New Cabell Hall 471
Office Hours: Tuesday & Thursday 10:00am-11:30am and by appt

Research Summary

Randolph Pope is the Commonwealth Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at the University of Virginia, where he has served as Chair of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese (2004–2007) and Director of Comparative Literature (2008–2011). He has also been the Director of Graduate Studies in Spanish (2001–2004 and 2013–2016). Born in Chile, he studied Spanish Literature and Classics at the Universidad Católica de Valparaíso. He received an M.A. and Ph.D. in Spanish from Columbia University in New York. His field of specialization is the Peninsular novel and autobiography, but he has also written extensively on other topics, such as Latin American literature, cultural studies, literature and architecture, literature and the arts, and literature and philosophy.

He has taught at Barnard College, the University of Bonn in Germany, Dartmouth College, Vassar College, where he was Chair of Hispanic Studies, and Washington University in St. Louis, where he served as Chair of Comparative Literature for seven years. He has been Visiting Professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder and at the University of Tübingen in Germany. For four years, he directed the Middlebury College Spanish Summer School in Vermont.

He was one of the two founders and main editors of Ediciones del Norte and serves in several editorial boards. From 1991 to the Spring issue of 2002 he was Editor of the Revista de Estudios Hispánicos. He has published three books and over one hundred scholarly essays. He has directed twice an NEH Summer Seminar for College Teachers on “Spanish autobiography in the European context”. He has received grants from the Fulbright Foundation, the NEH, and the Kemper Foundation. He has lectured at many universities in the United States, Spain, Canada, Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, France, Holland, Sweden, and Germany.

Education

Ph. D., Columbia University, New York
M. A., Columbia University
Profesor de Castellano, Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile

Publications

Books

“Borges y Skármeta en París”, Anales de Literatura Chilena 16 (2015): 125-39.

“El yo autobiográfico de Carmen Martín Gaite.” Hispania 98 (2015): 666–67.

“La recreación de la experiencia del instante en Viaje a la Alcarria de Cela”, Letras de Hoje 51 (2016): 211-216. Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. https://revistaseletronicas.pucrs.br/ojs/index.php/fale/article/view/23940

“The Mute Testimony of Portraits in Calderón and Unamuno’ Work”, Studies in Honor of  Robert Ter Horst, edited by Eleanor ter Horst, Edward Friedman, and Ali Shehzad Zaidi. Fair Lawn, NJ: Transformative Studies Institute Press, 2017. 99–110.

¿Por qué España? Memoria personal del hispanismo estadounidense, Co-Edited with Anna Caballé (University of Barcelona). Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2015.

Generation X Rocks: Contemporary Peninsular Fiction, Film and Rock Culture, Vanderbilt UP, 2007. Co-edited with Christine Henseler.

Understanding Juan Goytisolo, Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1995.

Novela de emergencia: España, 1939–1954. Madrid: SGEL, 1984.  

La autobiografía española hasta Torres Villarroel. Bern: Lang Verlag, 1974.

Selected Essays

“Conclusión provisional: La vida vale la pena” [autobiographical essay]  in ¿Por qué España? Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2015. 521–49.

“Borges y Skármeta en París”, Anales de Literatura Chilena 16 (2015): 125-39.

“’Obras  completas’ de Monterroso: La agonía del maestro y el discípulo,”  Lejana, Revista Crítica de Narrativa Breve, Budapest 6 (2013): 1–8.

“Whereto Now? From mezzo to Messi, from Don Quixote to 2666,” in Capital Inscriptions: Essays on Hispanic Literature, Film and Urban Space in Honor of Malcolm Alan Compitello, edited by Benjamin Fraser. Newark, Delaware: Juan de la Cuesta, 2012. 93–104.

"Antonio Skármeta's Uniqueness," Contracorriente 10 (Fall 2012): 124–46. Reproduced with permission here.

"A Writer for a Globalized Age: Roberto Bolaño and 2666," in Old Margins and New Centers: The European Literary Heritage in an Age of Globalization, edited by Marc Maufort & Caroline De Wagter, Brussels: New Comparative Poetics, 2011. 157–66.

