Don Chisciotte e la sfera pubblica immaginaria. Discorsi cavallereschi e nuove visioni nell’Europa dei tempi moderni

Abstract

Don Quixote and the Public Sphere of the Imaginary. Chivalrous speeches and new visions in the Europe of modern times.
Don Quixote of La Mancha, by Miguel de Cervantes, is a privileged observatory in order to catch the imaginary of seventeenth-century Europe and the new ongoing sensitivities and ideas regarding social and cultural structures. By means Quixote's adventures and dialogue Cervantes puts in stage the origin of a discursive space that is emancipating itself from the aristocracy and is giving rise to a sphere of emancipation of new subjects. Together with it, Cervantes’ novel offers a literary space by which the reader can imagine his own possibility of participating in the public debate regarding the society of his time. Not just a book that tells the world, Don Quixote was also a means of questioning and overcoming it. He revealed the social word in its reality and unreality, as well as in its alternatives. Until the end, when the character who reads the books, Quixote, becomes the character of a book, a stereotype. The hidalgo loses his ability to act and discern, leaving us material which is still fertile and relevant to cast a critical look at contemporary society.