| This dissertation establishes parallels between the comedies of the Spanish playwright Calderón de la. Barca and the emerging discipline of anatomical dissection in the 17th century. The introductory material traces the epistemological and paradigmatic shifts that occurred in the representation of the human body in the 16th and 17th centuries primarily as a result of the birth of Vesalian medicine and dissection. In the second chapter, I argue that the dissemination of anatomical drawings and somatic imagery contributed to a poetics of fragmentation, punishment, violence, and empiricism that is revealed through a close reading of a selection of Calderón's plays. At the same time, I question how theatrical techniques such as perspective, movement, and the use of quotidian objects were used to couch a discourse of destruction in the name of scientific knowledge in the anatomical drawings of the period.; Focusing primarily on poetic and rhetorical devices such as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and catachresis, the second and third chapters reveal how the analogical relationship between the human body (microcosm) and the world (macrocosm) is slowly replaced by a discourse of uncertainty, chaos, and difference in both anatomical drawings and Golden Age theatre. Mirroring political, economic, and religious uncertainty, I demonstrate that the human body clearly becomes a locus of control where the tensions of Early Modern Spain are played out. The third chapter examines more carefully how these new representational paradigms affect the configuration of gender, agency, voyeurism, and eroticism in medical drawings and theatre.; Shifting my focus to the relationship between the iconic and the verbal, the fourth chapter examines how both anatomical drawings and the works of Calderón simultaneously embrace the emblematic tradition perpetuated by Alciato and gesture towards modernity. In both areas, the body is portrayed as an enigma that must be resolved, but, unlike the emblematic tradition that points to a single, unified, didactic message, the body that emerges in the works of Calderón and in the anatomical drawings of the 17th century offers us an ambiguous message that continually questions the power of sight and language to confirm and represent reality. |
