The Literary Classics in Today’s Classroom: Don Quixote and Road Movies

Abstract

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.