HISP 388 - Peninsular Seminar

Semester Offered: Fall or Spring
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2014/15b: Madness, Irrationality, and Artifice: Facing the Limits of Fiction in Cervantine Narrative. Lionel Trilling once said “all prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote”. This class considers the most “extreme” forms of narration that Miguel de Cervantes designed in order to deal with one of the critical philosophical and artistic concerns of its time: the problem of appearance and reality. There are many aesthetic innovations in Cervantes’ narrative model: the creation of a self-conscious narrator, the integration of a multiplicity of styles, the assimilation of many different narrative genres, the problem of various levels of fictionality, the transformation of events into experience through the manipulation of the point of view, the elaboration of a constant and pervasive irony, etc. This course focuses specifically on Cervantes’ reflections about the way people think, change, dream, and fantasize in their quest for deciphering the complex relationship established between illusion and reality. The students explore two of the Exemplary Novels and several chapters of part 2 of Don Quixote in order to appreciate how Cervantes’ metafictional game came to be interwoven with a deep interest in determining the true nature of madness, perception, and the creative limits of baroque artifice. Mr. Vivalda.

Prerequisite: HISP 216  and one course above HISP 216.

One 2-hour period.