Adventures in paradox : Don Quixote and the Western tradition / Charles D. Presberg.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Presberg, Charles D., author.

Contributor:

Penn State University Libraries, funder.

Series:

Penn State studies in Romance literatures Adventures in paradox

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, 1547-1616. Don Quixote.

Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de.

Paradox in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (250 p. )

Place of Publication:

University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2001]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Cervantes’s Don Quixote confronts us with a series of enigmas that, over the centuries, have divided even its most expert readers: Does the text pursue a serious or comic purpose? Does it promote the truth of history and the untruth of fiction, or the truth of poetry and the fictiveness of truth itself? In a book that will revise the way we read and debate Don Quixote, Charles D. Presberg discusses the trope of paradox as a governing rhetorical strategy in this most canonical of Spanish literary texts. To situate Cervantes’s masterpiece within the centuries-long praxis of paradoxical discourse in the West, Presberg surveys its tradition in Classical Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the European Renaissance. He outlines the development of paradoxy in the Spanish Renaissance, centering on works by Fernando de Rojas, Pero Mexía, and Antonio de Guevara. In his detailed reading of portions of Don Quixote, Presberg shows how Cervantes’s work enlarges the tradition of paradoxical discourse by imitating as well as transforming fictional and nonfictional models. He concludes that Cervantes’s seriocomic ";system"; of paradoxy jointly parodies, celebrates, and urges us to ponder the agency of discourse in the continued refashioning of knowledge, history, culture, and personal identity.This engaging book will be welcomed by literary scholars, Hispanisists, historians, and students of the history of rhetoric and poetics.

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Introduction: Paradoxical Problems

PART I Western Paradox and the Spanish Golden Age

1 Paradoxical Discourse from Antiquity to the Renaissance: Plato, Nicolaus Cusanus, and Erasmus

2 Paradoxy and the Spanish Renaissance: Fernando de Rojas, Antonio de Guevara, and Pero Mexía

PART II Inventing a Tale, Inventing a Self

3 "This Is Not a Prologue": Paradoxy and the Prologue to Don Quixote, Part I

4 Paradoxes of lmitation: The Quest for Origins and Originality

5 "I Know Who I Am": Don Quixote de la Mancha, Don Diego de Miranda, and the Paradox of Self-Knowledge

Concluding Remarks

WORKS CITED

INDEX

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (p. [237]-245) and index.

This eBook is made available Open Access under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780271072234

0271072237

OCLC:

966819480