Chapter 3 - The Pleasure of Literary Criticism without Attachments to Any Method or Ideology Whatsoever: A Conversation with Roberto González Echevarría

Summary

The Training of González Echevarría.

FGH: What would you like to remember about your training years (BA University of South Florida (1964), MA Indiana University (1966), PhD Yale (1970)?

RGE: I have very pleasant memories of professors who were key in my training. At the University of South Florida, these professors did not produce a big written work, but they were great teachers. I am thinking of Edward McClean, Charles Micareli, Adrian Cherry and others in French and Italian. At Indiana, I had the good fortune of being a student of Miguel Enguíanos, a brilliant and warm professor from Valencia with whom I would spend hours talking in his office when I was twenty years old, which is when I started graduate school. Octavio Corbalán, a subtle Argentinian from Tucumán was also there. He wrote about “postmodernismo,” because that is how it was called [already in the 1960s]. and he taught me a lot of things about writing style. I was lucky because that was a moment of growth in the department. Américo Castro passed through to give a talk. Ana María Matute gave a course about fiction-writing. I studied with her. Antonio Ferres, Ignacio Aldecoa, Rosario Castellanos, etc. Lots of writers went through the department and I learned a lot from them. I learned a lot from a Mexican professor, Ortigoza by name, who gave very detailed courses on the Golden Age [period] and from Quentin Hope, a professor of XVII French theater. Prof. Houston who gave an excellent seminar on Proust. When I arrived at Yale, it was the beginning of the boom of structuralism. I was student of Hispanists such as [the Spaniard] Manuel Durán, who was my dissertation advisor, the Cuban José Arrom, the Colombian Gustavo Correa and others who were visiting professors. [I studied] in French with Jacques Ehrmann, who sadly died very young. He was one among those who gave entrance to structuralism in the U.S. via Yale and the journal Yale French Studies that published a very important issue at that time. Because I have always been between Spanish, French and Italian, it was also the Italian professor John Freccero. At some point, Paul de Man arrived. I attended the classes of Harold Bloom.