Distance And Control In Don Quixote

The novel Don Quixote, written in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, is widely considered to be one of the greatest fictional works in the entire canon of Western literature. At once farcical and deeply philosophical, Cervantes’ novel and its characters have become integrated into the cultures of the Western Hemisphere, influencing language and modern thought while inspiring art and artists such as Richard Strauss and Pablo Picasso. Based on Professor Roberto González Echevarría’s popular open course at Yale University, this essential guide to the enduring Spanish classic facilitates a close reading of Don Quixote in the artistic and historical context of renaissance and baroque Spain while exploring why Cervantes’ masterwork is still widely read and relevant today. González Echevarría addresses the novel’s major themes and demonstrates how the story of an aging, deluded would-be knight-errant embodies that most modern of predicaments: the individual’s dissatisfaction with the world in which he lives, and his struggle to make that world mesh with his desires.

In response to the classic question whether Don Quixote is true to life, Felix Martinez-Bonati defines it as an unrealistic allegory of realism. He maintains that Cervantes's novel presents an ironized universe of literature that plays with the contradictions of traditional wisdom and the variety and limitations of literary forms—including those of verisimilitude. Drawing on Aristotle's Poetics, on the idealist and romantic traditions that originate in Kant, Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, and Coleridge, and on contemporary critical theory, Martinez-Bonati describes the stylistic matrix of Don Quixote as a combination of semirealism, romance fantasy, and comedy. He provides fresh insights into the character of Cervantes's imagination, the composition and unity of Don Quixote, and its generic structure, rhetorical force, and metafictional intentionality.

James Montgomery's new translation of Don Quixote is the fourth already in the twenty-first century, and it stands with the best of them. It pays particular attention to what may be the hardest aspect of Cervantes's novel to render into English: the humorous passages, particularly those that feature a comic and original use of language. Cervantes would be proud. --Howard Mancing, Professor of Spanish, Purdue University and Vice President, Cervantes Society of America

The satirical story of the man from La Mancha has been popular for nearly 400 years.

Arguably the most influential work to emerge from Spain's Golden Age, Don Quixote laid the groundwork for the Western literary canon and remains one of its major achievements.