Don Quijote Research Articles

Figuraciones de autor en Javier Marías y Cervantes: una nueva perspectiva sobre los narradores del Quijote

This article draws on analyses of the concept of textual authority, authorial figurations, and the relationship between fiction and nonfiction to offer a new hypothesis about the configuration of narrative voices in Don Quijote. This critical approach focuses specifically on the transition between the eighth and ninth chapters of the First Part in order to explain the nature of the second author as a self-figuration of Cervantes, to justify his intrusion as a resource aimed at avoiding the identification between him and the first author, and to give an account of the voice appearing at the end of the eighth chapter as belonging to Cervantes himself. The narrative voice introduced by Javier Marías in Todas las almas serves as a reference for our argumentation.

A Salty Odyssey: A Potassium-Enriched Journey Inspired by Don Quijote.

A Salty Odyssey: A Potassium-Enriched Journey Inspired by Don Quijote.

Whose Voice? Speaking, Singing, and Listening in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Cervantes’s Don Quijote

ABSTRACT Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre appeared in 1795–96, two decades after the publication of Bertuch’s translation of Cervantes’ Don Quijote and three years before Tieck’s seminal translation of the same. Both novels famously feature errant protagonists with complex lives and problematic love interests. This comparative paper offers a detailed exploration of the potential links. The initial focus is contextual, with a discussion of Goethe’s reception of Cervantes’s work and the critical responses of Goetheforschung to this meeting of great minds. The paper then explores parallels between the texts, building on the work of Barry Ife on Quijote in relation to the use of voice (especially song) and dissembling (ventriloquy) in the Lehrjahre.

Cervantes and Don Quijote at Home and Abroad

Do resonances of Cervantes's frustrated attempts to be granted a royal appointment in the Spanish Indies filter into the “Quijote”? Can the author be glimpsed in the novel of which he is also a reader? What holds Don Quijote and Sancho Panza together and gives this episodic novel its coherence? Attuned to the rich conversational exchanges between the two protagonists, I argue that Don Quijote's escalating promises and Sancho's dogged pursuit of an island to govern, together with the triangulated relationship of Don Quijote, Sancho, and the imagined Dulcinea, result in what can rightly be called Cervantes's anti-anthem to America.

Sainte-Beuve's Quixotic Response to Hugo's Shakespeare

ABSTRACT: This article studies Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve's and Victor Hugo's clashing perspectives on Don Quijote in texts written in 1864, namely, the former's review of Doré's illustrations for the novel and the latter's Shakespeare . Considering the intellectual history between the two, the article argues that they use Don Quijote to promote their different literary and political agendas, which leads to overly complicated readings of the novel. They both interpret Sancho's way of dealing with Quijote as a metaphor for the attitude that the French nation should have towards Napoleon III, but they fundamentally disagree in their descriptions of that relationship.

Con-Temporary

The paper focuses on exhibition practice, taking exhibitions as the key to contemporaneity. I will make a strong plea for the mutuality between past and present, the encouragement of visitors becoming participants through soliciting affective empathic attitude, and the accommodation to make this possible thanks to the enticement of durational looking. I will do this through the theoretical analysis of what exhibiting means and does, and through a consideration of my recent video installation Don Quijote: Sad Countenances. One episode of this project will be the hook on which to hang my view of art-making as, not an illustration of but a method of cultural analysis.

Chrystal Ann Chemris. The Spanish Baroque and Latin American Literary Modernity: Writing in Constellation

Chrystal Ann Chemris. <i>The Spanish Baroque and Latin American Literary Modernity: Writing in Constellation</i>

