| Popis: |
For much of this century, Hispanists have labored in an effort to elevate Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra's El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (1605, 1615) to the coveted status of the "first modem novel." Today this kind of criticism may strike our postmodern sensibilities as a rather traditional enterprise, the kind more interested in establishing an elite hierarchy of literary tastes than in saying anything new about an author or text. For many, the study of literature is still an aesthetic beauty pageant in which "great books" like Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1767) or Marie de la Vergne de La Fayette's La princesse de Clives (1678) are paraded across the stage in a contest to seduce the Western intelligentsia.' The postmodern student of literature may not have much concern for this age-old territorial contest, but she might be interested to learn that the fallout from Hispanism's quest for the "first modem novel" has involved so much attention to, indeed complication of, Don Quixote, that the book now resembles more a postmodern text than an early modem one. At the turn of the century, we have been left with what Jorge Luis Borges would recognize as an "aleph": an infinite ideological labyrinth that reflects and/or cannibalizes all forms, thereby escaping all at |
