SPAN 597 Family, Nation, Telling, and Other Traumas

This course will familiarize the student with psychoanalysis as a way to approach literature and culture. We will cover its basic concepts and structures, especially with regard to trauma and post-trauma. Most relevant will be: 1) witnessing and rendering testimony; 2) inherited or misplaced trauma; 3) responses to the father figure and paternalism. For all, but especially this last topic, we will consider parallels between the individual subject and the collective psyche: both the personal and the national, or the personal as national. For specific case studies/histories, we will draw on the Latin American and Latinx canon, from the Colonial period to the present. These may include El Inca Garcilaso, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Hernandez’s "Martín Fierro," caciquismo, the death of José Martí, Alfonso Reyes and his father, Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, Cien años de soledad, the Dirty Wars of the 1970s, Rigoberta Menchú, and Gloria Anzaldúa. Theoretical readings will include psychoanalysis and trauma theory by Freud, Caruth, Felman, Laub, and on national identity by Benedict Anderson and Isiah Berlin.