SPAN 6360 - [Dandies, Drugs & Fetishes: Modernismo]

Spring. Not offered 2017-2018. 4 credits. Student option grading.

S. McDaniel.

This course examines the literary and somatic aesthetics of Spanish American modernismo (1880s-1920s), the European influences and transatlantic conversations that animate it (Baudelaire, Huysmans, Verlaine, Wilde), as well as theoretical readings that include Nietzsche, Freud, Bataille, and Foucault. In addition to interrogating how writers like Marti, Dario, Casal, Rodo, Silva, Agustini, and Gomez Carrillo perform, contest, and negotiate art and modernity, sovereignty and the sacred, degeneration and decadence, gender and fetishism, cosmopolitanism and orientalism, drugs, the occult, and the rhetoric of ennui, we will also situate the movement’s legacy in contemporary Latin American literature.