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I was wondering what were some goons feelings about Cervantes's Don Quixote being considered a post-modern novel? Is this just another way the stuffy literary establishment is trying to tack another gold-star on the forehead of the 400 y/o novel or do you think Cervantes' genius was genuinely timeless? (and all answers in b/w). The way I think of it is that while the novel may incidentally find itself using techniques we recognize as post-modern, it lacks the underlying ideology that motivated contemporary writers to write in the post-modern mode in the first place. But, like, look at all the post-modern flourishes of the thing. The story is told from the perspective of an arabic historian who stumbles upon an impossibly accurate chronicling of Don Quixote's adventures (as in, there is never a character said to be following Don Quixote who is even literate, let alone capable of chronicling every adventure he gets in) and the reader gets them third-hand once their translated from a dead language, into Arabic, and finally into Spanish. This kind of critical attitude towards historical fact paired with an awareness of its own place as fiction are so post-modern that I can't help but be impressed with just how timeless this novel has proven to be. On the other side though, there is a tradition of absurdly applying post-modern interpretations to famous works. I once had a professor describe Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors as a play that worked to show how mental illness was socially constructed. An idea that wasn't written about until Foucault in the 60s and not mainstream in academia for years after, and about a play that has slaves running around getting beaten up and making fun of women. So, what do you guys think? Don Quixote: the great post-modern novel, or simply, the great modern novel? EDIT: the filthy grammarian who lives in my attic decided the edit tag was worth changing a single word s7indicate3 fucked around with this message at 03:55 on Jun 20, 2016 |
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Jun 20, 2016 00:19
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:http://hispanlit.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/files/2011/06/Borges-Pierre-Menard.pdf 'Satire' is a genre and post-modernism a cultural movement, they are not mutually exclusive. Tristam Shandy sounds rad. I never heard of it before now. If he's a character like Don Quixote then maybe we have a modern trickster archetype in Quixote and Shandy. s7indicate3 fucked around with this message at 05:13 on Jun 20, 2016 |
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Jun 20, 2016 05:05
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blue squares posted:Metafiction is a trick that postmodern authors used. It's not at all what made their works postmodern. Their ideology is. Read the OP Is that necessarily true though? What difference would it make if the author was intentionally signifying post-modernity or whether the work just happened upon it? In the end, wouldn't both works signify the same thing regardless of intention? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorial_intent Believe me, I agree with what you're saying about post-modernism being an idea expressed through the use of a metafictional framing narrative, but a lot like how works before Kafka have come to be seen as Kafkaesque, can't we see Don Quixote as post-modern as well? Consider that one ideological tenant of post-modernity; the challenging of master narratives (this isn't my definition but Jean-Francois Lyotard's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Postmodern_Condition). Couldn't it then be said that if Quixote challenges master narratives that it, in fact, signifies post-modernity regardless of Cervantes' intention? Well, if you consider how Don Quixote blends reality and dream in a way that challenges Enlightenment age notions of reason and the legitimacy of history as I described in my last post, you'd be hard pressed to see Don Quixote as not challenging its fair share of master narratives. I won't go into point-by-point detail, connecting specific passages to examples so you're just going to have to take my word for it. If you've read it, I don't think what I'm saying here is that far of a stretch (but by all means tear me a new one). I'm not trying to be absurd in my interpretation here. A lot of authors who primarily write in the post-modern mode wrote in to a Guardian survey to vote Don Quixote as the greatest book ever written and I think its safe to say that that may be because its retrospectively recognized post-modernity has proven massively influential for contemporary post-modern writers. I'm just saying that life is stranger than fiction and sometimes someone writes a post-modern masterpiece in 1615. EDIT: A sentence got away from me
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Jun 20, 2016 22:42
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