Cervantes' Don Quixote
Yale, , Prof. Roberto González Echevarría
Updated On 02 Feb, 19
Yale, , Prof. Roberto González Echevarría
Updated On 02 Feb, 19
The course facilitates a close reading of Don Quixote in the artistic and historical context of renaissance and baroque Spain. Students are also expected to read four of Cervantes' Exemplary Stories, Cervantes' Don Quixote: A Casebook, and J.H. Elliott's Imperial Spain. Cervantes' work will be discussed in relation to paintings by Velazquez. The question of why Don Quixote is read today will be addressed throughout the course. Students are expected to know the book, the background readings and the materials covered in the lectures and class discussions.
4.1 ( 11 )
Cervantes Don Quixote (SPAN 300)
González Echevarría starts by commenting on three of the returns and repetitions (characters who reappear and incidents that, if not repeated, recall previous incidents) that take place at the end of part one of the Quixote and which give density to the fiction the galley slaves, Andrés, and the postprandial speech or the speech on arms and letters. Don Quixotes insanity not only gives him a certain transcendence, but also shows the arbitrariness of laws, which causes their rejection by society and other characters insane behavior. González Echevarría comments on the intersection between literature and history before moving on to the captives tale, the culmination of those intertwined stories, in which religious conversion overcomes social barriers and transcends the neo-platonic convergence of opposites in Renaissance plots. With his creation of Don Quixote, the first hero-fugitive from justice in the Western tradition--a "highway robber," as the officer of the Holy Brotherhood calls him--Cervantes has created the first important novelistic protagonist drawn from the legal archives. His is the case of the insane hidalgo who set out to act out chivalric fantasies and in the process committed a series of crimes. And yet, he is the agent of Providence.
Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website httpopen.yale.educourses
This course was recorded in Fall 2009.
Sam
Sep 12, 2018
Excellent course helped me understand topic that i couldn't while attendinfg my college.
Dembe
March 29, 2019
Great course. Thank you very much.