Amazing Lives Of The Baroque Era

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

What constitutes an extraordinary life? What can we learn about a particular historical moment by examining the fictional and real lives of the remarkable characters who populated their society? This seminar will analyze the various modes of representation and social control exerted by Spanish institutions during the Baroque period. Specifically, we will read a series of real and imaginary lives of men and women who challenged this power structure by living and writing extraordinary lives. These fictional accounts of an individual's life together with real accounts of imaginary individuals will give us the opportunity to face the complexity of Baroque Spain. Infamous men and women, marginalized subjects, persecuted personae are some of the examples of the extraordinary characters that we are going to meet in the class. Through the looking glass of their fantastic lives, we will analyze important concepts and categories such as subjectivity, subject formation, power/knowledge relations, gender, race, religious intolerance, persecution. We will focus on the creative responses forged by a heterogeneous community of people who wanted to reaffirm their individual freedom. The seminar will pay special attention not only to the discursive mechanisms used by the Spanish elite in order to maintain the status quo, but also will analyze how persecuted people of the same era were able to resist and challenge the dominant discourse. During the semester, we will read canonical literary texts (Poetry, drama, narrative) as well as other cultural artifacts (Manuals, treatises, chronicles, biographies, autobiographies, inquisitorial cases and movies).