What is Don Quijote/Don Quixote? And...And...And The Disjunctive Synthesis of Cervantes and Kathy Acker (original) (raw)
The Rhetoric of Madness in Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote
International Journal of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies, 2017
This essay examines the rhetorical experimentation of Don Quixote by Kathy Acker, starting from a theoretical concept central in the author’s thought: her search for a “language of the body”. A brief introduction to Kathy Acker’s plagiaristic poetics frames her narrative strategies between postmodern rewriting and pastiche. It shows the way in which her Don Quixote transposes the representative scheme of the chivalric quest into the contemporary value system with the aim of questioning Cervantes’ text as one of the canonical works of the Western literary tradition. The following section deepens three focal concepts of Acker’s theoretical works – body, madness, and norm – illuminating the connections between her rhetorical experimentation and the works by Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler. Finally, the paper will demonstrate how these concepts in Acker's rewriting of Don Quixote are strictly related to paradox, which she uses in order to actualize a “language of the body”: in the p...
Cervantes and the Sequel: Literary Continuation in Part I of Don Quijote
L iterary continuation is a little considered and even less understood element of Don Quijote. This is all the more unfortunate because the sequel plays a central role in the creation of Don Quijote and Don Quijote in the creation of the sequel. 1 The same holds for Don Quijote's elected precursors and the genres they found, namely the chivalric, pastoral, Celestinesque and picaresque novels. The present article proposes a new lens for reading the Don Quijote and its antecedents: a focus on the form and function of the sequel and the means and motivation of the sequelist. Indirectly, it suggests a way of tracing the history of the Early Modern Spanish novel through the prism of literary continuation. 2 Such continuation imbues every page of Part I of Don Quijote. It is present in the front matter, where Cervantes meditates on the challenges of continuing his own stalled career two decades after La Galatea's failure to yield a second part; in the early discussion of Don Quijote's favorite writer, the era's great sequelist Feliciano de Silva; in the Scrutiny of Books episode, where every work considered either is a sequel or generates sequels; and in the very structure of the work, which alludes to various con-1 I focus on modern prose narrative sequels whose characters and arguments are forged from specific authors' imaginations at specific points in time, and in particular on works continued while originating authors were alive and able to respond. This specificity allows allographic and autographic continuators to make and argue over claims to owning the characters they create or continue and the imaginative worlds that they come to inhabit. Authors of works based on religion, popular tradition, mythology and history cannot make such claims to originality or ownership.
Don Quijote y la narrativa posmoderna. , 2010
A radical shift in Western thought occurred in the eighties with the entrance of Postmodernism as a central instrumental concept for the understanding of contemporary culture. From the moment of its appearance in the cultural scenario and throughout the whole decade, scholars, writers, literary critics, artists, and philosophers discussed about the difficulties of defining such a concept, once they felt that a new age was starting and it needed to be considered. Poststructuralism 2 produced the fundamental theoretical frame for this debate, by advancing the main basic premises, which would help grasp the meaning of what was happening in the realm of art and fiction: a) a focus on the activities of language in constructing reality, which established a new frame for linguistic and philological analysis, b) an emphasis on difference rather than on identity, coming from Derrida's deconstruction and its appropriation by cultural theorists, c) and an interest in dismantling theories of the past, and of historiography as a 'real' and 'reliable' account of it, which provoked in part the dissolution of the barriers traditionally separating the real from the fictitious.
Phantoms and Embodiments: El Quixote a time traveler
Phantoms and Embodiments: El Quixote a time traveler, 2016
Miguel de Cervantes passed on April 1616. The two cultural pillars of the Spanish and Anglo culture, Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare shared the same times, and almost, the same day of death, April 23, 1616. Both, lived fully, as we do today, in tumultuous and tempestuous times and shared it in the tragedies and comedies coming out of their imagination. We, their heirs have adopted, used, and transformed their legacy -our language. Also, we do share that history, one of imperial dreams and nightmares and the expansion of a global Eurocentric culture that transformed the globe during what we called modernity. They foresaw such forces, those that unleashed our own wild and turbulent times. Art still creates out of Cervantes Don Quitoxe. This paper was commissioned for the first of a number of exhibits produced by the Artists Studio Project (ASP) for the annual Quixote Festiva, a nine month cultural adventure that takes place every year since 2015.
Reimagining Cervantes's Don Quixote: A Modern Lens, Through Borges's Vision of Literature
Jorge Luis Borges, one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, held Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote in the highest regard, often praising it as a masterpiece of world literature. For Borges, Don Quixote was more than just a tale of a misguided knight—it was a profound meditation on the nature of fiction, reality, and the power of storytelling. Both Cervantes and Borges blurred the lines between imagination and the real world, crafting narratives that questioned the very essence of authorship and perception. In their works, the themes of impossible quests, multiple perspectives, and the recursive nature of time serve as a bridge between the two literary giants. This article explores how Borges’s storytelling techniques mirror and build upon the innovations Cervantes pioneered, revealing a shared vision of literature as an endless, transformative quest.
