since Martha García published her Dialogismo teológico: devotio moderna, “Celestina” & “Quijote” at Academia Editorial del Hispanismo. When I first read the title I was terrified; not in vain my doctoral research at the time dealt with the topic of the relationship between Celestina and the devotio moderna, and I feared someone had reached the same conclusions I had, if not better ones, and turned my research useless and unoriginal -a quite common fear among doctoral candidates. However, García’s work could not be more different to my own dissertation.
In the first place, García’s book is a book on literary theory, and not so much on Celestina, Quijote or the devotio moderna. Its debt to Bakhtin’s interpretation of the genre of the novel in dialogic terms is evident from the title itself, and I have myself never been able to understand why certain scholars are so enthusiastic about this particular approach, but I must admit my dislike for literary theory in general is well-known and, therefore, I am not well-equipped to comment on the bakhtinian background of the study, so that I will not comment on this aspect. However, a bakhtinian reading is (fortunately for me) not everything García’s work is about.
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