Anthony J. Cascardi

Anthony J. Cascardi is an academic and author. He is professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, where he joined the faculty in 1980.

Cascardi's work centres on the intersections between literature and philosophy, aesthetic theory, and the European novel, with an emphasis on the early modern period and the works of Miguel de Cervantes. His books include The Subject of Modernity (1992), Consequences of Enlightenment (1999), Cervantes, Literature, and the Discourse of Politics (2011) and Francisco de Goya and the Art of Critique (2023), and he edited The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes. In 2013 the Renaissance Society of America awarded Cervantes, Literature, and the Discourse of Politics its Gordan Prize.

Education and career Cascardi graduated with Bachelor of Arts from Princeton University and a Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy in Romance languages and literatures from Harvard University.

Cascardi joined University of California, Berkeley as faculty in 1980. He was appointed chair of the departments of comparative literature and of rhetoric and held the first Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professorship in the Humanities. Later, he became the Sidney and Margaret Ancker Distinguished Professorship. He became director of the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities in 2006. He holds the title of professor emeritus. as well as for the Cambridge Studies in Literature and Philosophy.

Works In Ideologies of History in the Spanish Golden Age, Cascardi examined the historical struggles between tradition and modernity in early modern Spanish literature. Stephen Rupp from the University of Toronto remarked that the book is "more consistent and unified than a standard set of collected essays". However, he noted that it does not cover the "history in nonfictional writing from the Golden Age". Jonathan Thacker of University College London wrote that the essays treat didactic literature, lyric poetry, the novel, romance, the short story and secular drama, and credited the book with stimulating insights. However, he considered that Cascardi's analysis played down the diversity of Golden Age dramatists' uses of history and imposed a reluctant sense of progression on a varied collection of essays.

In his 1999 publication, Consequences of Enlightenment, Cascardi examined the relationship between modern thought and Enlightenment principles through responses to Kant, particularly the Critique of Judgment. Holger Briel of the University of Surrey described the chapters as detailed and well argued and Chapter 2 as a "well-informed interpretation of Kant's writings" on the beautiful and the sublime, but wrote that Cascardi ultimately "fails to provide strictures which would pull his argument together". This book appeared in Chinese translation in 2006.

Cascardi's earlier, 1992 book, The Subject of Modernity, traced the history of modernity from Descartes and Hobbes onwards, examining the origins of the modern rational subject through the writings of Hobbes, Montaigne, and Cervantes, and the myth of Don Juan. Jeremy Tambling of the University of Hong Kong considered the periodization of change powerfully made and the passages on Cervantes and Don Quixote strong, but wrote that a sense of the "other" in the discourse of the subject was comparatively absent from the book.

Cascardi edited The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes, in which he and the contributing authors covered Cervantes' historical and social context, his place in Renaissance literature, and his lesser-known works. According to Thomas R. Hart, the book provided a "great deal of information about Cervantes" and introduced readers to a wide range of critical responses to his work, though he noted that it contains no discussion of translations of Don Quixote or of Cervantes's other works, and that some statements, including those on Cervantes's perspectivism, required qualification.

Together with Leah Middlebrook, Cascardi edited the collective volume Poiesis and Modernity in the Old and New Worlds, a collection of thirteen essays examining the Platonic concept of poiesis as used by writers and thinkers of early modern Spain and Latin America. Cascardi's own chapter treats poesía and poiesis in Cervantes. Michael W. Joy of Northern Michigan University observed that all of the essays are of "very high quality" and that the editors have managed to "avoid the pitfalls inherent in such a broad theme". According to Michael J. McGrath of Georgia Southern University, the book argues in a "brilliant and convincing" manner that Cervantes merits consideration alongside Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu and Rousseau as an influential early modern political philosopher. Barbara Simerka of CUNY Queens College described it as providing an "illuminating commentary" on the influence of political philosophy on Cervantes's works, yet stated that "the thesis would be strengthened by more extensive discussions" of Castillo's book, di Salvo's work, and Osterc's study. In 2018, the work was translated into Spanish and published as Cervantes, la literatura y el discurso de la política.

Selected books