Review:

You learned something more about Renaissance values & about Spanish values (Catholicism, the military resistance against the Moors & its legacy, the conquistadors in the new world).  Renaissance theater often used farce (as in Shakespeare's comedies).  Cervantes, who first wrote for the theater, invented a very long, episodic fictional version of farce.  Cervantes' theme in Don Quixote was to ridicule medieval values, especially the otherworldly outlook that had no interest in things of this world.  It is true that Don Quixote looks for adventure in this world, but time & again he refuses to accept common reality & infuses it with mythic nonsense that invariably causes havoc.

You saw that literary figures can occasionally be appropriated from their original context & meaning to be reinterpreted in popular culture.  Cervantes clearly & frequently says Don Quixote is mad.  Nonetheless, Western culture appropriated the image of Don Quixote & interpreted that image in the context of 19th c. Romanticism, making Don Quixote into a poet or artist.

I won't see you next week!  This was your last lesson.  I hope you enjoyed the reading you did for this class & I predict that years from now, you may return to some of this material to read it for pleasure.