Calderón's Life Is a Dream: Mapping a Culture of Contingency for the Twenty-first Century

This essay sets out to produce a reading of Life Is a Dream that shows how Calderón's play is relevant to our individual lives as we begin the new millennium, thus serving as a response to Ortega y Gasset's question, "Can we live today based on the legacy of our classics?" It does so by showing that (1) Life Is a Dream presents the history of human ideas and developments as a nominalist succession of key metaphors, where one metaphor displaces a previous metaphor that has been dominant up to that point, and (2) that Calderón's text invites us to further humanize and expand our own culture of liberalism. The playwright makes the spectator/reader aware of the dangers inherent in the dominance of a language that attempts to be the only language spoken by all.