A Modern Gloss of Don Quijote: 1.50-52 (original) (raw)

A Modern Gloss of _Don Quijote_: 1.42-(43)

2016

Cervantes is also an excellent comedic writer. At this point, he gives us a burlesque version of the stories that we have been witnessing among the Sierra Morena lovers, the Captive and Zoraida, and now Doña Clara and the mule boy. Don Quijote is outside the inn keeping watch, and like the mule boy, he laments his fate as a “captive knight” of his beloved.

A Modern Gloss of _Don Quijote_: 2.71-74

2016

We have arrived at the last chapters of the greatest novel of all time. Any serious student of the early modern novel, or of the history of the novel form generally, must account for the final passages of Cervantes's masterpiece. Race and the Morisco problem are again present, but the definitive cure of Don Quijote's insanity is fundamental as well.

A Modern Gloss of _Don Quijote_: 1.39-41

2016

At first glance, The Captive’s Tale, which covers chapters thirty-nine to forty-one, is a military adventure. The Captive orients us by recalling the opening line of _Don Quijote_ 1.1, except that instead of referring to an unknown place in La Mancha, he begins in León and alludes explicitly to his bloodline: “Somewhere in the mountains of León my lineage had its beginnings.”

A Modern Gloss of _Don Quijote_: 1.44-46

2016

In these chapters Cervantes’s baroque style reaches a crescendo: the events at the inn unfold rapidly in a series of actions and reactions, and the case of the “bashelmet” results in the chaos of a general brawl that breaks out among the guests. To top this all off, after a lull in the action brings a moment of peace, an officer of the Holy Brotherhood attempts to arrest Don Quijote for having freed the galley slaves, giving rise to yet another pitched battle.

A Modern Gloss of _Don Quijote_: 1.36-38

2016

Perhaps the outcome of the debate delivered, and even represented, by Don Quijote between arms and letters is not so important as the fact that it symbolizes the two professional extremes lived by Cervantes himself.

A Modern Gloss of _Don Quijote_: 2.40-41

As evening approaches, Don Quijote worries that Clavileño's absence indicates that he might not be the knight designated for this adventure. But the wooden horse is finally deposited in the garden by four savages, recalling the theatrical representations at Camacho’s wedding.

A Modern Gloss of _Don Quijote_: 2.5-6

2016

Although not immediately apparent, chapters five and six contain much philosophical thinking about individual self-worth. At the same time, there are numerous hints that Cervantes thinks many of his readers have overlooked the complexity and seriousness of his art. For example, if, like the translator, we dismiss Sancho Panza’s speeches as implausible, we are unlikely to ponder their moral significance, their critique of hierarchical privilege.

A Modern Gloss of _Don Quijote_: 2.54-56

2016

Chapters fifty-four and fifty-five of part two of _Don Quijote_ are crucial to understanding Cervantes’s art of the novel. Here, more than anywhere else, our author combines two symbols: 1) the ass as the mistreated human beings of Apuleius’s anti-slavery picaresque _The Golden Ass_; and 2) the cave as the state of unenlightened philosophical ignorance in the political allegory of Plato’s _Republic_.

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.