Cervantes and His Age: Don Quixote and a Spain in Crisis
For this lecture from the Rising Tide Foundation Symposium “Storytelling, Mythmaking, and the Shaping of Universal History” Adam Sedia will go over the relevance of Cervantes’s “Don Quixote” for today.
Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote is commonly considered the first modern novel. It certainly is one of the most beloved — it has more translations than any book save the Bible. Everyone knows the story of the lovable madman who imagines himself to be a knight and goes “tilting at windmills” — a term that has entered the common lexicon and the popular imagination. Interpretations of Cervantes’s novel treat it either as a series of character studies or as a criticism of the medieval literature that lures the title character into madness. While these readings certainly are valid, they do not tell the whole story. Indeed, they overlook the most powerful aspect of Cervantes’s satire. More than merely writing engaging characters and humorous subplots, Cervantes wrote his novel as a withering criticism of the Spanish society of his day. This lecture will explore the history of Spain since the fall of the Roman Empire, its impact on the Spanish character of Cervantes’s day and more generally, and how Cervantes uses the character of Don Quixote to personify and thereby criticize a nation and a culture that has lost its sense of purpose.
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