Deep Analysis of Don Quixote: Meeting Cervantes (Lecture I) (Patreon)

Cervantes is going to be a strong presence in the world of Don Quixote.

So let's meet him together.

We'll learn what his life was like, and how the battles, woundings, and imprisonments helped shape the novel we love today.

Video Timestamps:

• 0:00 welcome to the Don Quixote lecture series
• 2:00 should we read Don Quixote biographically?
• 2:45 Cervantes vs Shakespeare
• 3:20 is the knight errant mad?
• 3:40 what does Cervantes brutalise his knight?
• 4:00 Nabokov on Don Quixote 
• 4:30 the suffering of Cervantes
• 4:54 Cervantes the soldier
• 5:25 wounded at the Battle of Lepanto
• 5:48 captured by pirates, held in slavery for five years
• 6:30 Cervantes vs Lope de Vega
• 7:30 Cervantes imprisoned 
• 9:00 how he began writing the novel in prison
• 9:30 part one and part two (and the plagiarised version)
• 11:30 on the nature of madness and imaginative literature
• 13:10 conversation, companionship, dialogue, love
• 13:40 the pre-novel picaresque 
• 14:30 psychologically complex characters (Proust, Tolstoy)
• 16:00 the device of story-within-a-story
• 16:30 "an area of free play"
• 17:00 the fool can speak truth to power
• 19:00 Don Quixote as satirical critique 
• 19:30 what is a chivalric romance?
• 21:30 what is a quest?
• 22:30 what does quixotic mean?
• 23:00 how the novel's reputation precedes it
• 25:00 three pieces of advice for appreciating Don Quixote 
• 28:41 reading assignments before the next lecture

Specific Reading Assignments:

1) The next video lecture will involve a deep-reading of the prologue and the prefacing poems. You may wish to read that along with the video in real time, or you may wish to read before the lecture and treat the video as a reread, relish, and appreciate opportunity. So you might want to take a look at pages 1-8 in the Edith Grossman Vintage edition.

2) Underline, mark, circle anything that stands out to you for any reason. If you had to pick one or two things from the prologue that pique your curiosity, what would they be? Let's get used to collecting artefacts from these great books with the view to share them with each other.

Happy questing, everybody!