Canine Epistemology and the Unfettered Imagination: The Maker’s Knowledge Argument in Cervantes’ El coloquio de los perros

Abstract

abstractAmong the twelve stories that comprise Cervantes’ Novelas ejemplares, El coloquio de los perros is the one that can be most fundamentally linked to issues of epistemology, as it presents a variety of unstable narrative frames that compel the reader to transcend the gap between the real and the imaginary. This analysis focuses on the intersection of two concepts that seem to hold together the epistemic instability evidenced in the Coloquio: scepticism and the imagination. I argue that Cervantes uses multiple narrative frames to assert human creativity and to highlight the unique power of the creator to know his creation, hence invoking the sceptical principal of the maker’s knowledge argument.