Well, I’m hangin’ in there with English Honors IV. We’re all second-semester seniors, as I mentioned, and I totally feel their pain. There’s so much going on this time of year, with APs, and we’re all really ready for this to be over with, eager for college to start (but not too soon!) Fortunately, I am not taking any APs this semester, but all my pals from class seem to be. Tests are this week. Egads. I remember it well.
But we’ve got a paper due Friday, and I’m working on mine tonight. I won’t give it away, but I will tell you what the assignment is. First a little background. So, in Book II of Don Quixote, he’s still tilting at windmills, generally making a fool of himself, to the great enjoyment of the reader. We love him because he’s doing all these crazy things in the name of nobility, in the name of bringing back the era of virtuous knights. Suddenly, he meets a Duke and Duchess who have supposedly read Book I (isn’t that clever, how the author references his own fiction inside his own fiction?), and they are so amused by him that they take him in and basically set him up to make a fool of himself while they watch. They position him up to do crazy and dangerous things, and they, barely containing themselves, just sit back and soak it all in.
Nabokov referred to Don Quixote as "encyclopedia of cruelty,” and this was one of the principal passages that inspired that insight. So, the topic for the essay is “what is the passage about the Duke and Duchess meant to suggest? Is it a commentary on human nature? Is it an indictment of a social class? Is it a statement about the relationship between readers, books, and writers?”
I have a few ideas, and they are supposed to fill 3 or 4 pages. So off I go. Comments welcome. It’s due Friday. Hasta Quixote!
But we’ve got a paper due Friday, and I’m working on mine tonight. I won’t give it away, but I will tell you what the assignment is. First a little background. So, in Book II of Don Quixote, he’s still tilting at windmills, generally making a fool of himself, to the great enjoyment of the reader. We love him because he’s doing all these crazy things in the name of nobility, in the name of bringing back the era of virtuous knights. Suddenly, he meets a Duke and Duchess who have supposedly read Book I (isn’t that clever, how the author references his own fiction inside his own fiction?), and they are so amused by him that they take him in and basically set him up to make a fool of himself while they watch. They position him up to do crazy and dangerous things, and they, barely containing themselves, just sit back and soak it all in.
Nabokov referred to Don Quixote as "encyclopedia of cruelty,” and this was one of the principal passages that inspired that insight. So, the topic for the essay is “what is the passage about the Duke and Duchess meant to suggest? Is it a commentary on human nature? Is it an indictment of a social class? Is it a statement about the relationship between readers, books, and writers?”
I have a few ideas, and they are supposed to fill 3 or 4 pages. So off I go. Comments welcome. It’s due Friday. Hasta Quixote!
No comments:
Post a Comment