| 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 MexÕa, 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. |
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