Comparative Literature 396:
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Although not actually an Honors course, this class was very Honors-esque in its discussion format and conceptual complexity. Reading and discussing Don Quixote for this course furthered my thinking about the concepts of truth, reality, and the construction of knowledge. I really enjoyed both the adventure aspect of the story and the more intellectual ideas that it brings up. Below is my final paper and an excerpt, focusing on the role of genre in representing reality and validating truth.
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Excerpt:
Although history is typically viewed as a reliable record of true occurrences and fiction is considered to be a fabrication anchored only in imagination and disloyal to reality, Cervantes challenges this outlook. Dorotea’s two stories show that histories can create false accounts using a framework of specific people and events as a foundation for misrepresentations, while fiction can depict universal truths demonstrated through people and events that never actually existed. Because fiction cannot be discounted as completely untrue, and history cannot be assumed to be fully true, we cannot use genre as the sole criterion for validating truth.
Although history is typically viewed as a reliable record of true occurrences and fiction is considered to be a fabrication anchored only in imagination and disloyal to reality, Cervantes challenges this outlook. Dorotea’s two stories show that histories can create false accounts using a framework of specific people and events as a foundation for misrepresentations, while fiction can depict universal truths demonstrated through people and events that never actually existed. Because fiction cannot be discounted as completely untrue, and history cannot be assumed to be fully true, we cannot use genre as the sole criterion for validating truth.
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