Quixotic memories : Cervantes and memory in early modern Spain

Author / Creator

Domínguez, Julia, author

Available as

Online

Summary

"This study offers insight into the plurality and complexity of memory's cultural scope through the lens of Cervantes, and specifically through his novel Don Quixote. The author explores the many s...

"This study offers insight into the plurality and complexity of memory's cultural scope through the lens of Cervantes, and specifically through his novel Don Quixote. The author explores the many spaces that memory created for itself in early modern Spain, particularly in the fields of philosophy, medicine, rhetoric, mnemotechnics, the visual arts, and pedagogy. More than a theme, memory is a system of understanding in Cervantes's world resulting from the major social, religious, and economic changes that epitomize Renaissance humanist culture and that concurrently will inform the transition to modernity. In Don Quixote, he draws on theories regarding memory that had been developed since classical antiquity and adapted to the specific circumstances of his own time: nostalgia for an earlier period as a means to confront the fears that come with a rapidly changing society; exploiting the two interior senses, imagination and memory, as a powerful tool to detach oneself from society's impositions and instead endorse the right to be forgotten; pedagogical theories that evolved as a response to the intellectual overload and the impositions of the imitatio; the role of memory in a society that continued to cling to the oral tradition; the use of influential mnemonic images as persuasive devices within highly visual cultural environments; and, finally, the immense power of memory in individual and collective identity formation and, paradoxically, memory's fragility and malleability when faced with social, religious, and cultural demands."--Provided by publisher.

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