About the Course
In this 4-week course we will read and discuss key episodes from Cervantes' Don Quixote (Part I). Classes will be structured around guided reading questions, provided to students one week in advance. We will examine the different cultural and historical contexts in which Don Quixote took shape, and try to see how Cervantes was writing about issues still of immediate and pressing relevance to us. We will approach the novel through the lens of several topics:
* The Novel versus Chivalric and Courtly Romance
* Time, Place and Space in the Golden Age of Imperial Spain
* Reality in flux: Windmills and the Spanish Inquisition
* Cervantes and Velasquez: Self-reflection and the limits of knowledge
* Heroism, irony and the phenomenology of ugliness
I received my doctorate in 2019 from the University of Edinburgh, where I taught several undergraduate courses, ranging from medieval and early modern literature, to Romantic, Modernist and Late-Modernist poetry and drama. My doctoral research examined the relationship between processes of state-formation in early modern England and the spectacular flourishing of religious poetry witnessed during the same period. This work has been published by leading academic journals in my field, and tries to show that religious poetry was vitally and critically responsive to broad changes in social relations and practices of rule in 17C England.
In my teaching, as in my research, I'm drawn to examining intellectual history and literary art in the context of given social and political conditions.