Resisting Category: New Spanish-language fiction

Resisting CategoryNew Spanish-language fiction Idra Novey (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Illustrations and design by Claire Hungerford. [End Page 46] The three spanish-language writers in this folio share a thrilling unpredictability. From one book to the next, their work has remained magnificently unclassifiable, mixing up fiction and nonfiction, prose and poetry. Their lives, too, resist easy categorization. Nona Fernández and Alejandro Zambra are both Chilean, although Fernández has called herself "an uncomfortable Chilean," and Zambra resides in Mexico City. Cristina Rivera Garza grew up in Mexico but has lived for long stretches in the United States and currently directs the creative writing program at the University of Houston. [End Page 47] I have long admired these writers for their daring experimentation with narrative uncertainty. Their stories acknowledge their own authorial fallibility, inviting readers into the creative act of imagining other versions, with alluring narrative holes of their own. Zambra's "Penultimate Activities" is the most explicitly metafictional. The opening paragraphs contain instructions for a writing assignment that becomes increasingly existential, raising questions about literature, God, and the psychic toll of putting anything to paper. One of my favorite novels by Fernández, Chilean Electric, a book not yet available in English, is excerpted and translated here as "The Illumination of Santiago." Its first line signals that we are reading recollections of someone else's memories. The narrator reconstructs her grandmother's descriptions of the night when electric streetlights first illuminated Santiago, Chile's capital. She describes her grandmother's wonder, observing other people outside in the dark for the first time, but also how the streetlights mark the moment that Santiago "started cheating with time." The narrator continually admits that her version of what occurred that night may not be reliable, that someone else might remember it differently. In Garza's story, when the narrator arrives at his estranged mother's house, he also becomes estranged from specificity. His emotional distance from his mother has stripped him of words to describe his own life with any particulars. He describes himself through negation, arriving from an unidentified "somewhere else." Where they are now is up for question, too. His mother tells him she feels at odds with the very air they breathe. The question of narrative certainty vs. uncertainty has had a strong presence in Spanish-language literature for centuries. The Old Spanish term certanedad derives from the Latin certanitatem for "full assurance of mind." It's deeply embedded in Don Quijote, considered to be the first modern novel in Spanish. The influence of Don Quijote–with its myriad metafictional layers and Cervantes' delight in drawing attention to Quijote's uncertainty of mind–is [End Page 48] notable in this trio of writers who are influencing the trajectory of Spanish-language literature today. Translation adds another layer of uncertainty to the stories in this folio. The very air of a narrative changes with translation. The reader breathes in the words of another mind living "somewhere else." Megan McDowell and Sarah Booker both translate with remarkable vividness and precision. I remain ambivalent about a few words in my translation of Fernández's story–the verb, for example, I chose for the lengthening of a shadow along a city wall. All translations, however, are provisional, which is what makes them fascinating. There's always the prospect of some other person recreating the same words anew, at another point in time. These three stories certainly merit further interpretations that recreate, as the translations do here, the dynamic ambiguities that make a work of literature come alive. [End Page 49] Idra Novey idra novey is a writer and translator. Her most recent novel is Take What You Need. Copyright © 2023 Yale University

Andantes con Cervantes

Andantes con Cervantes

Dime Con Quién Anda Guadalupe

Dime con quién andas, y te diré quién eres – Tell me with whom you walk, and I will tell you who you are. This is one of the most common sayings in the Spanish language, and one that appears at least as far back as Cervantes’ Don Quijote de la Mancha, published in 1615. In this paper I will explore briefly how this saying applies to Our Lady of Guadalupe by asking with whom the Virgin walks in order to discern who the Virgin is. I consciously do not start with theology, with the magisterium, or with the clergy. Instead, I look at the story, and at the storytellers – those stories that describe mysteries “cured in centuries of blood and candle smoke,” those people for whom “five hundred years of sorrow have not destroyed their deepest faith.” In their experience and praxis we find Guadalupe.

Realidad y ficción en las sobremesas de Don Quijote. Un estudio del capítulo XI, que narra «de lo que le sucedió a Don Quijote (en la sobremesa) con unos cabreros»

"Don Quijote de la Mancha has become an endless source for studies about cooking and socio-gastronomy, as Carolyn Nadeau and Martín Morán’s works attest. But beyond this culinary interpretation, Cervantes’s «after-dinner prose» can be said to treasure something else, rather than the mere narrative contextualization of food and entertainment. One proof of this argument is that some of the most enjoyable and masterful dialogues of the book converge in the after-dinner scenario, where a close relationship is established between food and conversations, between food and literature. This work defends the idea that Cervantes integrated these elements in order to convey one of the central topics of his novel: the intrinsic relation between reality and fiction, or between life and books."

PICARESQUE NOVELS IN CANNERY ROW, CANDIDE OR OPTIMISM, AND DON QUIJOTE

The research compared rascals in three Picaresque novels: Cannery Row, Candide or Optimism, and Don Quijote. It used Picaresque theories from Clarence Hugh Holman (1972), as well as Gustavo Pellon and Julio Rodriguez-Luis (1986), that specified rascal or rogue. This understanding explains how some Picaresque novels feature rascal characters who are silly, stupid, reckless, rude and have other negative traits, but they also have qualities of kindness, a good heart, and attentiveness hidden behind them. Mack and the boys, Candide, and Don Quijote are all depicted as rogues. The Picaresque element is used as a formula in the story to determine and exemplify rascal values. The researcher stated two problems related to Picaresque rascal: what are the similarities between Picaresque rascals in Cannery Row, Candide or Optimism, and Don Quijote? In addition, the purpose of this research is to identify Picaresque rascals in three objects. Furthermore, this research utilizes Ian Dey's (1993) literary criticism method, namely qualitative analysis. It is used to decipher the data of each object one by one and to obtain information about the Picaresque. The researcher then used Susan Bassnett's (1999) comparative method to compare topics. The similarities between the three objects are the results of this research. The similarities are rascals, education, instability of personality, criminality, and themes. Keywords: Comparative Literature 1; Elements 2; Novel 3; Picaresque 4; Rascal 5

