| Summary: | Cervantes’ Don Quixote, a parody of chivalry romances, centers on the misadventures of a protagonist who tries to align his desires and actions with those of his literary models. From this idea, René Girard develops his theory of external mediation of desire: the disposition of a character to imitate a model who does not belong to his diegetic universe. This idea, introduced by Girard, is not discussed enough in the theory and the aesthetics of comedy. Therefore, we identify in the modern comic heroes what we designate by a “syndrome of Don Quixote”, that make them victims of a mimetic appropriation of illusory models, and plunge them in a series of misadventures before a painful and inevitable return to lucidity. We will try to highlight Don Quixote’s specificity, its impact on parody and comedy’s syntax, and identify what make modern comic heroes the descendants of Cervantes’s prototype: incapable of desiring without models, and attached to conventional expressions of desire that lead them to disaster.31 janvier 2018 |
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