Latin American Spanish (MA)

Novísimas narraciones latinoamericanas. Dialogues between writing, memory and politics

This course offers an interdisciplinary reflection on the relationship between writing, memory and politics in the Latin American cultural field of the 21st century. In recent years, the reflection on memory has taken centre stage in Latin American literary scenarios, as a reflection of the urgency to investigate the epistemological reasons for inequality and to make visible the ways and forms of articulating violence.
The aptitude to explore the limits of the literary imagination (Ricoeur; Didi-Huberman), the ability to skim the boundaries of representation in order to account for its dark sides, the tension of dictability in the face of the abyss and horror (Agamben), are characteristics of these "memorial" writings, which take on the wounds of history, resist oblivion and re-signify the past, giving back body and voice to the victims of discrimination, class, race and gender.
The course will reflect on the ways and forms of rewriting the present, in its implicit relationship with social imaginaries constrained by dominant economic models.
The relationship between writing, memory and politics will necessarily involve the questioning of literary genres and the proposal of new narrative forms, lateral and hybrid, functional to the repair of the "wounds of history" in a critical perspective (new forms of testimony; documentary narration, in its anxiety to unveil the dark side of the truth, the historical novel, with its attempts to reinscribe the past in new genealogies, the fantastic and science fiction that open up liminal zones, populated by ghosts). Starting from these nuclei of reflection, a heterogeneous literary corpus will be tackled along three axes:
Narratives and economy: literary fields and reception phenomena
Narratives and the past: elaborating the past and reconfiguring the present
Narratives and genres: bodies and writings
General aims:
To propose an interdisciplinary reflection on the relationship between writing and memory in the Latin American literary field of the 21st century, with particular attention to the production of the Southern Cone.
Specific aims:
Students will be able to:
- Visualize the complexity of the processes and cultural dynamics of the Latin American literary field, in its transformations, starting with the phenomena of violence and discrimination based on class, gender, race and political views.
- To develop the ability to carefully read texts in their contexts of production, increasing one's reflective and critical capacity.
- To construct interdisciplinary lines of interpretation based on reflection between literature and memory