Unity-in-variety,admiratioand Verisimilitude in the Interpolated Stories ofDon Quijote, Part One

The interpolated stories included in Don Quijote, Part one have frequently been studied as oppositional to the main plot in function of thematic binaries such as literature-life, illusion-reality, truth-fiction, idealism-realism and romance-novel. An analysis of the embedded tales’ shared motifs, commonplace characterizations and structural relationship with the central narration, however, demonstrates Cervantes’s attempt to incorporate and harmonize disparate literary elements into a single narrative according to the theoretical precepts of his age, especially unity-in-variety, admiratio and verisimilitude. The interpolated stories are constructed as symmetrical patterns of recurrent tropes and themes with varying degrees of coordination with each other, as well as with the main plot. This intricate structure demonstrates the incremental nature of Cervantes’s innovation. Rather than constituting a decisive rupture with contemporary theoretical postulates, as the critical consensus holds, his approach to narrative and character develops in consonance with them.

Diccionario Cervantes by Jean Canavaggio

Reviewed by: Diccionario Cervantes by Jean Canavaggio Howard Mancing (bio) Jean Canavaggio. Diccionario Cervantes. Madrid: Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, 2020. 509 pp. ISBN-13: 978-8415245957. This is a beautiful book. It is also a big book: over 500 pages, measuring 8.5” x 10,” 2” thick, and weighing 4.5 pounds. It is lavishly illustrated; in fact, it is divided equally between text and image, about half the pages devoted to each. The body of the work is followed by a Cuadro genealógico de los Cervantes, a Cronología, and (an incomplete and uneven) list of Obras de referencia (all occupying a total of 12+ pages). The images include reproductions of works of art (paintings, drawings, engravings, etchings, lithographs, posters, tapestries, and more); texts (letters, documents, manuscripts); photographs of persons and places; and various other things (maps, photographs, music scores, movie stills, comics, newspapers). The visual attractiveness of the volume is impressive and, in some ways, the best part of the book is its rich collection of high-quality images, many of them familiar, others not seen before (at least, by me). The 136 double-column entries in the dictionary vary in length from a few lines to ten columns of text. The longest entries (not including images) are for the following topics: Cautiverio, Cine, Esoterismo, Letras hispanoamericanas, Prisiones (the longest single entry in the book), Sevilla, and Valladolid; these entries average 8.5 columns in length. The entries for Cervantes’s works— Comedias, Entremeses, Galatea, Novelas ejemplares, Numancia, Poesías, Persiles y Sigismunda, and Don Quijote, and Viaje del Parnaso—average 6 columns each. There is (as I know from personal experience) no way the author of a dictionary or an encyclopedia can include everything worthy of mention. Even the monumental Gran Enciclopedia Cervantina, currently 12 volumes (A through Sandoval y Rojas, Don Bernardo de) and more than 11,000 words long does not have an entry for everything and everyone. Jean Canavaggio has of necessity made choices about what and whom to include. It would not be fair for a reviewer to concentrate on what he has not done more than on what he has done so well. If the entries in this Diccionario Cervantes seem to give preference to French writers, artists, and scholars, so be it; that is Canavaggio’s choice. But not to point out a few significant omissions and distortions of emphasis or importance would be worse than ignoring them. There are superb entries on dozens of subjects of significance to the life and works of Cervantes in this dictionary: Atribuciones; Brujas y hechiceras; Converso, Origen; Documentos; España; Gitanos; Indias; Judíos; Lepanto; [End Page 208] Moriscos; Negocios; Óperas; Picaresca; Religión; Saavedra; and Traductores del Quijote. These and many other accurate and informative entries illustrate the breadth and subtlety of the author’s presentation. They are, for the most part, a delight to read and can be appreciated by general readers and Cervantes scholars alike. In addition, there are entries for members of Cervantes’s family and for others who play an important role in his life and times: Agi Morato, Felipe II, Don Juan de Austria, Juan López de Hoyos, Antonio de Sigura, Lope de Vega, and others. There are entries for two important literary genres important in the time of Cervantes—Libros de caballerías and Picaresca; Tirante el Blanco has an entry, but not Amadís de Gaula. There are entries for literary theorists and scholars: Américo Castro, Michel Foucault (?), György Lukács, and José Ortega y Gasset. Missing are two of the most important theorists of the novel and Cervantes’s place in it: Friedrich von Schlegel and Mikhail Bakhtin (also missing in the Gran Enciclopedia). The absence of the latter is particularly unfortunate, as no one has featured Cervantes and Don Quixote more centrally or with more original insightfulness. There are 21 entries for writers, mostly novelists, but with an uneven distribution and with some quirky inclusions: 8 English, 4 French, 3 Latin American (included in the Letras hispanoamericanas entry), 2 each Russian, German, and USA, and 1 Spanish. Azorín and Borges (the only Spanish American writer with...

