SPAN798A

Literary histories bound to and for national definition are dynamic fields of contestation. For example, individual literary texts often exhibit formal and thematic traits that simultaneously underwrite and resist hegemonic discourse and practice. When scholars and critics incorporate individual texts into a national literary history, this tension between underwriting and resistance takes on even greater significance. This graduate seminar about Mexican literature considers the critical categories of stock stories and counterstories as a point of departure for advancing students understanding of how to consider literary texts in relation to politics. One of the seminars guiding questions is: to what extent is it viable to imagine and comprehend literature as something apart from territorialization. The seminars primary texts are selected from the 1920s to the present, and they correspond to several genres, including novel, chronicle, and testimonial.