Cervantes and Our Media Condition: Cervantine Strategies for the Attention Age

Catalog description

This course will examine the work of Miguel de Cervantes in dialogue with the emerging mass media of his time. Most importantly, we will brush his experimental version of baroque desengaño (un-deception) against the grain of our own spectacular culture in the attention age. The idea is to identify and cultivate reality literacy strategies distilled from the works of Cervantes to critically interpret our AI-assisted world. Readings will include selections from his pioneering novel Don Quixote and his short-form theater (Entremeses), selected works of Cervantes’s contemporaries Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca and Baltasar Gracián, and samples of recent critical reflections on our own entertainment, information and communications ecosystems. This course is dual-listed with SPA 530.