L’immaginario dell’utopia moderna nella figura del Don Chisciotte

Abstract

The imaginary of modern utopia in Don Quixote.
The paper aims at analyzing the character of Don Quixote as a paradigm and icon of the modern imaginary and episteme, according to the Foucauldian approach. In particular, we have intertwined the form of the modern novel inaugurated by Cervantes (in two volumes in 1605 and 1615) with another literary genre that opens Modernity and which is founded by Thomas More's Utopia, in 1516. These two forms of the narrative imagination allow to understand the modern age through two imaginary forms that will become paradigms of its most widespread imaginary: Don Quixote and utopia. The essay shows how much the paradigm and the utopian matrix animate the spirit of our knight from within through different features of the ambivalence, rationality, individual.