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Example research essay topic: Romances Of Chivalry Don Quixote - 2,183 words

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I. Introduction These books are written chiefly to the young, the ignorant, and the idle, to whom they serve as lectures of conduct, and introduction s into life. They are the entertainment of minds unfurnished with ideas, and therefore easily susceptible of impressions; not fixed by principles, and therefore easily following the current of fancy; not informed by experience, and consequently open to every false suggestions and partial account. Samuel Johnson [W]e are polluting the world with our television programs, our movies and so forth, our books. We are polluting the whole world. We " ve made the world drunk, if you will, with the wine of our fornication.

The whole world has been affected by Hollywood. " Pat Robertson Creators of entertainment have always been made to answer for the effects that their works have on their audience, and on the larger society. However, the Spanish Inquisition had a much more invasive and powerful presence than modern critics of popular entertainment. Miguel de Cervantes published Don Quixote during the height of the Inquisition. Inquisitors stamps of approval are branded into the introduction s of both parts: I have had the book submitted to examination. It contains nothing against the faith or good morals. This overarching concern about the evils within entertainment must have had an oppressive effect.

Yet, Cervantes also sees the power to entertain as a wonderful power to create; indeed, it is this power (in the romances of chivalry) that drives Alonzo Quijao to become Don Quixote. With this in mind, we turn to the adventures Don Quixote has with the duke and duchess. Two opinions on their presence in the novel dominate literary criticism. Either they exist as a necessary device to give Don Quixote a chance to complete real chivalric tasks (or at least ones that he does not create himself out of madness), or they are cruel, selfish, or crazy, and torture Don Quixote for their own pleasure. However, both of these interpretations overlook Cervantes valuable insight into the role the duke and duchess play as producers of entertainment. The duke and the duchess are conventional readers of Don Quixote.

However, they have unlimited funds at their disposal, so they may respond to the book in ways that ordinary readers could not. It is as if they are billionaires who see a movie that they absolutely love, and consequently decide to buy the rights to make the sequel. They hire the same actors, and make the movie world their own. Yet, as novice producers, they have not yet fully realized the power of fiction to shape both those creating it as well as the world consuming it. Don Quixote provides the reader with a brilliant depiction of how entertainment is produced, and what effects it can have on reality. II.

The Characters of the Duke and Duchess Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh, writing in the early twentieth century, describes the duke and the duchess as readers who fall in love so deeply with Don Quixote's imaginary world that they set their own business aside in order to take part in the make-believe, and to be the persons of Don Quixote's dream. There was never any Kingdom of Barataria so the Duke lent a village for the purpose In this waste dream of Don Quixote makes the happiness it does not find. Raleigh sees the duke and duchess as helpful participants in Don Quixote's chivalric world who facilitate its marvelous fictional creation. In other words, the duke and duchess are conniving with Don Quixote and Sancho, although perhaps they serve more as parental figures, encouraging their children in make-believe play. They use their resources to produce the entertainment of Don Quixote's world, and bring happiness to the consumers of Don Quixote or at least for Raleigh. Yet this interpretation seems lacking, as it glosses over the tone of the actions of the duke and duchess.

After convincing Don Quixote and Sancho that Dulcineas enchantment can be cured by 3, 000 lashes to Sancho's back, the duke and duchess, pleased with their hunt and at having carried out their plans so cleverly and successfully, returned to their castle resolved to follow up their joke; for to them there was no reality that could afford them more amusement. At first glance, this seems to be consistent with Raleigh's thesis: the duke and duchess love Don Quixote's world, and strive to keep it primed with fresh amusing adventures. Yet, in doing so, they treat Don Quixote as a fictional character, and care not for his humanity. Quixote and Sancho are the targets of mental deception and physical abuse from the duke and duchess. Both are deluded by elaborate pranks, singed from Clavileos explosion, Quixote attacked by cats, and Sancho trampled by his townspeople, to name a few examples.

Cervantes is very clear in demonstrating the tendency of the duke and the duchess to abandon humanity for their own amusement. In particular, they react violently when their visions for entertainment are ruined, as Tosilos does when he refuses to fight Don Quixote in order to marry the daughter of Doa Rodriguez. The duke and duchess impose an extremely harsh two-week imprisonment on Tosilos for his disruption of their production. Critics Vladimir Nabokov and Cesreo Bandera highlight these cruelties, describing the ducal castle as a kind of laboratory where two poor souls, Don Quixote and Sancho, are vivisected and the duke and duchess as stepping below the dignity of their functions in a manner which is explicitly described as reprehensible. Nabokov's analysis of the duke and duchess is more comprehensive and more widely read, so we will use him as our touchstone for this school of criticism. Nabokov does not see any happiness in Don Quixote's fictional world because he does not see the fictional world as substantially separate from the real world of the duke and duchess.

For Nabokov, Don Quixote is a mentally disturbed human being who is ridiculed and tortured for almost a quarter of the entire book by the duke and duchess. Yet this interpretation is flawed as well, but not for want of reading Raleigh. Raleigh's interpretation relies on feeling a tone of joy in Don Quixote's adventures; Nabokov argues convincingly that there can be no such joy in the face of such abject torture. What Nabokov overlooks, however, is Cervantes irony. This is the essential problem with Nabokov's reading of Don Quixote, as highlighted by Catherine Knee.

