Don Quijote de la Mancha

This course will study Miguel de Cervantes's El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha in its literary and historical contexts. We will read Cervantes's masterpiece as a book about books and about the pleasures and dangers of reading; as a story of the Spanish empire and its discontents; as a palimpsest of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish meetings in Spain; and as a reflection on the nature of language, desire, and madness. All the while, we will read Don Quijote as an eminently entertaining and endlessly engaging work of the human imagination. In Spanish. Prerequisites: HISP 0650 or minimum score of 5 in 'AP Spanish Literature.'