La “demanda” del baciyelmo

The capture of the baciyelmo in chapter 21 of the first part of Don Quijote is an interpretive challenge. The assault on the barber follows, in principle, the parameters that one would expect from the practices regarding the spoils of war contemporary to Cervantes in which the troops benefited economically from the capture of the enemy’s properties. However, the rejection of the barber’s mount does not correspond to the behavior that one would expect from a knight motivated by material gain. This essay contemplates this problem with reference to the Espejo de caballerías-the Castilian rendition of Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato-the closest literary reference to Mambrino’s helmet in the hidalgo’s library. This essay proposes that this text contains the necessary elements for a coherent interpretation of the distribution of the barber’s belongings: the literary convention of la demanda and the allegation of extreme necessity.

Don Quijote Caballero de los Leones y los significados de “león” en el lenguaje de germanía

In Cervantes’s 1615 second part of Don Quijote, the title character assumes the heroic name “Caballero de los Leones.” This article argues that the chivalric appellation had a double meaning related to the context of prostitution and gambling, derived from the argot of the Spanish underworld of the Siglo de Oro, the “germanía.” In this sense, the adventure of the lions (2.17) is a sort of linguistic feat in which the character of the rufián prevails over the pícaro. Moreover, the meanings of “león” in 17th century Spain are important in the literary competition against Avellaneda’s apocryphal continuation.

Alexa, was Don Quijote Mad? Enchanted Heads in Cervantes’s World and in Our Own

Este ensayo propone una nueva lectura de la cabeza encantada en Don Quijote (;.&lt;;) a partir de recientes estudios del capitalismo de vigilancia. Se consideran dos preguntas centrales. En primer lugar, ¿qué nos revela la presencia de “cabezas habladoras” en nuestros hogares (dispositivos como Amazon Echo) sobre la difusión y el impacto de la vigilancia en la España del siglo XVII? Segundo, ¿qué nos enseña la falta de razonamiento crítico ante la cabeza encantada por parte de don Quijote sobre la facilidad con la que nuestra sociedad cede a las fuerzas políticas y comerciales que nos espían e intentan manipular nuestro comportamiento.

Alexa, was Don Quijote Mad? Enchanted Heads in Cervantes’s World and in Our Own

Este ensayo propone una nueva lectura de la cabeza encantada en Don Quijote (;.<;) a partir de recientes estudios del capitalismo de vigilancia. Se consideran dos preguntas centrales. En primer lugar, ¿qué nos revela la presencia de “cabezas habladoras” en nuestros hogares (dispositivos como Amazon Echo) sobre la difusión y el impacto de la vigilancia en la España del siglo XVII? Segundo, ¿qué nos enseña la falta de razonamiento crítico ante la cabeza encantada por parte de don Quijote sobre la facilidad con la que nuestra sociedad cede a las fuerzas políticas y comerciales que nos espían e intentan manipular nuestro comportamiento.

