RLSP 301
Cervantes' "Don Quijote" Spring 2015
Division I Writing Skills Exploring Diversity Initiative
This is not the current course catalog

We will devote the entire semester to the study of one novel: Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quijote, published in the early part of the 17th century. We will try to understand the reasons for the novel’s immense and ongoing influence on Western literature and thought. To do so, we will study Cervantes’ masterful handling of issues that continue to have an uncanny relevance to our lives today: relationships between men and women, the perception of Muslims by Christians and vice versa, the role of fiction in life, the shapes of mental illness, how we decide who we are, how our governments and families and friends decide who we are, the fun and annoyance of going on a totally disorganized road trip with someone else, the meaning of justice, and the meaning of storytelling, to name a few things. In the process, we will continually set things in context and make sure that we understand what was going on in Cervantes’ world that might better explain what goes on in his novel. Finally, we will find that even an entire semester is not enough to engage fully with this extraordinary work, but we will be very glad that we made some headway. Conducted in Spanish