How the Romantic vision subverts the dominant discourses of Catholicism and market capitalism

What is it about?

El estudiante de Salamanca, written from 1836 to 1839 in successive drafts, broaches the subject of metaphysics by accompanying its main character beyond the threshold of death. Its Romantic vision subverts traditional expectations. This study illuminates how clashes between figures that represent opposing orders nullify each other as a repeated pattern in the four-part poem. The Bourdieuian concepts of doxa, the habitus, and symbolic capital prove essential in clarifying the Romantic poet’s grappling with the existing order of his time as well as with the emergent order of liberalism. These constructs from Bourdieu’s theory of social practice also serve to place the work on a continuum of metaphysical representations comprising the baroque, deism, and the Gothic. An anti-hero without respect for doxa, who squanders symbolic capital, perishes in the grasp of the habitus, exemplifying the problematic structures of feeling of Spanish Romanticism towards Catholicism, market capitalism, and the exchange economy.

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