Studies in Spanish-American Literature

3 units

This course plays with literary explorations of the philosophy of the subject, concentrating on close readings of the art and artifice "the fiction" of selves. We will juxtapose 20th and 21st century literary texts, canonical and "contracanonical," in order to destabilize assumptions about a unified development of such fictive selves. At the same time, we will read relevant theoretical material which will both question and be questioned by the processes of subjectification and the elision of subjectification in the literature. This "fugue," then, understood as both composition and flight, anticipates the notion that literary selves are made through a sort of counterpoint, which will serve us as an organizing metaphor for the critical task: we will approach an understanding of the compositional, constructed nature of subjectivity through the examination of how literature's polyphony is usually read to create the illusion of unison -- and yet how in reading multiplicity, as in listening to a piece of music or viewing a diagram, we can also recognize our own participation in seeing, hearing or being told that which "is represented." We will also dwell for a while in the thematic relationship of literature-music explored in various texts, in which moments such counterpoint is made explicit. Readings may include works by Clarice Lispector, Felisberto Hernández, Horacio Quiroga, Julio Cortázar, Subcomandante Marcos, Roberto Bolaño, Gabriela Massuh, Roberto Arlt, Héctor Abad Faciolince, Diamela Eltit, Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, Mario Bellatín, and others.