How the humanities can save
us from the plague of disinformation.
The
attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 was a tragic illustration
of the existential threat that the viral spread of disinformation
poses in the age of social media and twenty-four-hour news. From
climate change denialism to the frenzied conspiracy theories and
racist mythologies that fuel antidemocratic white nationalist
movements in the United States and abroad, What Would Cervantes
Do? is a lucid meditation on the key role the humanities must
play in dissecting and combatting all forms of disinformation.
David
Castillo and William Egginton travel back to the early modern period,
the first age of inflationary media, in search of historically tested
strategies to overcome disinformation and shed light on our
post-truth market. Through a series of critical conversations between
cultural icons of the twenty-first century and those of the Spanish
Golden Age, What Would Cervantes Do? provides a tour-de-force
commentary on current politics and popular culture. Offering a
diverse range of Cervantist comparative readings of contemporary
cultural texts - movies, television shows, and infotainment -
alongside ideas and issues from literary and cultural texts of early
modern Spain, Castillo and Egginton present a new way of unpacking
the logic of contemporary media.
What
Would Cervantes Do? is an urgent and timely self-help manual for
literary scholars and humanists of all stripes, and a powerful
toolkit for reality literacy.
Details
Part
of the McGill-Queen's Iberian and Latin American Cultures Series
(number 2 in series)