#lol my thesis
By now all tumblr will have known of my thesis about Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quijote… Now that it’s finished, I’m publishing the front page of it as a special thank to every one of you who patiently dealt with my flow of posts about how much I loved Cervantes and how much effed up my thesis was!
So here it is: “Don Quixote and the magical devices to avoid death”… Quite proud of the effort I put into this!
Once again, how I love Don Quijote…
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Thank you all!!! I had no idea English academic writing could be so messed up - pity me ahahah… But I eventually managed to go through the whole essay and now I only have to reelaborate it in Italian for my high school final thesis (yeah!)Hi everybody! I am mainly adressing this desperate request for help to the English native people here… I am striving to get the meaning of this passage of an essay about metaliterature (literature that deals with literature):
“A fundamental trait that fiction and real life could be seen to have in common is that the individuals who populate both can be thought of as metaphors in a vast creative fabric, and largely self-conceived metaphors at that.”
I really can’t figure out what a “largely self-conceived metaphor at something” could ever be. Please heeeeeelppp!!!
This does sound like nonsense, and suspiciously Christian nonsense at that. This makes no sense whatsoever…unless you buy into the implicit premise that real life is a creation by some being, and therefore analogous or similar to literature. Otherwise we are not “self-conceived metaphors” - real life is definitely not metaphorical. We are made of flesh and blood - we might conceive of notions such as the self or the soul, but these do not really exist apart from the body. They are just figurative terms to describe a common phenomenon. We are only “self-conceived metaphors” in that we describe ourselves in figurative terms. What this has to do with meta literature I can’t quite figure out, but philosophically speaking it sounds like bullshit.
First things first, thank you very much for your attention to this post! I must say that the whole essay is quite messed up actually… It deals with the theme of enchantment in Cervantes’ Don Quixote, and that passage was referring to the fact that Don Quixote sees the world as if it was a romance of chivalry: full of dark forces which he has to fight in order for the good to prevail. This leads the author to claim that “our relation to the world would be unimaginable for us if it wasn’t organised in some sort of fictional framework” (and this, in my opinion, paves the way towards a reflection about meta literature).
Actually, what wasn’t clear to me was the very syntactic use of “metaphor at”: I have always heard only “metaphor for” and I was wondering what that strange construction would mean… Again, thank you anyways!!!Oh, “at” doesn’t go with “metaphors” here - “at that” is a phrase which means “in addition to that.”
Really, I love you all so much and love when tumblr is diabolically turned into a place for meaningful cultural discussion… eehhh you have to accept my nerdness…
