ILAC: Resisting Philology: Don Quijote and the Novel

Abstract: Don Quijote presents itself as a translation of a confusing jumble of texts and, above all, as a book about books, their creation, and the uncertainties of reading them.  From its very beginning, the work stages an extensive and detailed dramatization of the composition, reproduction, diffusion, and reception of books, as well as the latter’s epistemological effects on the human imagination. In this way, it is a work profoundly implicated in early modern learnèd culture as it plays from beginning to end with issues of reading, glossing, and interpretation and, above all, defining and locating the truth in a given text. But that truth, which is the object of reading in Don Quijote, is problematized, it remains constantly unstable--contumacious--especially for we, the readers situated outside the text, as much as for the reader-protagonists inside the work, and, of course, the narrators and the lectomaniacal don Quijote himself. All this leads into how philology, a gesture designed to recuperate the "original readings" of texts and correct past errors in their transmission, comprises an unproductive, desultory practice that fails to confront the deliberate and inherent textual variations and contradictions in Cervantes's masterwork, the first European novel. 
 

Bio: Michael Gerli is Commonwealth Professor of Hispanic Studies, emeritus at UVa and visiting at Stanford. He is an expert on Western Mediterranean Intellectual and Cultural History from the Middle Ages through Early Modernity. He is the author of several books including two on Cervantes. 

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