Debating Cultures:Love, Actually: (Re)Imagining Love in Latin American and Latinx Literature

SPANISH 3215

If you are inclined to trust the polls, according to a worldwide survey conducted by Gallup in 2014, Latin Americans are the most emotional people on the planet. In this course we will test this assertion by critically exploring one of the most intense and complex of human emotions: love. We will look at multidimensional and contradictory facets of love-from passion, desire, and happiness to solitude, betrayal and revenge, from family blood ties to bonds of community and patriotism, from motherhood to miscegenation-as they are reimagined in a wide range of 20th and 21st century literary works, performances, films, artwork, music, and popular culture from across Latin American and Latinx diasporic communities. Love as affect and existential experience invariably intersects and becomes interwoven with such important dimensions of the socio-historical framework as ethnicity, class, gender, sexual identity, nationality, exile, and spirituality. In addition to poems, essays and short narratives by authors representing several Latin American countries and their diasporas (Neruda, Mistral, Quiroga, Storni, Benedetti, Garro, Castellanos, Fuentes, Morejón, Poniatowska, Ocampo, Borges, Cortázar, Bobes, Bahr, Vega Serova, Paz Soldán, Obejas, and Meruane, among others), we will examine academic research on the subject of love, blending insights from psychology, sociology, history, anthropology, religion studies, neuroscience, and philosophy. This focus on interdisciplinary approaches will encourage students to seek their own insights grounded in their experiences and areas of expertise and to perceive love as a complex human condition that encompasses a plurality of socio-cultural expressions and unique individual relationships. This course is conducted in Spanish and has a strong, mandatory and graded oral component. Prereq. Spanish 303 or 308E. Students who have taken more than two Spanish culture or literature classes are not allowed in this course and must proceed
Course Attributes: BU BA; BU IS; AS HUM; AS LCD; AS SC; EN H

Section 01

Debating Cultures:Love, Actually: (Re)Imagining Love in Latin American and Latinx Literature - 01
INSTRUCTOR: Sklodowska
View Course Listing - SP2022