'Don Quixote', academia and the streets

Great literary works, like Cervantes' Don Quixote, travel through diverse times, genres, literary communities and spaces. This study not only recognizes these journeys, but also analyzes their affects on the work's public existence and receptions. Academics witness and record these voyages, but the public remains segregated from Don Quixote's passage. In reaction, this investigation studies the reasons behind marginalized publics' literary alienation or silencing and remedies. To do this, I draw from literary and educational fields of study in combination with my work with urban public students and teachers to address the questions: What deters urban public engagement with Don Quixote? What can motivate more profound and frequent popular connections?; The study looks at this restrained public life of Don Quixote through specific societal subset: urban public students. In spite of city students' creative capacities, while Don Quixote exists dynamically in intellectual realms, it stagnates in urban public spaces. As part of the explanation, inner city schools, mostly unsupported by outside community and intellectual institutions, struggle to compensate for practical barriers that perpetuate detachment from literature. Consequently, this work promotes a critical curriculum with scaffolding and relevance that diminishes these obstacles to Don Quixote's dissemination.; Student reception, beyond school, community, and educational conditions, hinges on political, media and consumer driven textual revisions. For that reason, I devise pedagogical packaging of Don Quixote's political, commodified, and technological existence that promotes students awareness and change in their own consumption practices. Finally, this investigation discusses program formats, both national and local, that would encourage public access to Don Quixote. These frequently bring postsecondary and secondary institutions into collaboration, and, at times, foster the formation of new community and/or local alliances.; Throughout this entire study notions of collaboration, desegregation, and hybridization offer ways to bring new readers and voices to texts. Such democratic participation sets a precedent that filters into everyday, and even political, acts in our society. It also energizes pedagogy and scholarship, as it motivates students, with the vitality inherent in Don Quixote .