Roberto González Echevarría opens his Yale course on Cervantes' Don Quixote by making the case for the novel as a foundational work of Western literature. He explains the correct Spanish pronunciation of Quixote and why French and English speakers get it wrong, then unpacks the book's full original title, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, alongside notes on its language and historical context. The lecture moves into the novel's afterlife, tracing how the word quixotic entered everyday usage and how the Quixote myth has persisted into the present. González Echevarría closes by returning to the question of why the book endures, locating the answer in its probing of the human self, before running through the syllabus for the semester. Recorded at Yale in Fall 2009 as the first session of SPAN 300.