What Lorca Knew: Teaching Receptivity

What Lorca Knew: Teaching Receptivity

Professor Jonathan Mayhew

Receptivity, which I define as the capacity to receive and experience the

most accomplished products of the human intelligence, should be the single

most important principle guiding research and teaching in the humanities.

Receptivity entails the fullest possible response—affective, intellectual, and

aesthetic—to a wide range of visual art, music, literature, and systems of

thought from any and all human cultures. Intelligence, as I employ the word

here, encompasses all the possible ways in which human beings can make

sense of their own experience of reality and develop forms of cultural

expression. Some of these forms might not appear to be intellectual in the

narrower sense of “cerebral,” but they all involve the human intelligence in

this larger sense.

We need, then, a shift in focus—away from a sterile academic

formalism and toward a more finely tuned receptivity to the “raw materials”

of the humanities. The work of Federico García Lorca puts this argument to

the test. Lorca is, in my view, an example of a highly receptive artist—in

some sense a theorist of receptivity—and one whose own critical reception

exposes the inadequacies of contemporary academic criticism. My

experience writing about Lorca and using him as a pedagogical model for

courses at the graduate and undergraduate level confirms my commitment to

an expanded view of receptivity...

From link at: ¡Bemsha SWING!: Hispanic Issues: What Lorca Knew