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Cervantes: Displacements, Inflections, and Transcendence
E. Michael Gerli
Newark : Juan de la Cuesta, 2019
Rejecting "the existence of a science of literature and philology," Gerli follows Américo Castro's discovery that "Don Quijote's radical contribution to narrative consisted in representing the on-going processes of human experience in the characters that inhabit the novel and in readers of it who seek to know their own world" (9). The author reads Cervantes's purpose in these pieces as the production of "critical insight regarding the representation of the long-established conflict between honor, morality, and individual desire that lies at the heart of the Spanish drama at the start of the seventeenth century," specifically the ways in which the comedia nueva obfuscates the relationship between "ethical blindness and political corruption" (88). Focusing on the importance of language, Gerli sees Persilesy Sigismunda as a reverent culmination of Cervantes's lifelong exploration of the vicissitudes of language and religious faith. According to Gerli, some would have seen it as a "flashback" to the prophetic tradition, others as monarchical propaganda, others as a reference to the barely completed expulsion of the Moriscos; but "Cervantes's most careful readers [...] would have seen and appreciated the prophecy as an example of the deepest Cervantine irony" (167).
