SPAN 346 - El Mal en la Literatura

Unit(s): 4

This course explores evil in literary fictions, and some films, mostly from Latin America and Spain. Discussions on evil in the West and in Latin America provide a philosophical context to the assigned literary texts. Generally, we understand evil in this class as the conflict produced by the emergence of Latin America in the European imagination. The region either represents the failure of modernity (and therefore a challenge) or serves as space onto which the European imagination enacted its fantasies. We look at the following instances of evil in literature: the vilification of the marginalized other in the civilization/ barbarism opposition (Sarmiento); fantastic narratives as the regions reaction to scientific realism and European philosophical models (Borges, Cortar); feminine enjoyments threat to patriarchal power (Rulfo, Restrepo); the rise of the antihero in Spains picaresque novel and modern and parodic renditions in both, Spain and Latin America (Cela, Zapata); the border as wound (Anzald and Gez Pe) and drug lords in narco-narratives as the new embodiment of evil in the Spanish speaking world (Herrera).

Prerequisite: SPAN 206 with a minimum grade of D or Spanish Heritage Test with a minimum score of 7
College of Arts and Sciences