“La destrucción o el amor: Rescate del museo," in Olvidar es morir: Nuevos encuentros con Vicente Aleixandre, edited by Sergio Arlandis and Miguel Ángel García, Valencia: Universitat de Valencia, 2011. 81–91.

“A Hispanist’s View of Changing Institutions, or About Insects and Whales,” in New Spain, New Literatures, edited by Luis Martín-Estudillo and Nicholas Spadaccini. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt UP, 2010. 99–115.

"Richard Rorty Questions All, Including Us," Comparative Critical Studies 7 (2010): 347–56.

“El recuerdo de la memoria en la autobiografía de Alberti,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 85 (2008): 61–68.

“Fighting the Long Battle of Memory: Autobiographical Writing about the Spanish Civil War,” in Teaching Representations of the Spanish Civil War, ed. Noël Valis. New York: Modern Language Association, 2007. 398–405.

“Contra la globalización: La importancia de lo nacional para una historia comparada de las literaturas ibéricas,” en Naciones literarias, ed. Dolores Romero López, Barcelona: Anthropos, 2006. 341–49.

“Constructing the Disappearing Self: Unamuno, Carmen Martín Gaite and the Quicksands of History,” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 30 (2005): 159–69.

“The Comparative Drive in the Latin American Essay,” in Literary Cultures of Latin America: A Comparative History, edited by Mario Valdés and Djelal Kadir, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Vol. II, 227–40.

 “El Hispanismo dionisíaco,” Lateral: Revista de Cultura 106 (2003): 6. Reprinted in Olivar: Revista de Literatura y Cultura Españolas 9 (2008): 91–94.

"A Criticism of Our Own," Anales de la Literatura Española Contemporánea 28, 1 (2003): 21-27.

"Resisting the Global: The Importance of the National for a Comparative History of Iberian Literatures," Neohelicon 30, 2 (2003): 79-84. Translated into Hungarian and published as “A globális nézõpont ellenében—A nemzeti szemlélet fontossága a komparatív ibériai irodalomtörténetben,” Literatura (Budapest) 3 (2003): 253–58.

“Writing about Writing,” The Cambridge Companion to the Spanish Novel from 1600 to the Present, edited by Harriet Turner and Adelaida López de Martínez. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 2003. 264-82.

“La elusiva autobiografía de José Donoso,” José Donoso: La literatura como arte de la transfiguración, Revista Anthropos 184/185 (May-August 1999): 73–76.

“La ciudad que desaparece en Cuentos del Barrio del Refugio,” Aproximaciones críticas al mundo narrativo de José María Merino, eds. Ángeles Encinar and Kathleen M. Glenn, León: Edilesa, 2000. 159–68.

“La resistencia en El cuarto mundo de Diamela Eltit.” Special issue on Diamela Eltit, Creación y resistencia: la narrativa de Diamela Eltit, 1983–1998, edited by María-Inés Lagos, Monografías de Nomadías (Santiago, Chile) 2000. 35–53.

“Narrative in Culture, 1936–1975,” in the Cambridge Companion to Spanish Literature, edited by David Gies, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 134–46.

“Contra Unamuno,” Nuevas perspectivas sobre el 98. Ed. John P. Gabriele. Madrid: Iberoamericana, 1999. 171–78.

“Intrusos en el templo: Profanando tumbas en las Noches lúgubres,” Dieciocho 21 (1998): 21–34.

“Autobiographical Selves as ‘Transpersonal Beings’: Gibbon, Kierkegaard, Goethe, and Luis Goytisolo among Others,” Intertextual Pursuits: Literary Mediations in Modern Spanish Narrative, eds. Jeanne P. Brownlow and John W. Kronik. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1998. 26–41.

“The Spanish American Novel, 1945–1975,” in The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature, vol. 2, The Twentieth Century, edited Roberto González Echevarría and Enrique Pupo-Walker, New York: Cambridge UP, 1996. 226–78. Translation in Historia de la literatura hispanoamericana. Volumen II: el siglo XX. Madrid: Gredos, 244–94.  

“La astuta ciencia de Torres Villarroel,” Revista Hispánica Moderna 49 (1996): 407–18.

“Letters in the Post, or How Goytisolo Got to La Chanca,” in Fernando de Toro and Alfonso de Toro, eds., Borders and Margins: Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism, Vervuert: Frankfurt am Main, 1995. 181–91. Also in World Literature Today 69 (Winter 1995): 22–28.

