Since its publication in 1605, readers have been enchanted by Miguel de Cervantes’s novel about a knight and his faithful squire and their quest to turn fiction into reality. The adventures of Don Quijote and Sancho Panza force readers to probe the fraught and circular relationship between life and art. How do we know when something is true? How do we negotiate conflicting versions of the truth? What happens when fictions, dreams, or outright lies becomes confused with the truth? What role does art play in catalyzing a desire to transform the world? Can this novel from the early modern period help us to better understand issues relating to gender, religion, and social class in their historical contexts? In addition to these questions, Don Quijote also has a distinctive place in literary history as the first “modern” European novel and thus helps answer questions regarding the precise nature of this narrative genre and its relation to poetry, drama, as well as short narratives. For the novel Don Quijote is many things, but it is first a foremost a story about telling stories and the power of stories to shape our perception of self and by extension our world.
This is a bilingual course with lectures in both Spanish and English and featuring small group discussions in both languages as well as Spanglish. Students will learn about the political, cultural, and artistic history of Early Modern Spain through a sustained engagement with Cervantes’s novel and the art and criticism it has inspired. This is also a course for Spanish-language learners. Students who aim to improve their language skills must come prepared to take risks, make mistakes, and learn from the experience of expressing their opinions in class. Over the semester, students will also gain familiarity with modern criticism and theory relating to Cervantes and develop their own creative and scholarly interventions on the topic.
This is a bilingual course with lectures in both Spanish and English and featuring small group discussions in both languages as well as Spanglish. Students will learn about the political, cultural, and artistic history of Early Modern Spain through a sustained engagement with Cervantes’s novel and the art and criticism it has inspired. This is also a course for Spanish-language learners. Students who aim to improve their language skills must come prepared to take risks, make mistakes, and learn from the experience of expressing their opinions in class. Over the semester, students will also gain familiarity with modern criticism and theory relating to Cervantes and develop their own creative and scholarly interventions on the topic.
- Teacher: Luis Rodriguez-Rincon