Posts tagged cervantes

William Egginton's ‘Quixote,’ Colbert and the Reality of Fiction

“In his contribution to The Stone last week, Alex Rosenberg posed a defense of naturalism — ‘the philosophical theory that treats science as our most reliable source of knowledge and scientific method as the most effective route to knowledge’ — at the expense of other theoretical endeavors such as, notably, literary theory…We especially revere the genius of Shakespeare in the English-speaking world, but I’d like to focus on the genius of another writer, a Spanish one, Miguel de Cervantes, who shaped our world as well, and did so in ways that may not be apparent even to those aware of his enormous literary influence…in writing those volumes Cervantes did something even more profound: he crystallized in prose a confluence of changes in how people in early modern Europe understood themselves and the world around them. What he passed down to those who would write in his wake, then, was not merely a new genre but an implicit worldview that would infiltrate every aspect of social life: fiction.”