Don Quixote Chapter 4 Summary

In the beginning of the chapter one of Rewriting: How To Do Things With Texts, by Joseph Harris, he tells of how Pierre Menard rewrote Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes as a joke to show the readers that “to understand a text you need, in a way, to rewrite it, to take the ideas and phrasings of its author and turn them into your own. Text simply reveal their meanings to us: we need to make sense of them.”(Harris 15) This is one of the key points Harris is trying to instill in the readers of his book. Harris explains how it is helpful to think of rewriting to represent the work of another as translating it into your own words using your own language and ideas of the text. Harris gives the reader three moves to help ease the translation, “Define …show more content…
The reader must look at reasons to write a writer might see it from their point of view and what certain aspects are highlighted because of that and what others are obscured. Harris puts it as “in dealing with other writers, your aim should be less to prove them right or wrong, correct or mistaken, than to assess both the uses and limits of their work.”(Harris 25) That is one of the whole points of academic writing which centers on weighing the option and sorting through the possibilities, verses taking …show more content…
These included block quotes, in-text quotes, scare quotes, epigraphs, and allusions. These terms help the reader understand what each of the things that they might be doing are specifically, as well as give some new terms to add to a person’s vocabulary arsenal. Each are very well explains and some of the terms are even given examples to go alongside with or a basic explanation of the root of the word in Latin. Harris also goes over, briefly, the use of brackets, ellipses, and italicizing or otherwise highlighting. “A strong use of the work of others is always grounded in a scrupulous care in citing their texts.”(Harris 31)
Harris, as an author, wants the reader to be able to better learn how to rewrite works of literature in our own terms using proper quotes and concisely, yet completely explaining the author’s “project” and how and why the author wrote it from that point of view. He goes about making his point by completely explaining each of the things he says in a way he believes is full and rich, as well as giving examples that he sees fitting to the way he presented the information, and using proper separation of each of the topics that he wants to explain and give examples