Dr. Bruce Burningham, professor of Spanish studies, theatre studies, and film studies, will deliver the biannual Arts and Sciences Lecture on Tuesday, November 11, at 5 p.m., in the Bone Student Center’s Old Main Room. Admission is free, and the public is invited to attend.

A faculty member in the College of Arts and Sciences‘ Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Burningham will present “Don Quixote as Möbius Strip: Terry Gilliam, Salman Rushdie, and the Infinite Loop of Cervantine Variation” in the first installment of this academic year’s lectures. The Arts and Sciences Lecture Series was established in 1968 to honor Arts and Sciences faculty who have made outstanding scholarly contributions to the University and their disciplines.

Abstract

Terry Gilliam and Salman Rushdie are particularly Cervantine artists whose work has long demonstrated an intertextual engagement with Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote. In Gilliam’s case, this engagement can be found in the substrata of such films as Monty Python and Holy Grail (1975), Brazil (1985), and The Fisher King (1991). For Rushdie, this engagement is on spectacular display in an array of self-conscious literary narrators, from Moraes Zogoiby in The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995) to “Rai” in The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999). In the past few years, both Gilliam and Rushdie have released their most overtly Cervantine works to date: Gilliam, in his long-anticipated (and famously beleaguered­) 2018 film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, and Rushdie, in his 2019 novel Quichotte. Through a close reading of these cinematic and literary texts—ones that employ the concept of the Möbius strip as an interpretive metaphor—this lecture will examine The Man Who Killed Don Quixote and Quichotte (along with Rushdie’s 2023 novel Victory City) as narratives that explore the boundaries of postmodern subjectivity while at the same time folding back on themselves in an infinite loop of Cervantine intertextuality.

Bruce Burningham biography

Bruce Burningham received his Ph.D. from Yale University and is currently professor at Illinois State University, where he teaches in the Spanish section of the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures and in the theatre studies and film studies areas of the School of Theatre, Dance, and Film. His research and teaching interests include medieval and early modern Spanish and Latin American literature, Hispanic theater and film, and performance theory.

His books include Millennial Cervantes: New Currents in Cervantes Studies (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), Tilting Cervantes: Baroque Reflections on Postmodern Culture (Vanderbilt University Press, 2008), and Radical Theatricality: Jongleuresque Performance on the Early Spanish Stage (Purdue University Press, 2007). He has also published some 50 articles and book chapters in venues such as Cervantes, Theatre Journal, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Bulletin of the Comediantes, Comedia Performance, Romance Quarterly, eHumanista/Cervantes, and Seattle Opera Magazine.

Since 2011, he has served as editor of Cervantes: Journal of the Cervantes Society of America, and he is immediate past president of the Association for Hispanic Classical Theater (for which he has also served on the Board of Directors since 2008). He also serves on the editorial boards of Ediciones Alfar Press, Laberinto: An Electronic Journal of Early Modern Hispanic Literature and Cultures, and Dialogía: Revista de lingüistica, literatura y cultura.

He is a recipient of a College of Arts and Sciences’ Outstanding College Researcher in the Humanities award, as well as an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship and grants from both the National Endowment for the Humanities and Spain’s Ministry of Culture.

He served as chair of the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures from 2010-21. Prior to coming to ISU, he held tenure-line positions at Florida Atlantic University and the University of Southern California.