Description
Book SynopsisA 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.
Trade Review“What Would Cervantes Do? is a persuasive exercise in making comparisons, and an enlightening guide both to seventeenth-century Spain and to our current circumstances.” Times Literary Supplement
“Castillo and Egginton are state-of-the-art readers of early modern Spanish literature and diligent investigators, well versed in theory. Castillo and Egginton recognize, eloquently and convincingly, that the baroque sensibility of 17th-century Spain – self-consciously obscure – can help to explain, or further complicate, the ups and downs of today’s world and media. Highly recommended.” Choice
“The volume closes with a section whose title could well serve as a metonymy for the entire book: “A Cervantine Toolkit for the Post-Truth Age.” The authors analyze, among other related phenomena, the extreme commodification of information on social media, which has led to “our current, deeply siloed version of the Internet [which is] the perfect marketplace of alt-realities”. Ultimately, WWCD emphasizes the crucial role of the humanities in addressing and combating misinformation.” Cervantes: Journal of the Cervantes Society of America