Don Quixote: The Re-Accentuation of the World’s Greatest Literary Hero

This book is a unique scholarly attempt to examine Don Quixote from multiple angles to see how the re-accentuation of the world’s greatest literary hero takes place in film, theatre, and literature. To accomplish this task, eighteen scholars from the USA, Canada, Spain, and Great Britain have come together, and each of them has brought his/her unique perspective to the subject. For the first time, Don Quixote is discussed from the point of re-accentuation, i.e. having in mind one of the key Bakhtinian concepts that will serve as a theoretical framework. A primary objective was therefore to articulate, relying on the concept of re-accentuation, that the history of the novel has benefited enormously from the re-accentuation of Don Quixote helping us to shape countless iconic novels from the eighteenth century, and to see how Cervantes’s title character has been reinterpreted to suit the needs of a variety of cultures across time and space.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Introduction by Howard Mancing and Slav N. Gratchev Part I: Re-accentuation: Theoretical Introduction Chapter I: On Re-accentuation, Adaptation, and Imitation of Don Quixote by Tatevik Gyulamiryan Part II: Imagery and Ideology Chapter 2: Don Quixote Re-depicted by Eduardo Urbina & Fernando González Moreno Chapter 3: Don Quixote in the Rise of Modern Novel: The Satirical Interpretation by Emilio Martínez Mata Chapter 4: Don Quixote and the Chivalric Ideal in Classics Illustrated Comics (1941-1971) by Ricardo Castells Chapter 5: A Horse of a Different Color: Salvador Dalí and the Re-imagining of Clavileño by S. Alleyn Smythe Chapter 5: Image not Found: Portraiture, Identity, and the future of Cervantismo by Stephen Hessel Part III: Literature Chapter 6: Borges and the Hermeneutics of the Novel by J. A. Garrido Ardila Chapter 7: World War and the Novel: Responding to Don Quixote in 1914 and 1934 by Rachel Schmidt Chapter 8: The Don Quixotes of Science Fiction by Howard Mancing Part IV: Film Chapter 9: The Art of re-accentuation: Don Quixote by Grigori Kozintsev by Slav N. Gratchev Chapter 10: Surviving the Hollywood Blacklist: Waldo Salt's adaptation of Don Quixote by William Childers Chapter 11: Crouching Squire, Hidden Madman: Ah Gan’s Don Quixote and Postmodern China by Bruce Burningham Chapter 12: Amélie as Re-accentuation of Cervantesby Jonathan Wade Chapter 13: Extracting the Essence of Don Quixote for a Puppet film by Steven Ritz-Barr Part V: Theater and Television Chapter 14: The Spanish Knight Among the Soviet People: Dramatic Re-accentuations ofDon Quixote as a Doomed Performer by Margarita Marinova & Scott Pollard Chapter 15: A Russian Lancelot and His Don Quixote by Victor Fet Part VI: Don Quixote in The New World Chapter 16: The Visionary’s Quixote by Roy H. Williams Bibliography Index About the Editors

About the Author :
Slav N. Gratchev is associate professor of Spanish at Marshall University. Howard Mancing is professor of Spanish at Purdue University.

Review :
The 17 essays in this volume, which also includes an introduction by Gratchev (Marshall Univ.) and Mancing (Purdue Univ.), take as their point of departure the concept of re-accentuation, initially proposed by Mikhail Bakhtin in The Dialogic Imagination (1975; Eng. tr., 1981). The interpretive and analytical openness of key works of prose fiction allow for re-reading and re-imagination in subsequent ages and through different media and approaches. In particular cases, the possibilities seem infinite. A primary example for Bakhtin was Cervantes’s Don Quixote and its eponymous protagonist. The present collection is divided into sections on imagery and ideology, literature, film, and theater and television. The great majority of the contributors are academics (in various fields), but one is a professional puppeteer and another a marketing consultant. A special pleasure of this text lies in the diversity of references and juxtapositions: Doré, Dalí, Fielding, Unamuno, Borges, Thomas Mann, Waldo Salt, Kathy Acker, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the Chinese director Ah Gan, Orhan Pamuk, multiple Russian connections, and so on. The essays are intriguing in their range and methodologies, and they become testaments to the afterlife—what Bakhtin termed the “unfinalizability”—of Don Quixote in both public and artistic spheres. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.