Prologue to Futures: The Death and Life of Don Quick (original) (raw)

A Critical Paper for the course Reading and Writing. Don Quixote: A Model for the Modern Novel

2017

Don Quixote is a Spanish novel by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Don Quixote is widely considered by literary critics and readers alike as the classic model for the world's first modern novel to be ever produced, serving as one of the foundations of modern literature, also serving as the model of Western and Spanish literature and how Don Quixote stands in a unique position between chivalric romance and the modern novel.

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.

Don Quixote complex and investigations into fictionality

2017

The doctoral dissertation The Don Quixote Complex and Investigations into Fictionality is based on the notion of mutable identity: The impulse that if I were another, the work I create would also be other. During my research I have experimented with conveying a fictional character as my colleague and introduced that we together have created the art productions that are part of this dissertation. This is to say that the point of departure has been to render a real character and that the idea of fiction as a potential is my basic supposition. The character Andrea Meinin Bück and the artist Lena Séraphin consolidate their collaboration on the framing story The Don Quixote Complex. We experiment with displaying photographs from military archives within the context of an artistic statement in order to avoid a presentation that rewards expressions of absolute power. In my artistic practice I process fictionality as spatial rendition and fictionality unfolds as a critical praxis in conjunc...

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?

Adventures in Paradox: "Don Quixote" and the Western Tradition

South Central Review, 2002

In Adventures in Paradox, Charles Presberg contends the following two points: 1) although it caught on later there than in the rest of Europe, paradoxy was cultivated in Spain with an unsurpassed exuberance; 2) Cervantes' Don Quixote contains a compendium of Western paradoxy as well as many innovations in the field. The study draws upon a variety of works, from Classical to Baroque, and engages a good deal of the critical literature, particularly that bearing upon key issues in Don Quixote related to paradox. Presberg weighs in on topics like the reliability of narrators and sources, the relationships Cervantes posits between the author and the reader, "hard" vs. "soft" readings of don Quixote, and the don Quixote vs. don Diego de Miranda controversy. As one might expect, the focus on paradox foregrounds many traits we have come to associate with Cervantes: parody, irony, ambivalence, anti-dogmatism, and so forth. Presberg's use of contemporary theory is eclectic, with a healthy focus on the primary literary texts as well as the abundant works on paradox by Classical and Renaissance writers. He discusses and makes productive use of figures and concepts such as Plato's Silenus, Aristotle's opposition of nature and art, and Erasmus's Folly. The parallels he highlights between paradoxy and Renaissance poetics provide a useful way of conceptualizing and understanding the vogue of such rhetoric in the period: concern with earthly, contingent matters, mixed forms, temporality and "process," satire that ostensibly contradicts received opinion. Indeed, one of Presberg's points is that paradox could be far more than a rhetorical exercise-that, in more complex writers, it can be characterized as a mode of thought. As with other conceptual frameworks, a danger with Presberg's approach is that it can lead him to characterize nearly any work or "utterance" that is not somehow completely intelligible and conclusive as "paradoxical"; on the other hand, the five categories of paradox he proposes seem useful, and while many of his conclusions involve a sort of rephrasing of previous critical observations, some offer fresh and valuable insight into Cervantes' art. The first part of the study provides an overview of paradoxy from Antiquity to the Renaissance, with brief discussions of Plato, Cusanus, and Erasmus. Beginning with the Parmenides, Presberg discusses the foundations and development of some of his basic operating concepts: serio ludere, discordia concors, via negativa and "resolution in mystery." Also included in this section are observations on the varied incorporation of such ideas into