ABSTRACT
In Cervantes's Don Quixote, only the protagonist seems to hold what both successors and opponents of the Frankfurt School would call a "critical" or cultural "theory." In that light, Cervantes's fiction seems to simulate how a critical theory becomes relegated to poetic or even lunatic status, and so remains neither historical nor effectual. Critics whom Close identifies as "panegyrists" sought to prove Cervantes's encyclopedic knowledge in disciplines ranging from law and medicine to navigation and political theory. The state of "crisis" ascribed to the humanities, literary studies and Cervantes studies in the wake of Castro emerges chiefly from a blend of theory and political concern that failed to coalesce during the radical movements of the 1960s. In Cervantes studies, "desacrahzmg" tendencies have arisen chiefly in the United States, and have proved both milder and more than elsewhere in literary studies, or even in Hispanism.
