What Would Cervantes Do?: Navigating Post-Truth with Spanish Baroque Literature (Volume 2) (McGill-Queen's Iberian and Latin American Cultures Series)

How the humanities can save us from the plague of disinformation. A timely meditation on the key role the humanities must play in dissecting and combatting all forms of disinformation. Castillo and Egginton offer a tour-de-force commentary on politics and popular culture through critical comparative readings of Western cultural texts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and those of the Spanish Golden Age. "The attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 was a tragic illustration of the existential threat that the viral spread of disinformation poses in the age of social media and twenty-four-hour news. From climate change denialism to the frenzied conspiracy theories and racist mythologies that fuel antidemocratic white nationalist movements in the United States and abroad, What Would Cervantes Do? is a lucid meditation on the key role the humanities must play in dissecting and combatting all forms of disinformation. David Castillo and William Egginton travel back to the early modern period, the first age of inflationary media, in search of historically tested strategies to overcome disinformation and shed light on our post-truth market. Through a series of critical conversations between cultural icons of the twenty-first century and those of the Spanish Golden Age, What Would Cervantes Do? provides a tour-de-force commentary on current politics and popular culture. Offering a diverse range of Cervantist comparative readings of contemporary cultural texts - movies, television shows, and infotainment - alongside ideas and issues from literary and cultural texts of early modern Spain, Castillo and Egginton present a new way of unpacking the logic of contemporary media. What Would Cervantes Do? is an urgent and timely self-help manual for literary scholars and humanists of all stripes, and a powerful toolkit for reality literacy."-- Provided by publisher Cover 1 Copyright 5 Contents 6 Acknowledgments 8 Prologue The Deadly Devolution of Language 14 Part One True Lies and Other Rules of Engagement 26 1 Reality Entitlement 28 2 The Imagination of the Possible 37 3 The Art of the Real 45 4 The Apocalypse Will Not Be Televised! 54 5 From Breaking Bad to Breaking Worse 61 6 Playing the Game 69 Part Two He Said, She Said 82 7 Not Your Father’s Classroom 84 8 The Poison of Purity 92 9 Her Weapon 109 10 A Homeopathic Cure for Patriarchy 120 Part Three A Cervantine Toolkit for the Post-Truth Age 130 11 Revelations of a Glass Man 132 12 A Posthumous Lesson 140 13 Surviving the Post-Truth Age 159 Epilogue Looking for Relevance in All the Right Places 170 Notes 180 Bibliography 194 Index 210 McGill-Queen’s,University,Press,2022,ISBN,978-0-2280-0814-9,(cloth),ISBN,978-0-2280-0815-6,(paper),ISBN,978-0-2280-0930-6,(ePDF),ISBN,978-0-2280-0931-3,(ePUB) McGill-Queen’s University Press 2022,ISBN 978-0-2280-0814-9 (cloth),ISBN 978-0-2280-0815-6 (paper),ISBN 978-0-2280-0930-6 (ePDF),ISBN 978-0-2280-0931-3 (ePUB)