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Duplicitous Diegesis: "Don Quijote" and Charlie Kaufman's "Adaptation"

2005; American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese; Volume: 88; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/20063079

2153-6414

Bárbara Simerka, Christopher B. Weimer,

Cinema History and Criticism

It is our purpose in this essay to offer a comparative study of Cervantes's Don Quote and the 2002 film Adaptation, written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Spike Jonze. This analysis will center on specific elements fundamental to the two works: the representation of self-inscriptive narrative acts and the juxtaposition of disparate generic forms to create parody. These homologies between Cervantes's novel and Kaufman and Jonze's film, we will argue, provide a striking example of how the aesthetic and epistemological preoccupations central to cultural production in the early modern period, during which the ideological constructs of modernity first appeared as emergent discourses, have returned to manifest themselves anew in popular art forms of the postmodern period which marks those constructs' disintegration.