2016-17 Graduate Courses
Fall 2016
SPANPORT 415-0-1: Studies in 19th Century Lit & Cultures: Body Fictions
Can the body disobey the limits imposed by the materiality of sex? Is it possible to disorganize the binary opposition without reinforcing its normativity? Can gender have a decisive bearing on bodily materiality? My seminar answers these questions, exploring the work of Latin American writers and artists who aim to defy the norms imposed by the heterosexual imperative. I propose that the possibility of a new body depends on its visuality and visibility to enable the deactivation of the culture's preferred categories.
Thurdsays: 2:00 - 4:50pm
SPANPORT 401-0-1: Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory: The Letter in Latin America
This course has two goals. First, it seeks to familiarize students with Latin American intellectual traditions in the modern period. In order to do so, it surveys a representative selection of pivotal figures in two different, and crucial, historical moments: the post-revolutionary 19th century and its responses both to Independence and an emerging neocolonial order and the frenetic 1920s and 30s and the articulations of a properly Latin American identity and culture. Second, within and across these historical constellations, the course will analyze prominent conceptual paradigms that have defined intellectual discourse in the region, such as mestizaje, hybridity, and heterogeneity, focusing particularly on their evolution and metamorphoses. As we consider the advent and waning of elite, lettered production’s influence and power to shape national and regional conceptualizations, we will pay special attention to how alterity, gender, and coloniality inflect the region’s intellectual production. Readings will be derived from a list of primary texts with optional supplements from other sources.
Reading knowledge of Spanish and Portuguese is required as is a familiarity with the history of Latin America. The language of class discussions will depend on the class registration.
Mondays: 2:00 - 4:50pm
Winter 2017
SPANPORT 420-0-1: Studies in 20th Century Lit & Cultures: Body Fictions
Testimonial narrative is among the most prominent--and most controversial--currents to have emerged in Latin America following the 1960s-1970s Boom era. Having now achieved canonical status within Latin American literary and cultural studies, the testimonial genre has generated discussion and debate inside and outside the academy about literature as an institution, authorship, truth, representation, memory, and subjectivity, among other topics. Anchoring our work overall in the question "How to read?" we will begin by investigating the family of words and concepts that frame discussion of the genre and that testimonial works also interrogate. Next, we will take up theories and models of testimony drawn from a variety of sources inside and outside Latin America. The properly analytical body of the course will be organized around three clusters of materials, which offer different--yet related--angles from which to consider testimonial narrative. The first cluster will take Menchú's Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú as its focus, drawing into its orbit related testimonial narratives (e.g., Barnet), authorial theories of testimonio, and critical debates about the genre. The second cluster will center on Timerman's Preso sin nombre, celda sin número, focusing attention especially on the survivor-witness as the subject and object of testimonial works and theory, dramatized twenty years earlier by Walsh's Operación masacre. The third cluster will place in dialogue García Márquez's La aventura de Miguel Littín clandestino en Chile and Littín's film Acta General de Chile, and also set the stage for the "concluding testimony" of Patricio Guzmán's Nostalgia de la luz. The last two class sessions will be dedicated to seminar presentations that draw on materials from students' areas of research in relation to the seminar's topic. The class will be conducted in English; primary texts are in Spanish (English editions can also be purchased to accompany original texts, if needed); secondary readings are in English and in Spanish.
Tuesdays: 2:00 - 4:50pm
SPANPORT 450-0-1: Topics in Cultural Studies
Utopia and Dystopia in Caribbean Literature and Culture Since its "discovery" and subsequent colonization by European explorers, the Caribbean has been a canvas onto which imaginings, dreams, and fears about civilization, society, identity, and modernity have been projected. This course will trace the utopian desires and dystopian anxieties running through Caribbean literary discourse and cultural production in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We will begin our exploration in the early twentieth-century, when writers in the Hispanic Caribbean looked at both literature and the nation as spaces with utopian potential, even as they were also sites of post-colonial anxieties. We will then move to examine the particular utopian discourse articulated by the Cuban Revolution, as well as the ways in which that discourse has been challenged by both subsequent events (the so-called Special Period) as well as literary and intellectual interventions within Cuba and abroad. The course will end by exploring how utopia and dystopia have been employed to construct and describe spaces of communitarian identity, to name and engage with processes of disempowerment, exclusion, or dehumanization, and to (re)negotiate the region's relationship to temporality. Readings will include works by Miguel de Carrión, Jorge Mañach, Luis Palés Matos, Antonio Pereira, Reinaldo Arenas, Antonio José Ponte, Reina María Rodríguez, Michel Encinosa Fu, Jorge Enrique Lage, Luis Negrón, Eduardo Lalo, and Rita Indiana Hernández, as well as the cinematic work of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Sara Gómez. Critical and theoretical readings will draw on the work of Ernst Bloch, Édouard Glissant, Antonio Benítez Rojo, Fredric Jameson, José Esteban Múñoz, and Sylvia Wynter, among others. The class will be conducted in Spanish. Readings will be in Spanish and English.
Thursdays: 2:00 - 4:50pm
Spring 2017
SPANPORT 455: Comparative Studies in Latin American and/or Iberian Literature & Cultures - Critical Cosmopolitanisms
The seminar seeks to critically engage with two master narratives that have been instrumental in an understanding of subjective universal desires, interrelations and fictions of integrated totality, as well as material processes of global dislocation, disjuncture and displacement: cosmopolitanism and globalization. Can these concepts still provide us with an account of present cultural-political moment? What has historically been their critical potential? The experience of destitution and dislocation, of not belonging, the discontent of those could cannot leave or return, the new forms of crossing borders, and the displacement of immigrants and refugees, as they have been articulated in both aesthetic formations and theoretical discourses in Latin America, point us to re-examine the reconfigurations of this translocal space we call “the world”and historicize its imaginative forms.
We will discuss readings by 19th century writer Eugenio Cambareres, Rubén Darío and Latin American and French avant-garde writers, Jorge Luis Borges, Roberto Bolaño, João Gilberto Noll, César Aira, films by Wong Kar Wai, as well as Nussbaum, Brennan, Jameson, Appadurai, Derrida, Arendt, Foucault and Butler.
Tuesdays 2:00 - 4:50pm
SPANPORT 401: Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory - The Letter in Latin America, part ii
This course has two goals. First, it seeks to familiarize students with Latin American intellectual traditions in the twentieth century. In order to do so, it surveys a representative selection of pivotal figures in two different, and crucial, historical moments: the frenetic articulations of a properly Latin American identity and culture that pertain to the first half of the 20th century, and the attempts to reckon with the repercussions of the revolutionary projects of the mid-century that characterize the century’s last decades. Second, within and across these historical constellations, the course will analyze prominent conceptual paradigms that have defined intellectual discourse in and about the region, such as mestizaje, hybridity, and heterogeneity, focusing particularly on their evolution and metamorphoses. As we consider the advent and waning of elite, lettered production’s influence and power to shape national and regional conceptualizations, we will pay special attention to how alterity, gender, and coloniality inflect the region’s intellectual production. Readings will be derived from a list of primary texts with optional supplements from other sources.
Thursdays: 2:00 - 4:50pm