Before we address this claim on the duke and duchess, it will be helpful to understand her basic argument with Nabokov. Here, she persuasively argues her case in regard in regard to Don Quixote's recanting: [Nabokov] faults the ending of Don Quixote, because when Don Quixote recants at the end of the book, it is neither from gratitude to his Christian God, nor is it under divine compulsion but because it conforms to the moral utilities of his dark day (18). Nabokov seems not to notice that Cervantes is doing more than appealing to convention as an easy artistic solution to end his tale. But Don Quixote's recantation exposes rather than conforms to the moral utilities of Cervantes time. Nabokov misses the fine irony that Don Quixote is confessing to a compounded mad mission that sustains some of Christianity's loftiest, presumably antiquated, ideals. Don Quixote undertakes his quest, after all, because many were the wrongs that had to be righted, grievances redressed, injustices made good, abuses removed, and duties discharged (Cervantes 29) By having Don Quixote confess, Cervantes unmasks both a virtue beyond insanity, and an insanity behind a virtuous society's exacting of such confessions.

This same analysis may be applied to Nabokov's reading of the duke and duchess. Nabokov criticizes all of the ducal episodes as chop-licking satisfaction with a joke and the immediate planning of another just as brutal. However, Nabokov overlooks Cervantes moral lesson. He uses the brutality of the duke and duchess not for entertainment, but precisely to show the evils of entertainment without morality. They all read the romances of chivalry, but Don Quixote extracts virtue, and the duke and duchess extract amoral amusement.

Cervantes acknowledges the moral utilities of the Inquisition, as he recognizes the ability of the romances of chivalry to warp the minds of the unthinking duke and duchess, but he also subverts the moral utilities, presenting the mad Don Quixote as the one consistent virtuous character in the novel. In addition, the torture of the duke and duchess helps to sustain Don Quixote's constructed moral world. Throughout the second part, Don Quixote is much more melancholy than in the first. His modus operandi of creating chivalric situations out of ordinary situations falters, and he is left only with imagined enchanters and an entirely created story in the cave of Montesinos. In one of the only truly candid moments that Don Quixote shares, he whispers, Sancho, as you would have us believe what you saw in heaven, I require you to believe me as to what I saw in the cave of Montesinos.

Indeed, he recognizes how inherently fragile his existence is as a knight of chivalry. Yet the presence of the duke and duchess even at the very beginning of their interactions with Don Quixote inspire Quixote's knight-errantry. When he first approaches the castle, it is the first time that he thoroughly felt and believed himself to be a real knight-errant and not an imaginary one. The adventures created by the duke and duchess help reinforce Don Quixote's constructed world. These new adventures also highlight the virtues of the knight in the face of evil. In other words, the more torturous the adventure, the more the character of Don Quixote builds as a true knight-errant.

When Quixote is inventing his enchanters, his position is entirely created, and therefore dependent on his madness. However, when the duke and duchess terrify Don Quixote with a flood of cats and bells in order to reap some personal amusement, it cost him five days of confinement to his bed. After Altisidoras first plea for Quixote's love, he shut the window with a bang and, as much out of temper and out of sorts as if some great misfortune had befallen him, stretched himself on his bed. Even Cide Hamete feels moved to comment on Quixote's condition after the bursting of stitches in his only pair of stockings, exclaiming, O poverty, poverty! Quixote's state of poverty and depression reinforces the need for knight-errantry in the world.

For the reader, it creates a longing for the old Don Quixote, happy and righting wrongs throughout the country. This is the result of the adventures of the duke and duchess; without them, Don Quixote may have lost his belief in his knight-errantry. Thus, a critical examination of the duke and duchess yields an ironic picture. They are both readers, who delight, like Sir Walter Raleigh, in Don Quixote's knight-errantry, and enchanters, who, in Nabokov's words, torture the knight. Ironically, Cervantes uses their torture to highlight and sustain Don Quixote's goodness.

Don Quixote needs the duke and duchess in reality to be his enchanters in the world of knight-errantry. III. The Larger Significance of the Duke and Duchess: Amoral Entertainment In addition to examining the role that the duke and duchess have in relation to Don Quixote, it is also important to see their relation to the book as a whole. Ruth El-Saffar argues, Don Quixote is in many ways a lesson in reading. All the major characters are drawn into the story by virtue of their interest in imaginatively involving themselves in the lives of others or in ideas which carry them away from their daily routine. Characters within Don Quixote read Quixote's constructed world of knight-errantry, and are so taken by its entertaining power that they attempt to close the distance between their real existence and the imaginary world of Don Quixote.

Quixote himself seems a model of someone who has transcended this boundary between reality and glorious fiction, and so other characters attempt to follow him in. However, El-Saffar points out that as soon as a character begins to write this imagined story, that character begins to lose control over his or her own real life. This model applies quite easily to the duke and duchess, as we are told by Cervantes that the duke and duchess enjoy nothing more than the company of Don Quixote and Sancho. However, the duke and the duchess are unique among the characters who attempt to write the adventures of Don Quixote because they can and do fully give themselves to the creation of the fictional world. They are the archetype of modern entertainment producers, using their unlimited funds and willing actors to create a sequel of enormous proportions with fantastic special effects.

The duke and duchess give up all critical distance between their reality and their fictional creations; their only goal is amusement. As producers, the duke and duchess are wildly successful. Cide Hamete tells us that the plots the duke and duchess create for Quixote are so clever that they form the best adventures this great history contains. Cervantes press...


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Research essay sample on Romances Of Chivalry Don Quixote

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