This article aims to help instructors tackle a perennial challenge in teaching one of the classic works of Spanish literature: Miguel de Cervantes's "Don Quixote." Many instructors teaching the novel for the first time may feel overwhelmed at the prospect of helping students appreciate the numerous ways in which Cervantes references the…

This paper focuses on an advanced Spanish literature seminar I taught at Kansas State University dedicated entirely to Cervantes's "Don Quijote de la Mancha." In an effort to appeal to twenty-first-century students in rural Kansas, I designed my seminar to explore traditional questions of authorship, translation and reading, metafiction,…

The historical content of "La voz dormida" by Dulce Chacon gives us unique insight into the formation of male subjectivities during the ideological and physical struggle that followed the establishment of Franco's regime. The second part of the novel which centers around the figure of the "maquis," allows us to investigate the construction of a…

By means of his association with the short-lived newspaper "Arte Joven", Unamuno had unique access to a series of sexually charged drawings by the young Pablo Picasso. While he initally objected to the explicit nature of one of these drawings, he seems ultimately to have taken inspiration from both it and others in its group on the way to…

"Los misterios de Madrid" (1992) provides a burlesque novelistic portrayal of the changing capital city and its inhabitants in the early 1990s. Spanish writer Antonio Munoz Molina creates vignettes of Madrid's people and places while showing the capital as a destination for both foreign-born immigrants and provincial Spaniards alike. In…

The Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance is turning 400. By some accounts, the first part of Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes's masterpiece, was available in Valladolid by Christmas Eve 1604, although Madrid did not get copies until January 1605. Thus came to life the "ingenious gentleman" who, ill equipped with antiquated armor "stained with rust…