This advanced Spanish course is a study of the paradox of trauma literature. Stories that compel their telling, yet are unassimilated and unspeakable, trauma narratives grow out of disaster and crisis on an individual and/or collective scale. To better understand Anne Whitehead’s assertion that “Novelists have frequently found that the impact of trauma can only adequately be represented by mimicking its forms and symptoms, so that temporality and chronology collapse, and narratives are characterized by repetition and indirection,” we first consider representative fictional narratives by contemporary Spanish authors including Juan Goytisolo, Juan Marsé, and Isaac Rosa Camacho. In order to develop an appropriate theoretical background, students also tackle major contributions by theorists such as Freud, Herman, Caruth, LaCapra, and Whitehead, whose ideas resonate deeply with our primary literary texts. Thereafter, students’ individual research questions will drive content choices, such that, depending on student interests, there will be ample opportunity to consider examples from any time and place in the Hispanophone world. Co-requisite: attendance at 2 language events. In Spanish. Advanced level.

Corequisites: Language Series