William Franke

Don Quixote's Impossible Quest for the Absolute in Literature

Fiction, Reflection, and Negative Theology

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Don Quixote's madly ideal fiction is as relevant as ever in our "post-truth" era of virtual reality. Classic Christian paradigms of prophetic revelation and expiatory self-sacrifice emerge transformed in the startling new light of current social revolutions such as transgendering and the apocalyptic biopolitics of transhumanism.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Seitenzahl: 240
• Erscheinungstermin: 31. Juli 2024
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 152mm
• ISBN-13: 9781032688961
• ISBN-10: 1032688963
• Artikelnr.: 70146456

Autorenporträt

William Franke is Professor of Comparative Literature at Vanderbilt University. He is currently Francesco de Dombrowski Professor in Residence at the Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies in Florence (Villa I Tatti) and Senior Fellow of the International Institute for Hermeneutics. He has been Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Macao, Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the University of Navarra, and Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Intercultural Theology and the Study of Religions at the University of Salzburg. His books include On What Cannot Be Said (2007); Poetry and Apocalypse (2009); Dante and the Sense of Transgression (2013); A Philosophy of the Unsayable (2014); The Revelation of Imagination (2015); Secular Scriptures (2016); A Theology of Literature (2018); The Universality of What is Not (2020); The Divine Vision of Dante's Paradiso (2021); The Vita Nuova and the New Testament (2021); Dantologies (2024); and numerous others.

Inhaltsangabe

List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Prologue Concerning Apophatic Theology in Literary Representation and
Reflection
Chapter 1 The Revelation of Laughter: Cervantes's Comic Christian Muse
The Power of Laughter-The Wisdom of Folly
A Negative Theological Reading of Don Quixote
Fool for Christ as Universal Sage
Don Quixote's Contemporaneity and Universality
The Holy Fool as Christian Saint and Crusader
Unamuno and Ortega: Dialectic of the Religious and the Secular
Chapter 2 Self-reflective Dynamics of Revelation in Literature
A. Self-subversive Mirroring Between and Among the Protagonists
The Knight of Mirrors and of the White Moon as Self-reflection of Don
Quixote
Don Quixote's Ideal Reflected in Sancho-and Inversely
Self-reflexivity as Self-fulfilling Ideal
Becoming a Book and Reading One's Life
B. Self-reflection and Undermining the Authority of the Author
Self-reflective Questioning of Authorship
Cervantes's Self-representations in the Prologues
Authorship and Originality
Self-reflexivity in the Narrative Structure of Fiction
Fictionalization of Author by Self-reflection-Kafka and Borges
The Dialectic of Self-reflection and Negative Theology
Chapter 3 Negative Theology of the Novel
The Novel as Breaking Down the Separation of Styles-Auerbach
Recognition Scenes: Epiphanies and Theophanies
The Novel as Subjective Reflective Medium and Genre Reflecting Concrete
Reality
The Novel as Subjectively Lived Experience
The Novel as a New and Comprehensive Genre
Dialectics of Wholeness
The In-breaking of External Reality Into Fiction
Mutual Contamination of History and Fiction and Their Exposure to
Externality
Maese Pedro's Puppet Show and Unamuno's Move Through Fiction to Reality
Ortega on Literary Genre: From Epic Myth to Novelistic Formal Reality
Novelistic Creation of Formal Reality-Ortega and Maese Pedro's Puppet
Theatre
Fiction and Realization of the Ideal
Chapter 4 Visionary Experience in the Cave of Montesinos as Revelation via
Parody
The Vision of Montesinos, or the Part of Fiction in the Construction of
Prophetic Revelation
The Question of Truth Raised by the Vision in the Cave
Artifice and the Limits of the Control of the Author
The Reality that Our Fictions Become
The Ontological Argument for Dulcinea's Existence
Real Costs of One's Fictive Inventions
Repetitions of Visionary Revelation following Montesinos
Sancho's Perversion of Visionary Experience-Clavileño
Visionary Revelation After the Cave of Montesinos-Its Translation Into the
Everyday
Chapter 5 Dialectic of Religious Truth and Its Secular Simulation
Religious and Anti-religious Interpretations of the Quixote: Religion
Versus Secularity
Velázquez's Las Meninas: Self-reflexivity and the Other
Camacho's Wedding as Theatrical Artifice and Its Sacramental
Transfiguration
Baroque Aesthetics of Contrast, the Grotesque, and Theatricalization of the
World
Feminine Beauty as Ideal and as Simulation
Transvestism, Love of Artifice, and the Transhuman
Formal Dimension of Reality-Names as Revelation-Antonomasia
Archetypal Image and Primal Naming-Spitzer's Linguistic Perspectivism
The Epistolary Novel and the Scriptural Ideal
Dialectic of Self-reflective Desengaño and Disinterested Dedication
Chapter 6 A Political Novel: Representation of an Idealized World Versus
Contemporary Reality
The Baroque Age: Aesthetics of the Ideal, Realism, and the Unrepresentable
Barataria as Anti-utopia of a Perfectly Artificial State
Knowing One's Limits and Becoming Oneself: Sancho in "Hell"
The Contemporary Expulsion Drama and the Apotheosis of Fiction
The Realistic Political Novel as an Overture to Modernity
Barcelona and the New Materialism
Chapter 7 The Passion of Sancho Panza and the Death of Don Quixote
The Wise Fool-Like Master Like Servant: Sancho's Governance
Sancho's Assuming the Lead Position in the Duo
Visionary Revisitations-Sancho in the Role of the Christ Figure
Altisidora's Invention of a Visionary Revelation
Don Quixote's Death and Bequest-The Heroism of the Common Person?
The Christian Death of Alonso Quijano-and Sancho's Passion to Live
Chapter 8 The Metaphysics of Fiction
The Force of Fiction
Real Tragedy in Fiction-Carl Schmitt
Ambiguity of Fictive Truth in Epic Tradition and Its Modern Parody
What Makes a Book of Poetic Literature Great-or Revelatory?
The Integration of Fiction into Reality and Vice Versa-Vargas Llosa
Self-reflection at the Juncture of Fiction and Ultimate Reality
The Apophatic in Literature-An Aesthetic Dimension of the Real
Chapter 9 Philosophies of Quixotism
Unamuno's Quixotesque Turning of Philosophy into Religion
Ortega's Cervantesque Philosophy of Desengaño as a Theory of Genres
Unamuno on Quixotism as the True Philosophy and Religion of the Spanish
People
Unamuno's Staging of the Battle Between Reason and Faith-Reason's
Self-undermining
The Novel as Philosophy, Don Quixote as Tragicomedy
Towards Ortega's Philosophy of Relations as a Type of Secular Revelation
Maria Zambrano's Mediation of Two Philosophical Masters
A Parting Reflection
Index