Within a backdrop of transformations in conceptions about knowledge, reason, and the spiritual experience and religious authority, throughout the 18th and 19th centuries Spain found itself experiencing a skeptical questioning of past truths, values, and methods. This brought about a plural and dissonant nature in representations of identity, the self and other, progress, modernity, and nationhood. These representations—across media, including literature and the visual arts—explored spaces, the natural world, human bodies, cultural beliefs, and the human imagination, and imbued these with images of the fantastic, the grotesque, the erotic, and the diseased to put forward critique, disappointment, and cynical views of Spain’s past, present, and future. This course will offer an overview of such literary, visual, and intellectual movements as the Enlightenment, the Spanish Gothic, Romanticism, and Decadentism.
M 2:00-4:50 pm; 1038 Literatures, Cultures, & Ling
CRN (for graduate students): 49987
CRN (for undergraduate students): 49989
Prerequisites: SPAN 312 and SPAN 320 or consent of instructor.
Instructor: Anna Torres-Cacoullos
Course image: De la España Negra (1920), José Gutiérrez Solana