Contemporary Iberian Literature: ‘Writing’ Reading Technics

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course studies how contemporary Iberian literature and culture is trying to come to terms with the coming of “Surveillance Capitalism;” namely, a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction and sales. Thanks to Google, Apple, Facebook, Netflix, etc., this “Surveillance capitalism” could be also understood as an economic and societal logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to an unprecedented global architecture of behavioral modification (Heidegger, Stiegler, Zuboff, Balibar, etc.). Ultimately, we will ask what kind of civilization the third modernity of technics and surveillance foretell, and we will explore how literature and culture bear witness to the subsequent shifting of the fundamental inherited notions of modernity such as: human self-representation and artistic expression, progress, social bond, sovereignty, freedom, planetary finitude, inequality, as well as to the new discontents of civilization. We will combine literary and film studies with conceptual perspectives and will closely examine: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Zuboff, 2019) as well as the novels Kentukis (Schweblin, 2019) and Horda (Menéndez Salmón, 2021). Taught in Spanish.