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Whitman College Spanish
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Clark Colahan Study Exercises for Don Quixote Date Awarded: January, 1998 Other Participants DESCRIPTION OF PROJECT Literary criticism has identified many elements that contribute to the artistic effect of a novel, such as themes, types of discourse, and tone. Students of Don Quixote were required to vary the stylistic elements of the original text in order to examine the artistic effect on the overall scheme of the novel. The aim of the study of a
foreign literature is assumed to be appreciation and understanding.
The aim of this project was to give students the opportunity to enter
into the fabric of a literary text, analyze its constituent elements
and perceive the creative formula that structures and unifies it. Then,
the students engaged in controlled and measured experiments in rewriting
passages from the masterpiece. 2. Process: The project was completed as proposed and titled “Don Quixote de Wala Wala.” The student rewrites of episodes from Don Quixote took one semester. the filming took two months of one summer. Editing of the video took six months. The actors were four native speakers of Spanish living in Walla Walla. My assistant for production was Katy Symon, a graduating Whitman senior. My cameraman was Joshua VonDongue, a Walla Walla college student who happened to be in the three-week Filmmakers Bootcamp at Whitman College I attended in order to prepare for directing and producing the film. My digital video editors were Aaron Rasmussen, a local high school student, and Fernando Salinas, a local community college student. 3. Outcomes: We rewrote four episodes from the novel, then filmed them with digital video to produce eleven episodes about 11 to 12 minutes in length. After editing and the addition of English subtitles that I wrote, I assigned the eleven episodes for viewing by students in my Cervantes class (Studies in World Literature 358) in the spring of 1999. I am now using them again in that course in 2001, together with study questions about each episode that I have more recently written. They have served effectively as the basis for lively class discussions of themes, characterization and Cervantes’ choices in writing specific scenes in the novel. 4. Critical Evaluation: What worked best were rewrites that were clearly different from the Cervantine original version of the episode, while seeing more than one rewrite of a scene, i.e., alternatives to what is in the novel, overly stretched the students’ ability to remember and analyze what happens in the book itself. I am hoping the detailed study questions on the videos that I have written for this year will enhance the precision of the literary analysis involved. These episodes could be used in any course which reads all of Don Quixote and encourages questioning why the author did what he did. Not so suitable for courses that read only excerpts, as the scenes were selected to be other than the most famous ones, nor for courses that take the common view that the knight is simply an altruistic but impractical do-gooder. Students were enthusiastic, though the rewrites were not formally evaluated. A viewing open to the general public attracted a standing-room-only crowd, including many Walla Walla Hispanic residents, and a big write-up in the town newspaper.
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