Rachel Schmidt. Forms of Modernity: Don Quixote and Modern Theories of the Novel

Rachel Schmidt. Forms of Modernity: DON QUIXOTE and Modern Theories of Novel. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2011. 403 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4426-4251-5. This book is not so much an analysis of Don Quijote as it is a study of key figures behind what Anthony Close would call our and postmodern (as opposed to historicizing) reading sensibilities: Friedrich Schlegel, Georg Lukacs, Hermann Cohen, Miguel de Unamuno, Jose Ortega y Gasset, and Mikhail Bakhtin. Rachel Schmidt capably presents their thought in contexts of philosophical tradition (with Kant as major reference-point), social and historical climate, and activities of thinkers themselves. While each figure is treated in a discrete and substantial chapter, Schmidt does a fine job tracing and teasing out various continuities, ruptures, veiled appropriations, and unacknowledged borrowings amongst them. The result is an illuminating rethinking of familiar theories (e.g., Unamuno, Ortega, and Bakhtin), and perhaps resuscitation of an unjustly overlooked figure (Cohen). Given inescapable influence of these thinkers and fundamental dilemmas of existence they confront, Schmidt helps us understand why we read Cervantes's masterpiece way we do. Modernity is a capacious and imprecise term, and Schmidt's use of it spans many centuries and developments: advent of systems of justice and militia; monetary exchange; rise in reliance upon technology; rationality, ideology (or political domination [27]), secularization, and accompanying dilemmas of class consciousness; freedom and alienation; awareness of limits of reason; and emergence of historical consciousness (see chapter one). Maybe it is easier to characterize modernity by what it is not: a stable, feudal order secured by static assurances of Great Chain of Being. Schmidt reviews evolution of modern institutions and sensibilities in Cervantes's Spain (which reminds us why preferred period designation currently seems to be early modern), and refers to aspects of Don Quijote that might reflect new era: technology of mills, class tensions in confrontation between Santa Hermandad and Don Fernando (and even between Don Quijote and Sancho), centralized justice in galeotes episode, and novel's relative absence of religious content. Schmidt then gives a somewhat brisk overview of Hegel, Kant, and Romantic irony in order to anticipate some of her study's informing ideas, including autonomy of aesthetic realm, imaginative literature as a mode of inquiry and cognition, and role of art in development of judgment and ethical faculty. What follows, in six chapters on figures listed above, is an examination of how accommodating and amorphous novel--often characterized in opposition to epic--offers alienated individual a space that is at once useless (in positive sense of unburdened by practical, purposive, ideological imperatives) and crucially pertinent to cultivation of fully human subjects. Drawing on Schlegel's Fragments, notebooks, dialogues, and his novel, Lucinde, Schmidt argues forcefully that his writings constitute the undisputed progenitor of all later theories of (72). The range of Schlegel's thought on novel is indeed impressive, and much of it retains currency. His formal concerns include novel as a mixed genre, importance of Platonic dialogue and parody in ironic inclusion of heterogeneous materials, and figure of arabesque as a way to balance fantasy and order within autotelic artwork. Thematically and conceptually, Schlegel examines importance of temporal movement and becoming (as opposed to epic stasis), productive forms of folly, or Narrheit (as an antidote to sterile rationality of Enlightenment), as well as inventive, ordering capacity of humor and Witz (a sort of Teutonic ingenio). …

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