REASON AND LIFE. PHENOMENOLOGICAL INTERPRETATIONS OF DON QUIXOTE
2013
Don Quixote is not only a novel which represents Spanish culture, but a hero that reveals the relation between life and reason. I will compare two interpretations of Don Quixote. The first phenomenological interpretation belongs to Ortega Y Gasset, and the second to Lithuanian philosopher Algis Mickūnas. The interpretations of Don Quixote are related to the question about an ideal. What is the role of ideals in culture? Are ideals principles constructed by reason? Do these principles deny the reality of life, or are ideals related to the self life-world rationality? Then what does the idealism of Don Quixote mean? Does it represent a utopian rationality or does it seek to show values that are not reduced to circum-stance? Ortega criticizes Don Quixote as an idealist, who can't find any ideal values in the nearest environment. Mickūnas suggests interpreting Don Quixote's idealism as a phenome-nological bracketing, which allows one to doubt the blind dependence on this life-world and question its value. Resumen: Don Quijote no es únicamente una novela que representa la cultura española, sino también un héroe que revela la relación entre vida y razón. Compararé dos interpretaciones de Don Quijote. La primera interpretación fe-nomenológica pertenece a Ortega y Gasset y la segunda al filósofo lituano Algis Mickūnas. Las interpretaciones de Don Quijote se relacionan con la cuestión acerca de los ideales. ¿Cuál es el papel de los ideales en la cultura? ¿Son los ideales principios construidos por la razón? ¿Niegan tales ideales la realidad de la vida o bien se encuentran los ideales relacionados con la racionalidad misma del mundo de la vida? ¿Qué significa entonces el idealismo de Don Quijote? ¿Representa acaso una racionalidad utópica o trata más bien de mostrar valores que no se hallan reducidos a la circunstancia? Orte-ga critica a Don Quijote como un idelista, que no es capaz de encontrar valores ideales en su entorno más próximo. Mickūnas propone inter-pretar el idealismo de Don Quijote como un poner entre paréntesis de tipo fenomenológico, que nos permite dudar de la ciega dependencia del mundo vital y cuestionar su valor. Palabras clave: Ideales, Don Quijote, Ortega y Gasset, Mickūnas. 236 DALIUS JONKUS 236 Investigaciones Fenomenológicas, vol. Monográfico 4/I (2013): Razón y Vida.
The Quixote code: Reading between the lines of the Cervantes novel
2014
Giorgini, Massimiliano Adelmo. Ph.D., Purdue University, December 2014. The Quixote Code: Reading Between the Lines of the Cervantes Novel. Major Professor: Howard Mancing. This study in two parts reexamines the notion that Don Quixote was originally seen as no more than a humorous story, and suggests that due to a variety of factors, a closer, more exegetical reading of the text may well be appropriate. In the first section of this work, focus is placed on the long history of the reception of the Cervantes novel as containing some deeper truth beneath the literal surface of the novel. This is complemented by a review of some examples of when several esoteric readings—done without academic rigor and adequate contextual research—have struck dramatically off-target and have read not between the lines but completely outside of the text of Don Quixote. The second part of this study proposes a new line of exegetical inquiry into the Cervantes classic, incorporating recent research in the...
Don Quixote in the Crosshairs: Borges, Ortega y Gasset, and Unamuno take aim at the Sorrowful Knight
I. Hunting for Adventures No vio la hora don Quijote de verse a caballo y salir buscando las aventuras. Part I, Chapter III 2 Don Quixote's narrator states that Alonso Quijano comes to enjoy reading high and low tales of knighthood better than hunting. This piece of seemingly biographical trivia actually highlights how consumed by his books the hidalgo is: he gives up a cherished pastime for a fool's knightly dream. We don't know whether Quijano was a good shot with bow, crossbow, or maybe harquebus. We know that by the time of his transformation inside and out his stalking ability was no match for his rhetorical talent for knightly self-promotion and hunger for adventure. While such behavioral changes pique our curiosity and demand impossible rational explanations—after all, to our eyes they are irrational already—ours is a different target here. The melancholy yet proud Don Quijote, astride Rocinante lance pointed at us, defiantly asks: " Quickly, state your purpose! " Given his short temper, it is best not to dillydally. The aim is to track Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote for literary, philosophic, and existential insights that may coalesce into revealing self-reflections to bring us, readers, a sporting chance to bag some Socratic self-knowledge. We are setting out on a Quixotean intellectual hunt in lands richly populated by irony and paradox. While infinitely easier than Pierre Menard's outlandish task of rewriting portions of the Quixote anew, it still is intimidating. To better hunt down the elusive game we pursue, we recruit three able, insightful companions who sequentially and ever more discriminately support our endeavor. The passionate scout Miguel de Unamuno sets us on track, while José Ortega y Gasset's philosophic skills corner the fantastic literary prey (Ortega hereafter), and Jorge Luis Borges finally looses his hounding thoughts on novel and novelist to get us within range. 3 Unsurprisingly, this is a game of mirrors on and off the page. Mirrors not only duplicate realities or create labyrinthine possibilities, but more importantly for us, they reflect back our own visage. With apposite Borgesian circularity various insights and themes— literary interpretation, (im)mortality, and self-knowledge, to name three—are revisited and refined as we follow the triad of intellectual Nimrods chasing book and hero. Presently, " Don Quixote " refers to the novel whereas " Don Quijote " is used to speak of the character. According to the analysis we develop, and to be clarified in the going, this indicates that Don Quijote is more than a character in the novel. It also showcases a certain flexible metaphysical reflexivity that multiplies possibilities and meanings as something desirable for our novels and our lives. Let's describe this project geometrically, something Borges would have undoubtedly smiled on, however ruefully. A horizontal line encompasses the literary horizon with Borges and Cervantes as its defining points of origin and terminus. It is bisected by a vertical line, philosophy, demarcated at either end by Spain's preeminent 20 th century philosophical hounds: Ortega and Unamuno. The intersection of the two lines is a mathematically dimensionless point full of significance. As crosshairs they enable us, should our hand prove steady enough, to revealingly track our knight's actions and words, and explore their meaning. \