(DOWNLOAD) "Camila's Story." by Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Camila's Story.
- Author : Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America
- Release Date : January 22, 2005
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 183 KB
Description
El curioso impertinente" ("Curioso" hereafter), which occupies chapters 33-35 of the first part of Don Quijote, has been perceptively discussed, among other things, as a study in triangular desire (Girard), hysteria (Sieber), pride (Hahn), obsession (Clamurro), jealousy (Wey-Gomez), and homoeroticism (Amat), almost always with emphasis on Anselmo and his madness/obsession. (1) I would like to suggest in this essay that "Curioso" is also a prototypical exemplar of a basic cognitive principle and, at the same time, a study in agency and narrative discourse. And I would place primary emphasis on Camila as the protagonist of the story. The cognitive principle has to do with the modes of epistemology available in human thought. Cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner has argued that "[t]here are two modes of cognitive functioning, two modes of thought, each providing distinctive ways of ordering experience, of constructing reality" (11). Bruner maintains that the two modes, while complimentary, "are irreducible to one another" and that each of them "has operating principles of its own and its own criteria of well-formedness." The two modes are "a good story" and a "well-formed argument." The latter, "the paradigmatic or logico-scientific one, attempts to fulfill the ideal of a formal, mathematical system of description and explanation" (12). It is this form--logic, argument, abstraction, theory--that has traditionally (at least since the days of the ancient Greeks) (2) been privileged: human beings are reasoning entities (as opposed to brute animals, which are guided by instinct and sensation); the culminating and distinguishing cognitive achievement of homo sapiens is the ability to think logically, argue coherently, and convince by means of abstraction. Men (gender exclusiveness intended) have often been presumed to use reason and logic to govern their thought and are not to be swayed by emotion, feeling, or stories. Of the two ways of ordering reality, argument has been identified with the male. (3)