“Las sirenas de Vario y la visión de Clarín,” Revista Hispánica Moderna 48, 1 (1995): 106–13.

“La autobiografía y su tradición en España: Blanco White leyendo a Feijóo,” in Juan Orbe, ed., Autobiografía y escritura, Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 1994. 111–26.

“Theories and Models for the History of Spanish Autobiography: General Problems of Autobiography,” Siglo XX/20th Century 12 (1994): 207–17.

“Juan Goytisolo y la tradición autobiográfica española,” Revista Chilena de Literatura, 41 (1993): 25–32.

“La determinación genérica en la autobiografía española de postguerra,” Journal of Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 5, 1 (1993): 85–99.

“Theory and Contemporary Autobiographical Writing: The Case of Juan Goytisolo,” Siglo XX/20th Century  8 (1990–1991) : 87–101.

“Mercè Rodoreda's Subtle Greatness,” a chapter of Women Writers of Contemporary Spain: Exiles in the Homeland, edited by Joan L. Brown, Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990. 116–35.

“Metamorphosis and Don Quixote,” Cervantes (Special Issue) (Winter 1988): 93–101.

“Unamuno in Exile: Cómo se hace una novela,” The Exile in Literature, edited by María- Inés  Lagos, Bucknell University Press, 1988. 72–81.

“Historia y novela en la posguerra española,” Siglo XX/20th Century 5 (1987–88): 16–24.

“CGoarltdaozsar: el Galdós intercalado en Rayuela de Cortázar,” Los ochenta mundos de Cortázar: Ensayos, edited by Fernando Burgos, Madrid: Edi-6, 1987, pp. 121–28. Reprinted in Anales Galdosianos 21 (1986 [published in 1992]): 141–46.

“Transparency and Illusion in García Márquez’s Crónica de una muerte anunciada,” The  Boom in Retrospect: A Reconsideration (special issue of the Latin American Literary Review), edited by Yvette Miller and Raymond Williams, 15 (1987): 183– 200.

“Benet, Faulkner, and Bergson’s Memory,” Critical Approaches to Juan Benet, edited by Herzberger, Manteiga et. al. Hanover and London: The University Press of New England, 1984, pp. 111–19. This article was also published, translated into Spanish, in an anthology of articles on Benet edited by Kathleen Vernon in the Taurus’ series “El escritor y la crítica,” Juan Benet, Madrid: Taurus, 1986. 243–53.

“Don Quijote, Segunda Parte, Capítulo 74 y final,” Homenaje a Horst Baader, edited by F. Gewecke, Frankfurt: Verlag K. Dieter Vervuert, 1984. 169–74.

“Las buenas conciencias de Carlos Fuentes  y Las afueras de Luis Goytisolo: Correspondencia en la nostalgia,” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, 7 (1983): 273–89.

“Especulaciones sobre el ajedrez, Sansón Carrasco y don Quijote,” Anales Cervantinos 20 (1982): 29–47.

“La vorágine: autobiografía de un intelectual,” The Analysis of Literary Texts: Current Trends in Methodology, edited by Randolph Pope, vol. III, New York The Bilingual Press, 1980, pp. 256–67. This article was reprinted in La vorágine: Textos críticos, edited by Montserrat Ordóñez, Bogotá: Alianza Editorial, 1987, pp. 399–414, and in Vorágine 1 (May–June 1988): 5–12.

“Don Quijote y el Caballero del Verde Gabán: El encuentro a la luz de su contexto,” Hispanic Review 47 (1979): 207–18.

“Pascual Duarte, casi indiano, y su hermano el inocente,” Insula (Madrid), Nr. 396–397 (1979): 12–13.

“Precauciones para la lectura de Conversación en La Catedral,” Journal of Spanish Studies: Twentieth Century 6 (1978): 207–17.

“La apertura al futuro una categoría para el análisis de la novela hispanoamericana contemporánea,” Revista Iberoamericana 41 (1975): 15–28.

“The Autobiographical Form in the Persiles,” Anales Cervantinos 13–14 (1974–75): 93–106.

Grants & Awards

For a complete list of grants and awards, please download his C.V.