SPAN 6920 - [Mottled Narratives: Latin American Essay]

Spring. Not offered: 2020-2021. Next offered: 2022-2023. 4 credits. Student option grading.

L. Cadahia.

This seminar proposes two displacements regarding the study of Latin American essay. We will not focus on the problem of nation but on the notion of republic, as an attempt to deconstruct the one-sided image of essays as “accomplices” of foundational domination national projects, in order to explore a struggle between an oligarchical republicanism and a plebeian republicanism. Following the critical thought tradition, we will explore this struggle in terms of “dialectical images”, working with texts from the 19th and 20th centuries-fiction and non-fiction, in order to reveal a tragic dialectic between an oligarchic desire and a plebeian impulse, overcoming fossilized dichotomies (nationalism/cosmopolitism; avant-garde/traditionalism), from Sarmiento to Isaacs, Euclides da Cunha, Mariátegui, Gilberto Freyre, Silvina Ocampo, and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui among others.