One of the most pressing challenges we are currently facing as literature scholars working in the revenue-driven universities of the twenty-first century is the need for self-justification. How do we explain our dedication to commentary on texts written centuries ago, often in foreign languages, even as our students struggle to keep up with the massive amounts of information made available daily by increasingly powerful digital technology networks? How do we convince university administrators, educational boards, and government officials that a seminar on seventeenthcentury literature is just as worthy of public investment as any computer science or business course? And just as important, what kind of "real-life" lessons or skills might literature classes offer our students? This chapter is partly an attempt to sketch a theoretical line of response to these questions, and partly an illustration of the pedagogical possibilities of a classroom practice of cultural commentary that places the literary classics side by side with the products of our own media culture. Thus, the first half of this essay provides a speculative overview of "the state of the question" in terms of the central issues of the volume, while the second half rehearses a pedagogical approach to Cervantes's classic novel, Don Quixote, as a road narrative that shares a good number of traits with road films as diverse as Easy Rider, The Motorcycle Diaries, Thelma and Louise, Into the Wild, and Borat. My goal is to suggest that the literary classics are most effectively (and productively) engaged in the new humanities classroom in practical exercises of strategic re-historicization.
As its title indicates, this book is an exploration of the theme of madness in Cervantes's novel in light of the information that the author has been able to extract from bibliographical sources and archival materials regarding medical, theological, ethical and legal approaches to the question of madness in early modern Spain. In the process, the author draws important distinctions between the way we define, diagnose, and treat mental illnesses in modern times and how madness was debated, codified, and treated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These findings allow Shuger to distinguish his own historicist approach from the considerable number of Cervantes specialists who have linked the mad protagonist of the novel to the treatment of madness in classical satires and Renaissance literature, and simultaneously from those scholars who have applied Freudian and post-Freudian theories to the study of Cervantes's texts. At times even Foucauldian historicism comes under fire in Shuger's book, if not in itself, certainly as it has been incorporated into the critical tradition of Golden Age studies. As Shuger writes: ''The influence of Foucault's Madness and Civilization in Cervantine scholarship is somewhat inexplicable for, after a brief initial chapter which cites no archival material, Foucault speaks neither of Spain nor of anything prior to the 1656 founding of l'Hopital G en eral in Paris'' (13-14). The book includes a preface from the series editor, an introduction, six chapters, a short epilogue, a bibliographical section, and an index. The introduction poses a key question, which is indeed central to the entire study: ''We know that Cervantes chose to call the protagonist of his masterpiece a 'madman', but which
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