Antiquarianism & its Discontents: Ethics & Aesthetic Enjoyment in Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote (2013)

Undergraduate: Clark Sanford

Faculty Advisor: Shayne Legassie
Department: English & Comparative Literature

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Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote is a novel teeming with characters who write, read and try to structure their lives around various outdated literary genres. In his exploration of these diverse modes of antiquarian enjoyment and their aesthetic as well as moral implications, Cervantes ends up adumbrating a number of conceptual terrains which will only much later be given the names by which we know them today. This essay proposes that it is not anachronistic to apply the terms cliché, Camp, kitsch and aestheticism to Cervantes's novel, and that they are in fact necessary to fully understand the complex arguments it makes about the ethical consequences of stylistic judgments.