Afterword: Cervantes and the culture wars

Carroll Johnson’s Cervantes is, therefore, “aware of the relation between language, mind and reality” and becomes “an ironic spokesman for the counterculture that was possible in his time and place”. In contrast to most of the approaches mentioned above, John J. Allen identifies himself with the thematic structural criticism of A. A. Parker, and warns against rereading Cervantes in connection with the practices of deconstruction, psychoanalysis and identity politics. In fact, a number of recent studies on Cervantes by Johnson, Diana de Armas Wilson and Anthony Cascardi, among others, have called attention to those elements of self-reflexivity in Cervantes’s writing. Cervantes studies in the United States has taken a different direction, particularly with the interest shown by many of its practitioners in various strands of poststructuralist theory, especially deconstruction, vanguard feminism and new historicism. Thus the question for us is not about projecting current theory into Cervantes, nor about arguing for a positivistic understanding of historical and analytical inquiry.