Pavel Andrade, Ph.D.

Course Description

In this seminar we will study the Mexican novel through the analytical convergence of literary formalism, aesthetic theory, and geocriticism. We will consider how the spatial imagination of the Mexican novel bespeaks the changing motions of sociality from the 1960s to the present. From style, composition, and plot to cognitive mapping, uneven development, and world-systems theory, we ask what the formal and spatial aggregations of the novel allow us to conceptualize about Mexico’s socioeconomic displacements in an era marked by privatization, financialization, international forced migration, and ecological devastation.

Required Novels

• Fernando del Paso, José Trigo
• María Luisa Puga, Cuando el aire es azul
• Daniel Sada, Albedrío
• Cristina Rivera Garza, Nadie me verá llorar
• Juan Villoro, Arrecife
• Fernanda Melchor, Falsa liebre
• Nicolás Cabral, Catálogo de formas

Requirements

• Careful, annotated reading of class materials and active seminar participation, including discussion facilitation focused on critical texts and informal summaries of class discussion (30%)
• Close reading presentation (20%)
• Written work (50%)

Guidelines

Reading Preparation and Participation: This is an intensive seminar that centers collective reflection and formalist methods. Participants are expected to read all required texts thoroughly in order to contribute actively to class discussion. You should come to class having flagged passages that you think deserve a closer look and that you would like to introduce for collective examination. Please make sure to take notes as you work through the readings, especially in those instances where the prose turns out to be particularly challenging or opaque.

Discussion Facilitation: Each student will lead discussion twice focusing on at least one of the critical texts assigned for a given session. When facilitating discussion, you should: a) present a succinct summary of the text’s argument; b) select a passage or two that you find to be relevant and flesh out its analytical implications; c) try to establish connections with past discussions and, especially, with the last session’s discussion summary; d) offer 3-4 questions for further discussion.

Discussion Summary: At the beginning of each session, a participant will rehearse for the class the main themes, questions, and topics discussed during the previous session.

Close Reading Presentation: Oral presentation (15-20min) based on 3-4 pages of writing from one of the required novels. Close readings should foreground formal elements (rhythm, style, plot, characterization, focalization, etc.) and strive to reflect on their implications for the overall aesthetic effect of the novel in question. This need not be a traditional oral presentation; you are encouraged to take whatever pedagogical approach best fits your interests and/or scholarly motivations.

Written Work: Each student can choose one of two tracks:

Track 1. Article-length paper: 7000-9000 word paper on a topic of your choice related to the purview of the course. This can be a formalist approximation to a narrative problem; an in-depth exploration of a particular concept or category; or a close reading of a primary text that elicits a theoretical formulation. If you choose this option, you should consult with me before October 13 about your topic and plan for work. You should submit an abstract (500 words) of your paper and a bibliography by November 3. Due on December 15.

Track 2. Completion of two shorter assignments:

• Review essay: 3500-4000 word review essay of 2-4 monographs related to the topics of this course, written in the style of the Latin American Research Review book review essay. Books should be chosen in consultation with the instructor. Due December 15.
• Annotated bibliography of 20-25 items (essays or books) on a theoretical or critical topic pertaining to your own scholarly interests. No more than 5 items can be drawn from those included in the course syllabus, no primary sources allowed. Entries for each item should be 150-250 words in length. Due December 1.

Reading Calendar

Thurs. Aug. 25: Introduction
bell hooks, “Theory as Liberatory Practice”
Raymond Williams, “The Analysis of Culture”
Anna Kornbluh, “We Have Never Been Critical: Toward the Novel as Critique”

Thurs. Sept. 1: Novel Forms
Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, “Realism and the Novel Form”
Georg Lukács, Theory of the Novel, “The Epic and the Novel” and “The Inner Form of the Novel”
Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics, “Poetics of the Novel”
David Cunningham, “Capitalist Epics”

Thurs. Sept. 8: Modernism and the Novel
Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction”
Deborah Parsons, “A New Realism”
Carlos Blanco Aguinaga, “On Modernism from the Periphery”
Noé Jitrik, “Destrucción y formas en las narraciones”
Carlos Fuentes, La nueva novela hispanoamericana (Excerpt)

Thurs. Sept. 15: Ordering the Nation
Fernando del Paso, José Trigo (Part I)
Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many, “Introduction: Characterization and Distribution”
Jean Franco, “From Modernization to Resistance: Latin American Literature 1959-1976”
Neil Larsen, Reading North by South, “Culture and Nation”

Thurs. Sept. 22: National Forms
Fernando del Paso, José Trigo (Part 2)
Robin W. Fiddian, The Novels of Fernando del Paso, “José Trigo: A Novel of Hybridity and Regeneration”
Ryan F. Long, Fictions of Totality, “Animating the Popular: Fernando del Paso’s José Trigo and the Ruins of Totalizing Thought”

Thurs. Sept. 29: Form and Ideology
Georg Lukács, Writer & Critic and Other Essays, “Preface” & “Art and Objective Truth”
Theodor W. Adorno, “Art, Society, Aesthetics”
Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, “Towards Dialectical Criticism”
Andrew Cole, “The Dialectic of Space: An Untimely Proposal”

Thurs. Oct. 6: Worldmaking
María Luisa Puga, Cuando el aire es azul
Dora Zhang, Strange Likeness, “That Ugly, That Clumsy, That Incongruous Tool” & “Toward a Theory of Description”
Irma M. López, “Utopía e historia en Cuando el aire es azul”

Thurs. Oct. 13: Novel Spaces
Fredric Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping”
Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature” and “More Conjectures”
Pascale Casanova, “Literature as World”
Warwick Research Collective, Combined and Uneven Development, “World-Literature in the Context of Combined and Uneven Development”
Robert Tally Jr. Topophrenia: Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination, “The Space of the Novel”

Thurs. Oct. 20: Novel Hybrids
Daniel Sada, Albedrío
Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, “Discourse in the Novel” (Excerpt)
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, “1227: Treatise on Nomadology—The War Machine”

Thurs. Oct. 27: Formalism Anew
Caroline Levine, Forms, “Introduction: The Affordances of Form” and “Whole”
Anna Kornbluh, The Order of Forms, “Introduction”
Susan J. Wolfson, “Reading for Form”
Ellen Rooney, “Form and Contentment”

Thurs. Nov. 3: Of Other Spaces
Cristina Rivera Garza, Nadie me verá llorar
Laura Kanost, “Pasillos sin luz: Reading the Asylum in Nadie me verá llorar by Cristina Rivera Garza”
Michel Foucault, “Madness, The Absence of an Œuvre” & “Of Other Spaces”

Thurs. Nov. 10: Novel Ecologies
Juan Villoro, Arrecife
Sharae Deckard, “Capitalism’s Long Spiral: Periodicity, Temporality and the Global Contemporary in World Literature”
Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, “Introduction”
Donna J. Haraway, “Staying with the Trouble: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene”

Thurs. Nov. 17: Postdemocratic Forms
Fernanda Melchor, Falsa liebre
Rachel Greenwald Smith, “The Contemporary Novel and Postdemocratic Form”
Jed Esty and Colleen Lye, “Peripheral Realisms Now”
Oswaldo Zavala, “Imagining the US-Mexico Drug War: The Critical Limits of Narconarratives”

Thurs. Dec. 1: Formal Catalogues
Nicolás Cabral, Catálogo de formas
Eugenio Di Stefano and Emilio Sauri, “La furia de la materia: On the Non-Contemporaneity of Modernism in Latin America”