Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Note: Graduate students only

This course provides a foray into theoretically informed work in the humanities, with a focus on key questions and debates that have shaped humanistic reflection on the ways in which we understand and move about in our world. The course does not pretend to be a survey providing comprehensive coverage of the intellectual traditions and methodologies associated with doing theory in the humanities. The primary goal, instead, is to explore how what we call “theory” is in fact the name for an unresolved torsion: between theory understood as knowledge production and theory understood as inquiry into where and how structures designed to produce and secure meaning and order sometimes do not work as intended. In his famous essay “The Resistance to Theory,” Paul de Man enigmatically asserts that “nothing can overcome the resistance to theory since theory is itself this resistance.” The guiding double hypothesis for this course is that theory and resistance cohabitate, so to speak, albeit without ever coming together to form a unity or a stable ground. Unlike philosophy, which understands its task as that of generating systematic forms of knowledge, theory concerns itself with the inconsistencies, knots, and lacunae that inhabit thinking while resisting assimilation within the logic of any system.  

We will read selections from variety of traditions including Continental philosophy, Marxism and post-Marxism, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, feminism, subaltern/postcolonial studies, queer studies, and deconstruction. At the same time, we will explore some literary works from the Latin American tradition in which there may be some interplay or tension between literariness and theoretical inquiry. We will use works by César Vallejo, Rubén Darío, Delmira Agustini, Alejandra Pizarnik, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Germán Rozenmacher, and Luisa Valenzuela as starting points for thinking about how what we call “theory” seems to designate an unstable intermediate space between philosophical systematicity and literary language.

Discussions will be organized in seminar format, with each student responsible for presenting or leading class discussion on a topic to be chosen in consultation with me. While the course will be officially conducted in English, participants are welcome to intervene in whatever language they feel most at ease. Students will write a short response paper and a longer final research paper.

HISP-S 512     #13490     3:55P-6:25P       M      AD 151     Prof. Patrick Dove