Description

What’s the connection between fear, hate, pain and identity? To what extent are our personal and collective identities shaped by received ideas of “others”? Does questioning “others” help us understand our ideas of culture, nation, and polity? How do these questions help us understand our position in current political debates? What’s the value of asking these questions when we read modern literature about Spain? Najat El Hachmi will guide us in her turn-of-the-century journey of emancipation between Morocco and Barcelona. A journalist going by the same name as novelist Javier Cercas will rely on fiction to tell the truth of an anonymous hero of the Spanish Civil War. Juan José Saer, an Argentine writer living in France, will tell us an unsettling narrative of survival set in the 16th century about a 15-year-old cabin boy who was captured en route from Spain to the New World, and lived among cannibals for a decade. Carmen Laforet and Leopoldo Alas will spin tales of grit and self-reliance about a Catalan teenager and a Galician spinster in times of socio-political repression. Federico García Lorca’s poems will show us a kaleidoscopic view of Depression-era New York. Among the aims of this seminar is to discuss how autobiography, fiction and poetry may challenge and entice readers to consent to or dissent from such representations. That is why this seminar also introduces students to different literary traditions while providing them with essential skills of literary analysis such as close reading and conceptual and historical framing.