SPAN 4080 - New Configurations of Time in Contemporary Latin American Art and Fiction

(LA-AS) Satisfies Option 1.

Spring. 4 credits. Student option grading.

Conducted in Spanish.

G. Speranza.

As twentieth century globalization fostered large-scale chronological synchronization and cyberculture brought immediate hyperconnection, contemporary writers and visual artists have figured new ways of spatializing time and representing the multifarious experience of Latin American present in global culture. What is “the contemporary”? Do we live in global synchronicity or in local out of sync? Reconsidering concepts of time, art history and contemporaneity through theoretical writings by philosophers, critics and art historians, we will study works of Latin American writers and artists, focusing on new logics of narrative causality and new uses of series and archives furthered by the experience of wandering, acceleration, and porous relationships between historical and private time. We will also analyze narrative and visual strategies for “recovering time”, “representing” the past and renewing the dialogue with tradition by means of anachronic rereadings, appropriation, mutation and “reboot.”