in Post-Franco Spanish Cultural Production~
(S640) Topics in Twentieth-Century Spanish Literature
Benito mira el cartel de la película de cine mudo, "El amante menguante".
Escena de Hable con ella (2002), de Pedro Almodóvar.
“The body holds the key not only to pleasure but as well to knowledge and power.”
-Peter Brooks, Body Work
Since the death of Franco in 1975, Spain has undergone immense political, socio-economic, and cultural transformations. These shifts and changes have been mediated by a boom in cultural production that, to a large extent, has figured the body as a space of contention, particularly regarding national and personal identity. This course will look at the way the body has been represented in Spanish cultural production of the past twenty-nine years and the way these representations (re)produce discourses on identity, politics, and social plight. Moving from the destape of the national body to the exoticized immigrant, we will consider the ways that writers and filmmakers have constructed a gendered, sexed, victimized, and/or politicized body in order to tell stories about transformations in national and personal identity. Alternately celebrating and mourning its fate, these writers and directors engage the body in ways that have left an indelible mark on contemporary Spanish culture both within and beyond the country’s bounds.
Some of the issues we will discuss are notions of gender and sexuality, eroticism, queer identities, illness and pain, hauntology, cultural and personal memory, exile and migrations, constructions of the family, and the relationship between voice and power.
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