Baroque Utopias

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

As the Spanish Empire expanded in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, so did the selection of goods available in its marketplaces. The explosion of wealth and the increased circulation of products had aesthetic effects as well as economic ones. In this course, we’ll draw on literary theory, and especially theories of capitalism, to explore the ways that 16th- and 17th-century texts from Spain and Spanish America (and, on occasion, England) idealize the accumulation of material and intellectual goods. We’ll examine visual and textual representations of productive or accumulative space, including maps, cityscapes, encyclopedias, and libraries, in an attempt to resolve several questions: Are these spaces really intended to be utopias? How do they illuminate the effects of Spain’s globalizing economy? Do their efforts to amass goods and ideas constitute a form of capitalism? Does their obsessive accumulation ultimately defy the synthesis and utility of knowledge to which “utopias” aspire?