[PAST EVENT] Bellini Colloquium: Prof Timothy McCallister on Don Quijote

November 13, 2014
3:30pm - 5pm
Location
Washington Hall, Room 315
241 Jamestown Rd
Williamsburg, VA 23185Map this location
Since the publication of Miguel de Cervantes' novel 'El Ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha' (1605), two questions have hung over the novel. First, how could an obscure tax collector with a scant publishing record have written it? Second, how does the work hold together? The episodes that make up the first half of the novel, of a crazed hidalgo-turned-knight-errant tilting against the indifference of early modern Spain, give way in the second half to a different constellation of characters, plots, and literary textures. If the title character is not playing a peripheral role, he is altogether absent. The tendency during most of the four centuries of Quijote criticism has been to conclude that Cervantes was a middling genius drawing inspiration from an unsystematic muse.
The talk will propose a new answer to these two questions, embarking on an excursion in over-reading not unlike the one that sets the novel in motion.
Contact

[[afcate, Francie Cate-Arries]]