Tilting Cervantes: Baroque Reflections on Postmodern Culture (review)

In Tilting Cervantes, Bruce R. Burningham explores the similarities between the Spanish Baroque and postmodern US and UK popular culture. A cultural studies methodology informs both the structure and the content of the book, with Cervantes and Lope de Vega mixing company with the likes of Marilyn Manson, Johnny Rotten, Terry Gilliam, and Keanu Reeves. The baseline proposition of the book requires a leap of faith as it asks scholars on both sides of the aisle to agree that analyzing commonalities between postmodern cultural production and early modern Spanish literature promises to bear fruit for all parties. Not all readers will be willing to make that leap, as many may well prefer to read scholarship exclusively focused on the Baroque or on twentieth- and twenty-first century culture. Yet all should take heed. From my perspective, the most compelling reason to read and write the type of scholarship practiced by Burningham is pedagogical. In this regard, the author has succeeded in producing some eminently teachable chapters that should appeal to students at many universities across the country.

In the preface, Burningham acknowledges that most of the chapters began with ideas generated in the classroom. The creative dialogue he forges between the Baroque and postmodernism makes it easy to imagine him helping students connect present with past in exciting and interesting ways. Cervantes serves as a touchstone for many of the literary innovations and philosophical ideas examined in the book. Indeed, even as the focus of each chapter shifts among different contemporary and early modern texts, Burningham relies on Cervantine techniques and concerns to weave a common thread. This analytical approach works because the book relies primarily on early modern narrative (the picaresque in chapters two and three and Don Quixote in chapters four through seven). Chapter one presents the lone exception to the narrative focus, as Burningham chooses Lope de Vega's Las famosas asturianas and John Ford's Stagecoach to analyze imperial impulses and artistic representations of the "conquered." Discussions about US and Spanish hegemony work in this chapter to push readers to consider the parallels between two complicated moments of imperial rise and decline in ways that could provide the basis for a good classroom discussion of such issues.

One implicit danger of pop culture-driven scholarship is the risk of losing relevance. Chapter two—on Marilyn Manson, Johnny Rotten, and the Spanish picaresque—perhaps falls victim to this risk. On this side of the 1990s and from a viewpoint informed by an extended global recession, Manson's autobiography and Rotten's punk memoir seem painfully dated as narcissistic, self-promotional endeavors that speak more to a vanity-fair cultural moment than to a broader postmodern exploration of the self. Indeed, I fear I learned more about Marilyn Manson's masturbatory practices here than I ever wanted to know.

Burningham's most important contribution to the use of contemporary culture to unlock Baroque texts appears in chapter four, "John Lasseter's Toy Story as Postmodern Don Quixote." Like three other chapters in the book, this was published previously as a stand-alone article. Since its appearance in 2000, the analysis of Toy Story and Don Quixote has become a go-to article for those interested in bringing film studies into the Cervantes classroom. The chapter's success lies in its playful and often thoughtful considerations of how Cervantine techniques have become ingrained into postmodern culture. Like other fine chapters on Brazil (chapter 6) and The Matrix (chapter 7), this analysis highlights the Cervantine engagement with the relationship between the text and the character, between fantasy and reality, and between the meanings of art and life.

Burningham explicitly states his desire to speak to two audiences at once: those interested in popular culture in the US and the UK today and those who study early modern Spain (4). I applaud Burningham's commitment to bridging two scholarly worlds and to bringing new ideas to bear...