SPAN 597 Psychoanalysis: 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, including the usages of Freud, Lacan and Kristeva. 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—the personal and the national—including the personal as national. Readings will include theoretical and clinical texts by Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, Caruth, Felman, Laub, and Abraham and Torok, as well as works on national identity by Doris Sommer, Benedict Anderson and Isiah Berlin. For specific case studies/histories, we will rely on a wide-ranging corpus drawn from the Latin American and Latinx canon from the colonial period to the present. Discussion will be in English, and all readings will also be available in English.