Author:
Bezrukov Andrii,Bohovyk Oksana
Abstract
The most recent reimagining of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605) —Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte (2019)— represents the volatile identities in American society under the conditions of blurring a line between fact and fiction. Exploring quixotism as the conflict of idealism vs realism elucidates the idea of humans who fight with the windmills in their heads. Against the background of this conflict, topical concerns are vividly highlighted to remain constant throughout the centuries, considering specific historical and sociocultural circumstances. The impact of this binary opposition on the worldview of the people of that time and the modern ones, created by Cervantes and Rushdie correspondingly, is a primary focus of the article. Both novels share a symbolic reflection of the world through the distinct aesthetics of a work of fiction that moves them beyond metafictional narration. A comparative study of the diachronically different stories emphasises a similarity of the strong questions raised about the societies whose ideals quixotes reflect.
Publisher
Universidad Nacional de Colombia
Reference32 articles.
1. Bezrukov, Andrii and Oksana Bohovyk. “On the Verge of Moral and Spiritual Collapse: Challenges of a Post-truth World and Hyperreality in Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte.ˮ Forum for World Literature Studies, vol. 14, no. 2, 2022, pages 204-26.
2. Boutcher, Warren. “Transnational Cervantes: Text, Performance, and Transmission in the World of Don Quixote.ˮ Seventeenth-Century Fiction: Text and Transmission, edited by Jacqueline Glomski and Isabelle Moreau, Oxford University Press, 2016, pages 99-114. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198737261.003.0007.
3. Britt-Arredondo, Christopher. Quixotism: The Imaginative Denial of Spain’s Loss of Empire. New York, State University of New York Press, 2004.
4. Cascardi, Anthony J. “Don Quixote and the Invention of the Novel.ˮ The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pages 58-79. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521663210.004.
5. Cascardi, Anthony J. The Subject of Modernity. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992.