Researching Cultures: Afterlives, Ghosts, and Haunted Places

3 units

In this course, we will examine the historical, cultural and aesthetic implications of how different artists, filmmakers, and writers approach the afterlife in the Spanish-speaking world. We will explore experiences and emotions that can be deeply personal and intimate as well as shared and lived out in public. We will discuss how practices and beliefs vary widely across the Spanish-speaking world and explore how traditions and rituals are invented and how these change over time. While our readings will include a few works from earlier periods, most of the texts stem from the 20th and 21st centuries, allowing us also to examine a number of historical events and their depiction in history and memory. We will discuss the ways in which grief, mourning, and trauma relate to identity and belonging, and we will also pay close attention to coping mechanisms that range from forgetting to humor. The last section of the course will focus on a specific case study of public mourning and remembrance: the Spanish Civil War and its multiple afterlives. This course will have a strong, mandatory and graded written communications component, and it is taught in Spanish. It also fulfills the Writing Intensive (WI) requirement for Arts & Sciences students. Students who have taken more than four Spanish culture or literature classes are not allowed in this course and must proceed to a Major Seminar.