Stereotyped fans and social critique: Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Eminem’s ‘Stan’

Abstract

Abstract This article compares two very different texts, but important similarities can be established between Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Eminem’s ‘Stan’. These include shared explorations of fandom and influence. However, whilst Eminem discusses the dangers of his own music, Cervantes addresses the influence of an entire genre: the Chivalric Romance. Still, inherent to Cervantes’s critique of poorly written Romances is recognition of his own accountability as an author. Therefore, both texts’ creators consider the responsibilities that their influential position entails, examining this in reference to an apparently stereotypically drawn ‘pathological fan’. Jensen argues that the pathologizing of fans masks ‘an implicit critique of modern life’ (2003: 9), but both ‘Stan’ and Don Quixote’s social critique is quite explicit. This is despite Cervantes’s novel being produced before the modern era (as the age of mass media), and the relevance of other arguments made by Jensen – for example, those concerning stigmatization, compensation and understandings of the fan versus the aficionado – are also examined in reference to Don Quixote as a ‘pre-modern’ text. Nevertheless, fan characterization as a tool of social critique remains the central focus of this analysis, as it is through this that the allegedly negative stereotype of the fan depicted by both Cervantes and Eminem can be re-evaluated.