ABSTRACT
Most of the influential Cervantes criticism written forms a fairly coherent tradition stemming from Americo Castro's El pensamiento de Cervantes. The tradition is idealist and humanist. The terms "humanism," "humanistic," "humanities," redolent of the morally enlightening study of the classics, are used recurrently by Leo Spitzer, as they are by Ernst Curtius. The former accommodates the alleged myth of liberal bourgeois ideology and traditional humanist scholarship. The assumption, underpinned by Saussurian linguistics, is that individual minds constitute separate and specific microsystems within the macrosystem of surrounding society and culture, so many paroles within a langue. The good Alicia never asks such preliminary questions, never makes the necessary distinctions. This lack of rigor is reflected in the lack of sense of proportion and likelihood which she displays as an exegete of Cervantes's fiction.
