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Photography by Reed Hutchinson
UCLA Photographic Services
Carroll Johnson is leading the
La Mancha festivities. |
98th Faculty Research Lecture
A celebration of Cervantes
BY MEG SULLIVAN
UCLA Today
Carroll Johnson, an acclaimed scholar of the literature of Spain’s
Golden Age, started studying Spanish only to fulfill a language
requirement at his South Pasadena junior high school.
When he later enrolled at UCLA as an undergraduate in 1955, Spanish
wasn’t his first choice as a major. But after growing disenchanted
with international relations, Johnson figured he would spend four
years mastering ever finer points of Spanish grammar.
“I was just appalled when I realized I’d signed up
for a Spanish lit major,” he now admits, chuckling. “Frankly,
I don’t think I’m a very good role model.”
But whatever auspicious beginnings his career as a Spanish literary
scholar may have lacked, the presenter of UCLA’s upcoming
98th Faculty Research Lecture has more than made up for that, say
his colleagues.
“Johnson has consistently produced some of the most insightful
and groundbreaking studies in his field,” said Anne J. Cruz,
a Spanish professor and administrator at the University of Miami.
Students, meanwhile, praise the popular teacher’s clarity
of expression and subtle sense of humor.
“It’s fun to be in his classes,” said Paula Thorrington,
a graduate student in the program. “He relates this stuff
that seems so distant to the present.”
Johnson is a past president of the Cervantes Society of America,
the leading professional organization in Cervantes studies in the
United States, and an editor of Cervantes, the world’s leading
scholarly journal for the field. On campus, he has been active in
preparations for Month of La Mancha, a celebration of the 400th
anniversary of “Don Quixote.” Tall and wiry like the
knight, Johnson even looks the part.
“I reread most of ‘Don Quixote’ every time I
give ‘Golden Age: Don Quixote,’ which is generally once
a year,” he said. “And every time I find something I
didn’t notice.”
In the early 1980s, Johnson ruffled feathers with one of the earliest
examples of Freudian analysis of Quixote. Undergoing psychoanalysis
himself, Johnson argued that the nobleman, who is living alone with
his comely 20-year-old niece at the beginning of the novel, was
experiencing a midlife crisis, confounded by unconscious incestuous
impulses.
“It got me in a lot of trouble — it really did,”
Johnson said of his 1983 book “Madness and Lust: A Psychoanalytical
Approach to Don Quixote.” “But now the interpretation
is orthodoxy.”
In his latest book, “Cervantes and the Material World”
(Illinois, 2000), he shows how the novel opens a window onto the
real socioeconomic tensions of Cervantes’ era, particularly
as they related to women.
Johnson’s April 26 faculty lecture will explore a theme as
fresh as today’s headlines: the interplay among Jewish, Islamic
and Christian forces.
“The official version of Spanish literature — especially
the one that emanated from General Franco’s Spanish government
— is that there’s nobody here but us Christians,”
Johnson said. “But all the great writing of the Golden Age
is a reflection of the age’s ethnic tensions.”
The 98th Faculty Research Lecture is open to all and will
take place on April 26 at 3 p.m. in Schoenberg Hall Auditorium.
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