Questions:

Chat:

• Before you read this selection from Don Quixote, did you have an idea about the character?  If so, did you think of Don Quixote as a romantic, as someone possessing the courage to follow his own poetic ideas?  Were you surprised that Cervantes did not create that character?  Do you know of any other comparable literary characters that have been appropriated by popular culture & redefined?
• How effective do you think Cervantes tactic was?  Cervantes' theme was to ridicule medieval values. Even though Cervantes frequently tells us that Don Quixote is crazy, do we resist thinking of him as simply demented?  Cervantes faced a difficult task in ridiculing medieval culture, such as Courtly Love & Arthurian Romance, without attacking Spanish Catholicism. Was he effective in doing that?
• Do you think that Don Quixote deflected awareness or criticism from what Spain was doing in the New World, with conquistadors dressed up in the same armor that we find so humorous in Don Quixote?
• Boccaccio provided a glimpse of a positive Renaissance replacement for the institution of the monastery in the kind of experiment liberal arts college represented by the young people living in the country estate.  Rabelais invents what he calls a new monastery, which is obviously a sketch for a university.  If Don Quixote is simply mad & we dismiss his values as deluded, where does Cervantes leave us?  If we turn our backs on the medieval outlook, does Cervantes sufficiently provide directions for developing a preferable Renaissance outlook?  If not, does this mar Don Quixote as a work of art?  Is Boccaccio superior?
• There have been & continue to be many "spin-offs" from Don Quixote, including the TV show, Fantasy Island, the Broadway musical "The Man From La Mancha," & a novel by Graham Greene that was made into a film by PBS (our two characters drive around Spain in a Citroën called Rozinante).  Why do you think Don Quixote has inspired so many spin-offs?

Paper #3: Please submit your analytic essay on medieval & Renaissance literataure.   Use the File Upload option on the Tools menu.

When you finish answering the questions, go to the Review above.