“Snapping the Quijote:
Examining L2 Literature, Social Media, and Digital Storytelling through a Cervantine Lens.”
Rebecca M. Bender, Kansas State University
in Hispania, vol. 103, no. 3 (September), 2020
Read the full article here via Project MUSE
Abstract:
This paper focuses on an advanced Spanish literature seminar I taught at Kansas State University dedicated entirely to Cervantes’s Don Quijote de la Mancha. In an effort to appeal to twenty-first-century students in rural Kansas, I designed my seminar to explore traditional questions of authorship, translation and reading, metafiction, self-invention, and parody, but through the lens of contemporary pop culture, including the graphic novel and mobile applications (apps). Unlike a traditional research paper, this course’s non-traditional final assessment required students to place academic scholarship in an alternative, accessible format. It also promoted innovative, analytic interpretations of the novel through the juxtaposition of text, images, video, and sound in a medium in which students already excelled: Snapchat. In what follows, I describe this alternative Snapchat project and its pedagogical justifications, then reflect on the results, student feedback, successes, and limitations. Ultimately, I propose rethinking or reimagining the traditional Don Quijote seminar – and second-language (L2) literature courses and assessments more broadly – by embracing purportedly non-academic technologies like Snapchat, whose reliance on a variety of semiotic tools has the potential to teach traditional skills of literary analysis and increase students’ engagement with and understanding of narrative processes.
Keywords:
Don Quijote, graphic novel/novela gráfica, Miguel de Cervantes, narrative/narrativa, popular culture/cultura popular, Snapchat, Spanish literature/literatura española
Images referenced in article:
Image 1:
Image 2, “Snap Story”:
Image 3:
Quijote Snaps 