SPAN 6830 - Post-Totalitarian Spanish Fiction

Spring. 4 credits.

Conducted in Spanish. This is the required course for all Spanish graduate students.

P. Keller.

In the era of “posts” (post-cold war, post-modernism, post-secularism, post-hegemony, post-photograpy, etc.), how are we to think the contemporary? For some critics, rethinking the “post” hinges on a re-conception of the end itself – “ends of history” and the “death of the author.” For others, it may entail thinking through belatedness, latency, and afterness as key frameworks that shape the present condition of criticism and artistic possibility. This seminar explores those ideas in the relation to the particularities of 20th century Spanish politics and culture and the canonical works of literature written under the conditions of totalitarianism. Focusing primarily on post-war period (1940s) to the present we will explore representations of Spains’ gradual emergence from the reigns of fascism to its complicated transition to democracy. To complement literary texts, we will read theoretical works on ideology and state terror, fascist optics, theories of apparatus, and theories of exception, emergence, afterness, and spectrality.