Don Quixote de la Mancha and Spanish Children Animation and Cartoons: Miguel de Cervantes's Uses of Bestial Enchantment for Young Readers and Viewers in the 2000s (original) (raw)
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Mimetic Desire in Miguel Cervantes’ Don Quixote : an Anthropological Study
International journal of humanities and social sciences, 2016
This paper sets out to unearth the underlying reasons behind the spectacular success that the seventeenth-century Spanish novelist, Cervantes, achieved in his humoristic work, Don Quixote which has been translated into many languages, including English. In this respect, I work to demonstate the centrality of what the anthropologist Rene Girard called in his book Deceit, Desire and the Novel (1961) ‘mimetic desire’ in sustaining the lightness of the novel’s humor. A desire that is built on imitating others does, actually, define Don Quixote, the protagonist of the novel. Yet, what is special with him is that this desire leads him to generate a whole imagined narrative about knight errantry and, more importatly, to live it out in a time in which medieval chivalric codes of behaviour become outmoded and just part of the fictional world. So, Don Quixote’s plight becomes comic, for he places what he read about the knight Amadis of Gaul and other stories of chivalry as models he irresist...
Past Tense, 2017
Translated into dozens of languages and published thousands of times in numerous countries around the world in its 411 years of existence, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s (1547-1616) The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha has attained recognition as one of the most read books in western culture. Various reproductions of Don Quixote over the last four centuries include parodies, plays, paintings and illustrations, cartoons, comic books, movies and music. Of the many text editions in existence today this short study will address a particular copy of Cervantes Don Quixote: The History of the valorous and witty-knight-errant Don Quixote of La Mancha, Translated out of the Spanish [by T. Shelton] now newly corrected and amended (1652), along with a few of the people who produced this seminal work and several of the notable individuals who have owned it through time.
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. \
The Long Shadow of Don Quixote
Don Quixote is back again, notices Magdalena Barbaruk tracing the resurgence of the knight errant in the contemporary humanities. In the aftermath of World War Two, the figure underwent the most radical re-interpretation since Romanticism. These changes speak volumes about our culture. The Long Shadow of Don Quixote is a pioneering, cultural studies-driven reading of Quixotism. Drawing on the theoretical framework of the specifically Polish variety of cultural studies, it makes Don Quixote a patron of cultural reflection. With culture conceptualised as performative, Quixotism is “the cultivation of the soul,” an axiotic space which forms human ways of life across epochs. In this way, the history of culture can be re-written as a history of a values frenzy, bibliomania or evil.
The Birth of Don Quixote: Madness, Poetry, and Transformation
Though many have called Don Quixote mad, even the author of Don Quixote himself sometimes, there is something undeniably striking in his mode of being in the world. In the final chapters of the book, Don Quixote recants his entire life's venture and while it seems that we should be glad that a deluded man has finally seen his error -better late than never -instead we feel a great sense of tragedy. Upon reflection, it begins to appear that Don Quixote was in fact attempting to transform himself and to truly engage with life rather than being subjected to it, simply following along by habit or convention. I would like to say that this desire is in fact a philosophical one. Don Quixote wants to transform his life into the best one that he can and to see the dimensions of the world that may not be immediately evident. And so the question arises: what exactly is this transformation? And what difficulties prevented him from fulfilling it?
Mimetic Desire in Miguel Cervantes’ Don Quixote : an Anthropological Study (Farhat Ben Amor)
This paper sets out to unearth the underlying reasons behind the spectacular success that the seventeenth-century Spanish novelist, Cervantes, achieved in his humoristic work, Don Quixote which has been translated into many languages, including English. In this respect, I work to demonstate the centrality of what the anthropologist Réné Girard called in his book Deceit, Desire and the Novel (1961) ‘mimetic desire’ in sustaining the lightness of the novel’s humor. A desire that is built on imitating others does, actually, define Don Quixote, the protagonist of the novel. Yet, what is special with him is that this desire leads him to generate a whole imagined narrative about knight errantry and, more importatly, to live it out in a time in which medieval chivalric codes of behaviour become outmoded and just part of the fictional world. So, Don Quixote’s plight becomes comic, for he places what he read about the knight Amadis of Gaul and other stories of chivalry as models he irresistably strives to cult and copy from. Certainly, the sharp chasm separating reality from fiction is enough to set the protagonist in a state of confusion whereby he is made to appear to other characters and even to the reader as veritably mad. Meanwhile, our laughable protagonist keeps clinging to such a desire that helps him considerably overcome the heavy hazardous adventures he comes across in his ludicrous and, at the same time, absurd journey of what we may call ‘search for knighthood.’ It is precisely the waxing and waning of this mimetic desire, galvanizing his courage, that this paper seeks to chart and examine anthropologically. Keywords : anthroplogy, mimetic desire, humor, knight-errantry, mediation, parody, rivalry