Adventures in paradox: A study of paradoxy in Cervantes' 'Don Quixote' and the Spanish Golden Age

The six chapters comprising this study center on Cervantes' Don Quixote as a major innovation within the poetic and rhetorical tradition of paradoxy in the Renaissance and, in particular, the Spanish Golden Age. Chapter One discusses the main features of paradoxy in the West from antiquity to the Renaissance, paying special attention to three texts within that tradition: Plato's Parmenides, Nicholas Cusanus' Of Learned Ignorance and Erasmus' The Praise of Folly. Chapter Two examines the development of paradoxy in Spain's Renaissance, as exemplified in Fernando de Rojas, Antonio de Guevara and Pero Mexia. Falling between the Spanish Renaissance and the Spanish Baroque, Don Quixote's thoroughgoing rhetoric of paradoxy marks the infectious beginning of what Rosalie Colie dubs an "epidemic" of paradoxy that persists in later, Baroque writings of Spain. By focusing on the writings of St. John of the Cross and Francisco de Quevedo, Chapter Three contrasts Cervantes with his near contemporaries, allowing one to ascertain why his use of paradoxy merits a place apart.;Chapter Four examines a select cluster of metaliterary issues, both dramatized and thematized throughout the work, against the backdrop of the Prologue to Don Quixote, Part I. Those issues concern the complex and fluid relations between such seeming contraries as art and nature; literature and life; history and poetry; as well as author, reader and text. At once a preface and an epilogue with respect to the subsequent narrative, the Prologue of 1605 is also shown to form part of the fiction, Don Quixote.;Cervantes' dramatization of the overlap between "art" and "life" yields what is discussed, in Chapter Five, as central "paradoxes of imitation." Through a host of imitative jests that are also in earnest, Cervantes deploys and dramatizes imitatio as at once an ethical and aesthetic issue. Chapter Six focuses on "paradoxes of self-knowledge" in its analysis of the link between imitatio, self-awareness and "self-fashioning," which the narrative throws into bold relief in the episodes devoted to the encounter between Don Quixote and Don Diego de Miranda. In the same vein, the concluding remarks discuss why Cervantes' "playful" system of paradoxy is also what we may call a "committed rhetoric" that parodies, celebrates and thus invites moral reflection on the role of human discourse in the continuing creation, or cancelation, of knowledge, culture, and the self.