Miguel de Cervantes was a groundbreaking poet, playwright and short story writer in his lifetime. Yet, most readers only know his famous novel, Don Quijote – in bits and pieces, if at all – and generally ignore his wider corpus of published works. This course aims to foster a fuller picture of Cervantes’s lifetime of literary experimentation by focusing specifically on his lesser-read works. Course readings and discussions will assess the writer’s corpus diachronically as it developed over time in order to better gauge the author’s intellectual development and its relation to his slippery critical perspective on early-modern Spanish society. At a time in which Hapsburg Spain waged religious war on multiple fronts, Cervantes articulated throughout his corpus a more inclusive, if not progressive, understandings of what Spain could and should be. How does a literary writer give literary form to the desire for freedom and self-determination in a time of political and inquisitorial censorship? Of particular interest will be the author’s changing representation of women, Turks, moors and other cultural minorities in the Iberian Peninsula and the role of literary fiction in defining the identitarian parameters of the nation.
- Trainer/in: Luis Rodriguez-Rincon