The readers and the listeners in Don Quixote

Abstract

The principal innovation of Cervantes’s Don Quixote is a shift of focus from the logic of writing a rhetorically convincing text to the problematization of the reader’s perception. For the first time, reading and readers naturally constitute the subject of narration. The novel registers a point of balance, where a new reading practice (individual reading) coexists with the old-fashioned way (reading aloud in a group). The article explores two types of characters: one is responsible for oral narration and emotional engagement and dependability, while the other represents the culture of printed text, with its presupposition of a creative and critical perception of the text. Don Quixote himself is a paradoxical combination of both. The author also discusses the novel’s paratextual area — the prologues, where the battle for new readers plays out in the guise of a critique of chivalric romance. The scholar discovers that Cervantes not only analyzes the dramatic innovations in text interpretation prompted by Gutenberg’s new technology, but also attempts to eliminate the resulting discord with his writing and creatively reinvent the very essence of the novel as a genre.