In this Book

Adventures in Paradox: Don Quixote and the Western Tradition

Book
Charles D. Presberg
2001
summary

Cervantes’s Don Quixote confronts us with a series of enigmas that, over the centuries, have divided even its most expert readers: Does the text pursue a serious or comic purpose? Does it promote the truth of history and the untruth of fiction, or the truth of poetry and the fictiveness of truth itself? In a book that will revise the way we read and debate Don Quixote, Charles D. Presberg discusses the trope of paradox as a governing rhetorical strategy in this most canonical of Spanish literary texts.

To situate Cervantes’s masterpiece within the centuries-long praxis of paradoxical discourse in the West, Presberg surveys its tradition in Classical Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the European Renaissance. He outlines the development of paradoxy in the Spanish Renaissance, centering on works by Fernando de Rojas, Pero Mexía, and Antonio de Guevara. In his detailed reading of portions of Don Quixote, Presberg shows how Cervantes’s work enlarges the tradition of paradoxical discourse by imitating as well as transforming fictional and nonfictional models. He concludes that Cervantes’s seriocomic "system" of paradoxy jointly parodies, celebrates, and urges us to ponder the agency of discourse in the continued refashioning of knowledge, history, culture, and personal identity.

This engaging book will be welcomed by literary scholars, Hispanisists, historians, and students of the history of rhetoric and poetics.

Table of Contents

Front Cover

Half title, Series Page, Title Page, Copyright, Dedication

Contents

pp. vii-viii

Acknowledgments

pp. ix-x

Introduction: Paradoxical Problems

pp. 1-8

Part I: Western Paradox and the Spanish Golden Age

1. Paradoxical Discourse from Antiquity to the Renaissance: Plato, Nicolaus, Cusanus, and Erasmus

pp. 11-36

2. Paradoxy and the Spanish Renaissance: Fernando de Rojas, Antonio de Guevara, and Pero Mexia

pp. 37-72

Part II: Inventing a Tale, Inventing a Self

3. "This Is Not a Prologue": Paradoxy and the Prologue to Don Quixote Part I

pp. 75-162

4. Paradoxes of Imitation: The Quest for Origins and Originality

pp. 163-192

5. "I Know Who I Am": Don Quixote de la Mancha, Don Diego de Miranda, and the Paradox of Self-Knowledge

pp. 193-230

Concluding Remarks

pp. 231-236

Works Cited

pp. 237-246

Index

pp. 247-250

Back Cover

Back To Top