SOURCE: Friedman, Edward H. “Creative Space: Ideologies of Discourse in Góngora's Polifemo.” In Cultural Authority in Golden Age Spain, edited by Marina S. Brownlee and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, pp. 51-78. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1995.

In the following essay, Friedman argues that Góngora's retelling of familiar stories in Polifemo y Galatea is indicative of the poet's literary competition with past and contemporary authors.

There are a number of ways of looking at the question of continuity in literature, including a focus on discontinuity. To an extent, we have put aside—marginated—literary history in favor of difference. We look for markers of distance, of separation, of inexplicability. We seem to want meaning to elude us, yet we hope creatively to describe the indeterminacies, the scissions, the ungrammaticalities that defer and divert us as we read texts. The autonomous work that was the object of North American...