You may have heard of Cervantes' sad knight, that old bugger Don Quixote. You may know him as the Man of La Mancha. Or you may not know him at all—in which case you're in for a treat.
This guy's worth getting to know, we promise you. He's an unforgettable character. He blurs the boundary (the binary, even?) between literature and life. And though a lot falls apart as he does so, a lot is revealed as well.
Literature becomes a place for truth as well as lies. Yeah, that sounds a lot like Derrida's love for uncertainty, doesn't it?
Here are some questions for you, as you think about Don Quixote through your Derridean Looking Glass:
- Where does Don Quixote fall in "the institution of literature"?
- What, if anything, does Cervantes's text teach us that Deconstruction cannot account for?