The Warren Center will sponsor a conference on November 12 and 13, 2004, to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the publication of Miguel de Cervantes’s classic work Don Quixote (the first part of which was published in 1605). The book was an immediate success and is considered to have played a major role in the development of the novel. Don Quixote tells two interrelated but very different stories: the story of the misadventures of a man who tries to function as a knight errant when society has moved beyond its chivalric past and the story of the composition of the Don Quixote story. Cervantes does not simply write a novel to entertain the reader with an intriguing plot, but he uses the occasion to make the reader think seriously about the act of writing, the act of reading, and the place (and the construction) of history. Edward Friedman, professor of Spanish and comparative literature at Vanderbilt, is the conference organizer. Professor Friedman is a specialist in early modern Spanish literature, and has just completed a term as the president of the Cervantes Society of America.

Three distinguished scholars will give presentations at the conference. Marina Brownlee, professor of Spanish literature at Princeton University, is the author of The Cultural Labyrinth of Maria de Zayas (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000) and other studies of medieval and early modern Spanish literature. Yvonne Jehenson is professor emerita of Spanish and comparative literature at the University of Hartford. She is the author of Latin-American Women Writers: Class, Race, and Gender (State University of New York Press, 1995) and is completing a book (with Peter N. Dunn) tentatively titled “The Utopian Nexus in Cervantes’s Don Quixote.” Howard Mancing is professor of Spanish at Purdue University. He has recently published the two-volume Cervantes Encyclopedia (Greenwood Press, 2003). His other books include The Chivalric World of “Don Quijote” (University of Missouri Press, 1982).

The Warren Center will circulate more detailed information about the conference program during the fall semester.