Don Quixote

Introduction

The history of Western literature is a dualistic history. It begins with two separate traditions: Hellenism and Hebraism. The spirits or values these two traditions represent seldom blend equally at any supposed period of the history. http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/donnebib.htm

The Classical period and the Modernist movement are dominated by Hellenistic like Don Quizote qualities whereas the Romantic period and the postmodern movements are dominated by Hebraic spirits. In fact, the postmodern style seems to be the result of pushing the Romantic Movement, with its Hebraic/Dionysian tendencies, to an extreme. Many Postmodern characteristics can be traced back logically to Romantic attributes. This logical inference can be confirmed through factual evidence. After considering the seven factors—world, medium, language, author, reader, work, and theme—involved in literature as a means of communication, we cannot but admit that the Romantic spirit of loving freedom, change and difference has really brought about the Postmodern style, the fin-de-siècle trend of worshiping Chaos, of anti-form, anti-art, anti-literature. But this, we can predict, is likewise only a phase of the changing history. When the Hellenistic/Apollonian values become dominant again, the golden age of art may return with a new vigor. (Retrieved from http://www.online literature.com/cervantes/don_quixote/5/

Western historians specifically Don Quizote often regard the Romantic Movement as a reaction to Neoclassicism, and set the period of its triumph within the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. (Sexton, 9) But to replace the old binary opposition (Hellenism/Hebraism) with the new one (Classicism/Romanticism) is to further complicate the dualistic contrasts. Now it suggests not simply the contrasts between secularity and religiosity, aesthetics and ethics, or hedonism and asceticism. It also suggests many other contrasts, and some of the contrasts may not accord with the discriminations that go with the dichotomy of Hellenism vs. Hebraism.

The Modernist /Postmodernist Dichotomy

After the Romantic Period, Western literature is said to enter the period of Realism and Naturalism. But the slogans “Realism” and “Naturalism” indicate mainly a new methodology of treating art materials. As per Don Quizote, aiming at a truthful representation of contemporary life and manners, Realism or Naturalism is observational and objective in method, thus more affiliated to Classicism than to Romanticism. Indeed, “truth, contemporaneity, and objectivity were the obvious counterparts of romantic imagination, of romantic historicism and its glorification of the past, and of romantic subjectivity, the exaltation of the ego and the individual”

However, the contrast between Romanticism and Realism/Naturalism is not so keenly felt and widely discussed as that between Classicism and Romanticism. Retrieved from http://www.online literature.com/cervantes/don_quixote/5/

After Realism/Naturalism, Western literature is sometimes said to turn to Symbolism, as Don Quizote demonstrates, which is in a way a Romantic revival, as it emphasizes again the power of vision or imagination in its effort to use an image or a cluster of images to suggest (“symbolize”) another plane of reality (“the essence of things”) that cannot be expressed in more direct and rational terms. (Sexton, 9) Yet, the contrast between Symbolism and Realism/Naturalism is also not so widely discussed as that between Classicism and ...