Great Cities in Literature, Film and Culture

Courses offered by SFIP Faculty:

Fall 2005

Span 594 – Fall 05 : Prof. Margarita Saona
Special Topics in Hispanic Studies: Identity and Modernity in Latin America

From the 19th century on, Latin American intellectuals have expressed anxiety over modernization processes and their impact on the configuration of national or continental identities. The rapid growth of cities like Buenos Aires, Mexico, Lima, and Santiago, during the early decades of the 20th century was instrumental in the way Latin Americans understood their relationship with modernity. Whether they consider the effect of industrialization on agrarian societies or the uncertain role of the traditional intellectual in a postmodern “mediascape,” Latin American writers seem haunted by what Carlos Fuentes called a “cultural lag.” Readings (in Spanish and in translation) include essays by Sarmiento,Martí, Mariátegui, Octavio Paz, Angel Rama, García Canclini, and Beatriz Sarlo.

Spring 2006

French 464 : Prof. Ellen McClure
Exchange Before Orientalism: Europe and its Others (1500-1800) – Offered at the Newberry Library (application and approval of instructor required)
 

As Americans, we often think first of Europe-New World encounters when we think of the age of exploration. Yet this period also saw incredibly complex interactions between Europe and the East. In this course, we (myself and Laura Hostetler, History UIC) will explore the interaction of Europe and the sophisticated cultures of the East through a variety of sources, examining exchange BEFORE European economic and technological advantages set the scene for turning such encounters into expressions of unequal power relations.

El mundo novelistico de Alejo Carpentier: Apuntes para un centenario
Prof. Klaus Muller-Bergh

A portion of Span 530 (El mundo novelistico de Alejo Carpentier: Apuntes para un centenario ) is devoted to questions of urbanism through a careful discussion of Carpentier's La ciudad de las columnas. This book, Carpentier's long essay of Havana, illustrated with the extraordinary photographs of Paolo Gasparini, is a treatise on “urbanism, city planers, the science of urbanization [and a] vision of urbanism." It is also an affective essay on the capital of Cuba as an unique arquitectonic, mythic and foundational space in the Caribbean, a major port [as well as ] one of the great urban centers of Latin America. Additionally, the book is also a celebration of that “place a l ' imagination -- the mental blueprint of the author's creative imagination. Finally, La ciudad de las columnas, the city of pillars/the city of ornamental columns, is the ground where Carpentier articulates “the recurring constants of a broad outline that sets Havana apart from other great cities of the continent”.

Theorizing Indigenous Knowledge in Colonial Mexico: Pictorial Nahua Documents
Course offered at Newberry Library (application and approval of instructor required)
Cristián Roa-De-La-Carrera
Ellen T. Baird

Fridays, 1:00-4:00 p.m., Newberry Library

This seminar will focus on the richness and vigor of indigenous creativity and intellectual production in the colonial period with a particular emphasis on pictorial documents. We will examine forms of continuity, adaptation, and transformation of indigenous Nahua culture (the Aztecs' colonial descendants) through the continued use of Aztec symbolic forms and the introduction of the alphabetic writing of Nahuatl. New thriving forms of indigenous cultural production develop in the context of a changing relationship between urban landscape and sources of social power in Mexico, best exemplified in the leveling and reconstruction of Tenochtitlan and the destruction of indigenous ceremonial centers. Thus writing as social practice among colonial Nahuas signals a new experience of the page that goes hand in hand with the emergence of new sites where social and political power will be inscribed and contested. We will study these reconfigurations of indigenous culture through original manuscripts, books, documents, and maps from the Newberry Library's acclaimed collection of colonial Mexican materials and secondary readings.