Cervantes: Displacements, Inflections, and Transcendence by E. Michael Gerli

Reviewed by: Cervantes: Displacements, Inflections, and Transcendence by E. Michael Gerli Bradley J. Nelson (bio) E. Michael Gerli. Cervantes: Displacements, Inflections, and Transcendence. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2019. 266 pp. ISBN-13: ISBN-13: 978-1588713377. E. Michael Gerli begins his latest book with a prologue entitled “Cervantes and I,” in which he describes his personal and professional relationship with Cervantes as a journey that has led him to the realization that the best teacher and most reliable authority for the Cervantine oeuvre are the works and author, themselves. Rejecting “the existence of a science of literature and philology,” Gerli follows Américo Castro’s discovery that “Don Quijote’s radical contribution to narrative consisted in representing the on-going processes of human experience in the characters that inhabit the novel and in readers of it who seek to know their own world” (9). The rest of the book develops the textual bases for his claim, beginning with a theoretically-informed deep reading of the eruption of competing narrative voices in part one of Don Quixote, when the narrator interrupts the battle between Don Quixote and the Vizcaino with the subtly uproarious history of the lost Arabic manuscript, its translation, and the myriad problems and perspectives of interpretation that it drops into unsuspecting readers’ hands. Gerli links Castro’s recognition of the “problematical nature of the representation of truth” in Cervantes with Foucault’s concept of linguistic heterotopias (19–20), offering a productive and agile analytical framework for the complex linguistic games that Cervantes plays with his readers. The latter’s self-conscious presentation of the missing manuscript provides Gerli with prima facie evidence of the intentional and systematic production of textual and narrative lacunae and mis-direction that generations of philologists have peddled as signs of Cervantes’s supposed carelessness or lack of formal aesthetic training: justification, in other words, for their continued attempts to correct the text in ways that suit their own vision of an ex post facto editio printemps. Gerli’s ironically serious discussion of philology is reminiscent of Julio Baena’s sustained critique of what he calls the science’s “rigor mortis,” on the [End Page 223] one hand, and Tom Lathrop’s spirited defense of Cervantes’s artistic control over his intentionally error-filled texts, on the other. More importantly, it allows the critic to dive into the rhetorical gamesmanship of Cervantes while, at the same time, enriching his analyses with important contributions to our understanding of the literary and historical contexts with which Cervantes dialogues. Gerli’s readings demonstrate how Cervantes’s works not only communicate and model a productively ironic approach to history and truth, they also show how the metaphysical positing of a stable truth and reality beyond language, what David Castillo and William Egginton call the “major Baroque strategy,” both perpetuates and disguises systemic violence along caste, gender, ethnic, and cultural frontiers. In chapter 2 Gerli juxtaposes his analysis of “El curioso impertinente” with Francis Bacon’s “rehabilitation of curiosity” and the rise of scientific empiricism, showing, in effect, how the metaphysics of honor attempt to appropriate the early modern drive toward scientific certainty. In this perspectival analysis of the tragedies that ensue from Anselmo’s drive towards absolute knowledge, “Cervantes signals the need for an ethical basis to all belief [...] and [...] that the search for truth [...] requires moral agency,” situating judgment in relation to values as opposed to knowledge. Chapter 3 continues in this vein through an insightful analysis of Cañizares’s analogously impertinent desire to preserve his young wife’s chastity—albeit through enclosure as opposed to temptation—in the entremés El viejo celoso. Gerli reminds us that the interludes should not be detached from their performative placement as entr’actes in the comedia nueva, which foregrounds their critical relationship with the socio-economic apparatuses surrounding early modern theatrical institutions. The author reads Cervantes’s purpose in these pieces as the production of “critical insight regarding the representation of the long-established conflict between honor, morality, and individual desire that lies at the heart of the Spanish drama at the start of the seventeenth century,” specifically the ways in which the comedia nueva obfuscates...

E. Michael Gerli. Cervantes: Displacements, Inflections, and Transcendence. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2019. 266 pp. ISBN-13: ISBN-13: 978-1588713377.

E. Michael Gerli begins his latest book with a prologue entitled “Cervantes and I,” in which he describes his personal and professional relationship with Cervantes as a journey that has led him to the realization that the best teacher and most reliable authority for the Cervantine oeuvre are the works and author, themselves. Rejecting “the existence of a science of literature and philology,” Gerli follows Américo Castro’s discovery that “Don Quijote’s radical contribution to narrative consisted in representing the on-going processes of human experience in the characters that inhabit the novel and in readers of it who seek to know their own world” (9). The rest of the book develops the textual bases for his claim, beginning with a theoretically-informed deep reading of the eruption of competing narrative voices in part one of Don Quixote, when the narrator interrupts the battle between Don Quixote and the Vizcaino with the subtly uproarious history of the lost Arabic manuscript, its translation, and the myriad problems and perspectives of interpretation that it drops into unsuspecting readers’ hands. Gerli links Castro’s recognition of the “problematical nature of the representation of truth” in Cervantes with Foucault’s concept of linguistic heterotopias (19—20), offering a productive and agile analytical framework for the complex linguistic games that Cervantes plays with his readers. The latter’s self-conscious presentation of the missing manuscript provides Gerli with prima facie evidence of the intentional and systematic production of textual and narrative lacunae and misdirection that generations of philologists have peddled as signs of Cervantes’s supposed carelessness or lack of formal aesthetic training: justification, in other words, for their continued attempts to correct the text in ways that suit their own vision of an ex post facto editio printemps.