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DHH. ... I'm a writer. And, in the end, everything is always about me.
David Henry Hwang, Yellow Face
STEVE. ... If there's anyone here who's being marginalized by the tide of history - You don't exactly see me sitting in the White House, do you?
Bruce Norris, Clybourne Park
Comparative literature is a fruitful and satisfying discipline. It is also a problematic endeavor, in that comparisons can be forced, unconvincing, and lacking in profundity. Poring over two or more works, one must find substantial, credible, and compelling reasons to place them in any kind of alignment. For me, the rule of thumb is this: the comparison must illuminate the texts mutually. The reciprocal force lets A make B clearer, and vice versa. Don Quijote may be an ideal choice in this respect, for its foreshadowing of formal and theoretical currents of later centuries is uncanny. One profitably can read a vast number of texts with Don Quijote -it would be misleading to use the word against in this context - and one can discern interrelations that seem to intensify on reflection. Don Quijote is my jumping-off place. The twenty-first century American stage is the end point, which may, in fact, be the middle ground.
Don Quijote offers an impressive artistic paradox. Miguel de Cervantes's narrative is bidirectional. It incorporates a generous sampling of the literary past while establishing a model (or models) for the future. From the prologue to Part 1 to the closing statement by the Arab historian Cide Hamete Benengeli's pen in the final chapter of Part 2, radical innovations coexist with evocations of predecessors and a far-reaching intertext. Cervantes approaches the act of writing from within; to be precise, he acknowledges the forms and genres that inspire, motivate, and encourage him to build upon tradition. He then invents new manners of expression and new procedural options for composition. Don Quijote is theory and praxis, a poetics and a model for what would develop as the modern novel and as a cornerstone of metafiction (see Friedman esp. 33-106). There is something exceptional about the staying power of Don Quijote in what perhaps could be labeled the creative unconscious. Cervantes's novel attracts attention from practitioners of a wide variety of media: literature, the...