RLSP 403(F) Literature and the Body Politic: Space, Power and Performance in Latin America*
For the last decade or so, scholars have discussed Latin American cultural production through a range of metaphors that descend from two distinct but closely related tropes: place and performance. Power, for contemporary theorists, is both exercised in and resisted by gendered bodies that move through the structures of public and private spaces. Identity is understood primarily in terms of performance; history and meaning are embodied, not just encoded in texts, while political, economic, and cultural discourses are all dominated by a rhetoric of flow, movement, and migration. This seminar proposes to examine these spatial metaphors in contemporary Latin American literature and cultural theory. Where do figures like “mapping,” “marginality” and “embodiment” come from, and what does their emergence in the 1990s signify? How are they prefigured in earlier periods of Latin American cultural discourse, and how does their widespread circulation (to use another trope from the same series) influence the ways that we think and act politically today? More specifically, is the nation still a viable model for constructing identity and struggling for political change in the age of globalization and mass
migration? To get to the bottom of these issues, we will explore representations of space, place, and the body in recent narrative, poetry and performance, with a particular focus on the postdictatorial literatures of the Southern Cone of South America. Literary readings may include work by: Diamela Eltit, Ricardo Piglia, Luisa Valenzuela, Tomás Eloy Martínez, Juan José Saer, Julio Ortega, Juan Gelman, and others. Theoretical readings may include the work of: Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Diana Taylor, Walter Mignolo, Nelly Richard, Néstor García Canclini, José Joaquín Brunner, Mary Louise Pratt and Homi Bhaba. As a capstone experience, the seminar will require participants to take an active role in shaping discussion.
Format: seminar. Requirements: regular participation, two oral presentations, 7-page paper, 15-page term paper and 2-page proposal with bibliography.
Prerequisites: RLSP 200, 203, 219T or permission of instructor. Enrollment limit: 15 (expected: 10). Preference given to Spanish and Comparative Literature majors and seniors with sufficient competency in Spanish.
Hour: W FRENCH

Not offered 2007-2008
RLSP 403 Senior Seminar: Power, Repression, and Dictatorship in the Latin-American Novel *
Military dictatorship is among the most crucial factors in Latin-American society and history, and some of the continent's leading novelists have taken it upon themselves to depict the experience in their work. In this course we will examine both the fact of dictatorship itself and the diverse representation thereof in Spanish-American fiction. Novels by Garcia Marquez, Carpentier, Fuentes, Poniatowska, and Tomas Eloy Martinez will be closely studied. Students will also read Absalom! Absalom! by Faulkner, whose influence on Latin-American authors' techniques of representation has been decisive and profound. Conducted in Spanish.
Requirements: three papers based on the readings, one oral report on the life and personality of a given dictator, and a final exam.
Prerequisite: any 300-level course or two 200-level courses or permission of the instructor.

BELL-VILLADA