Love and Pedagogy; Or, How to Create a Genius

Amor y pedagog a (1902), by the celebrated Spanish writer and thinker Miguel de Unamuno, centers on the project of Avito Carrascal to raise a genius according to the doctrine of "sociological pedagogy." The object of the scientific process is Apolodoro, caught between his father's strict supervision and his mother's more traditional views on child-rearing. Avito Carrascal's guide is the noted philosopher Don Fulgencio Entrambosmares, who advises both father and son. In the conflict between love and pedagogy, and for better or worse, Apolodoro makes important decisions of his own. In the narrative, Unamuno adroitly--and with doses of humor and irony--explores the dichotomies that mark life choices and that cause existential anguish. He is clearly concerned, as well, with the style in which he tells his story, through a technique that simultaneously responds to and wavers from the paradigms of realism.

In Love and Pedagogy; Or, How to Create a Genius, Edward Friedman captures the spirit of Unamuno's work while adapting it for the stage. He endeavors to display, in the different medium, the challenges of form and content, the profound symbolism, the eccentricities, the meaningful contradictions, and the comic undertones of the original. Like its predecessor, Love and Pedagogy examines human foibles in the context of reality, metaphysics, and art.