SPAN 347 - Poetry and Power

FDR: HL Literature Distribution
Credits: 3

Prerequisite: SPAN 240 and SPAN 275. This is a course about reading. With tremendous care, and taking nothing for granted, we will read Spanish-American poetry on power and violence as a way of engaging and investigating the multifaceted and layered historiographies of the region. To intensify our reading, we also will “read” a diversity of pertinent cultural production, including paintings, murals, and music. Through these self-conscious acts of reading—that is, acts of identifying, evaluating, and critiquing form as much as content—we will enhance our ability to analyze and debate many different ways of defining power in the Americas from within, without, and in liminal zones. In this manner we will trace through poetry the complexities and tensions of transcultural, transnational, and transhistorical legacies of violence, all the while cultivating our abilities to read, write, speak, and listen rigorously in Spanish. This is also to say that our process will be thoroughly collaborative and interactive as we endeavor to discover the potentiality and even the hope in our difficult and sometimes even despairing project. Recurring motifs throughout the term will include sexism, racism, classism, and fascism, and each will be framed and examined by critical theory from leading scholars from the Americas and beyond. Students will leave the course feeling more confident and articulate in addressing through poetry many of our most urgent ideas about literatures, cultures, and historiographies of power and violence.