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SPAN 300: Cervantes' Don Quixote

Lecture 07 - Don Quixote, Part I: Chapters XXI-XXVI (cont.). Professor Gonzalez Echevarria resumes his commentary on the galley slaves episode by talking about Gines' cross-eyedness as a metaphor for congenital internal perspectivism. This is a new model of conflictive being, capable of seeing simultaneously in two ways. The character among the galley slaves that he calls "the prisoner of sex" follows. Professor Gonzalez Echevarria shows how Cervantes can create a complex character in just one paragraph while portraying the historical and legal background of Cervantes' time. The Sierra Morena episodes, the core of part one of the Quixote, take the second half of the lecture. They consist of a set of narrative strands tightly woven around two of the principal drives in the book: Don Quixote's love quest for Dulcinea, and the series of crimes and misdemeanors perpetrated by the hidalgo and his squire. All the interpolated stories have common elements with the central plot, with the Marcela and Grisostomo interlude, and with each other: the perpetration of offenses due to passion, honor, body and property, and with the resulting need for restitution, recompense, requital, pardon or revenge. In all of them, marriage looms as the inevitable and most appropriate form of reparation as well as the most effective kind of narrative closure. (from oyc.yale.edu)

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