Pavel Andrade, Ph.D.

Description

This seminar studies the Mexican novel in its encounters with global capitalism and neoliberalization. Focusing on two corpora of contemporary Mexican literature, Onda and Crack, we will examine the capabilities of the novel form to periodize transition, crisis, unevenness, scarcity, and adjustment. We will consider how, in the aftermath of 1968, Onda and Crack novels offer two different formal solutions to the problem posed by the foreclosure of national development and the advent of globalization. What does the formal tension between realist and modernist elements in these novels tell us about their uniquely peripheral instantiation of world-systemic processes? How do these novels scale the relational structures of global capitalism? How do the formal patterns of the Mexican novel make capitalism’s uneven and combined development available for conceptualization?

Required Novels

• Gustavo Sainz, Gazapo
• Margarita Dalton, Larga sinfonía en D y había una vez…
• María Luisa Puga, Las posibilidades del odio
• José Agustín, Ciudades desiertas
• Pedro Ángel Palou, Memoria de los días
• Jorge Volpi, El temperamento melancólico
• Ricardo Chávez Castañeda, El día del hurón

Course Guidelines and Grading

Annotated reading, participation, and discussion facilitation (20%). This is an intensive seminar that centers collective reflection and formalist methods. Careful, annotated reading of class materials and active seminar participation are crucial for your success in this course. As you work through the readings, flag passages that you think deserve a closer look or that you would like to introduce for collective examination. What makes a particular passage exciting, intriguing, or perplexing? What ideas, concepts, or arguments deserve to be celebrated, reflected upon, or further interrogated? We will begin each session with these questions, constructing a common ground for our conversation. Throughout the semester, each student will lead a seminar discussion on a critical text of their choosing.

Seminar recaps (10%). At the beginning of each session, a participant will rehearse for the class the main themes, questions, and topics that guided the previous session’s discussion. What were the key points of agreement and/or contention? Are there any connections between previous and current reading materials? Are there any loose ends worth discussing alongside the new set of readings?

Weekly post-seminar reflections (20%). Reflection begins post festum. Write a short reflection about your engagement with the week’s reading materials and seminar discussion. Focus on an idea, problem, or theoretical proposition that sparked your interest or invited you to think about a literary or cultural phenomenon under a new light. Keep your notes handy as you write. Paraphrase, comment, argue, experiment. Reflections are meant to help you order and clarify your thoughts. 500-words max. Due on Fridays by 5pm.

Close reading presentation (20%). Oral presentation (15-20min) based on 3-5 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.

Seminar paper (30%). 12-15 page essay on a topic of your choosing related to the purview of the course. This can be a critical 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 proposition. You should consult with me before October 10 about your topic and plan for work. You should submit a 500-word abstract and a tentative bibliography by October 31. Seminar paper due on December 12.

Reading Calendar

Aug. 29: Introduction: Latin American Literary Criticism
Jean Franco, “El ocaso de la Vanguardia y el auge de la crítica”
Beatriz Sarlo, “Cultural Studies and Literary Criticism at the Crossroads of Values”
Graciela Montaldo, “Latin American Literature and Criticism in the Global Market”

Sept. 5: Preliminaries I: Method
Fredric Jameson, “On Interpretation: Literature as a Socially Symbolic Act”
Raymond Williams, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory” and “Structures of Feeling”
Anna Kornbluh, “Totality”

Sept. 12: Preliminaries II: Modernity
Marshal Berman, “Modernity—Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow”
Perry Anderson, “Modernity and Revolution”
Elizabeth Anker, “All That Is Solid Melts into Paradox: The Idea of Modernity”

Sept. 19: Onda I
Gustavo Sainz, Gazapo
Margo Glantz, “Onda y escritura en México: jóvenes de 20 a 33” & “La onda diez años después: ¿Epitafio o revalorización?”

Sept. 26: México 1968
Susana Draper. “The Philosophical and Literary Configuration of 68’: José Revueltas on Cognitive Democracy and Self-Management”
Eric Zolov, “La Onda: Mexico’s Counterculture and the Student Movement of 1968”
Brian Price, “Del rock a la palabra. La música popular y la literatura mexicana”
Louise E. Walker, “The Middle Classes and the Crisis of the Institutional Revolution”

Oct. 3: Onda II
Margarita Dalton, Larga sinfonía en D y había una vez…
Elena Poniatowska, “La literatura de la Onda”
Carlos Monsiváis, “La naturaleza de la Onda”

Oct. 10: Beyond La Onda I
María Luisa Puga, Las posibilidades del odio (Cap. 1-4)
Jean Franco, “From Modernization to Resistance: Latin American Literature 1959-1976”

Oct. 17: Beyond La Onda II
María Luisa Puga, Las posibilidades del odio
Irma López, “Las posibilidades del odio: El doble perfil de un texto narrativo”

Oct. 24: Onda III
José Agustín, Ciudades desiertas
José Agustín, “La Onda que nunca existió”
Mabel Moraña, “Habitar/Pensar el límite”

Oct. 31: Interlude (Modernity Redux)
Fredric Jameson, “The Four Maxims of Modernity”
Neil Davidson, “Uneven and Combined Development: Between Capitalist Modernity and Modernism”
WReC, “World-Literature in the Context of Combined and Uneven Development”

Nov. 7: Crack I
Pedro Ángel Palou, Memoria de los días (Cap. I-II)
Palou et al., “Manifesto del Crack” (1996)
Tomás Regalado López, “The Crack: Generational Strategies in Mexico at the Turn of the Century”

Nov. 14: Crack II
Pedro Ángel Palou, Memoria de los días
Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, “The Crack Group: Cosmopolitanism contra the Magical Realist Imperative”

Nov. 21: Crack III
Jorge Volpi, El temperamento melancólico (Libros I-V)
Mathias Nilges, “The Cultural Regulation of Neoliberal Capitalism”
Ramón Alvarado Ruiz, “The Crack Movement’s Literary Cartography”

Nov. 28: Crack IV
Jorge Volpi, El temperamento melancólico
Eloy Urroz, “El temperamento melancólico de Jorge Volpi: Una novela Narciso”

Dec. 5: Crack V
Ricardo Chávez Castañeda, El día del hurón
Tomás Regalado López, “A Tale of Three Cities: Urban Space in the Crack Novels (1995-1997)”