« I am mad about Spain»: la búsqueda de la identidad modernista a través del viaje quijotesco en Rosinante to the Road Again de John Dos Passos

Abstract

This essay analyzes the intertextual influence of Cervantes’s Don Quixote of La Mancha in John Dos Passos’s Rosinante to the Road Again (1922) to construct a modernist epic. The American writer found in Spain his own modernist utopia, an Arcadia that was opposed to American capitalism and monetarism. Dos Passos’s journey in search of identity was based on a quest for the values that embodied by the mythical couple Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, who for the American writer became the symbol of the «Spanish gesture». Furthermore, Dos Passos was able to put Madrid and La Mancha on the map of the global scope of Modernism like other European cities such as London and Paris, in his search for the modern cosmopolitan subject. Finally, Dos Passos’s idealism transformed Spanish society into an Edenic civilization and at the same time questioned the excesses of materialism and industrialism in American society.