Argentine History and Literature

Abstract

Course Description "All stories are fictions", wrote Hayden White, insisting in the fact that history is as much about how these stories are told as what is the material ground in which they are produced. Following this trend, this course seeks to problematize the complex relationship --be it sometimes a dialogue, some other times contested debates that could go well beyond rhetoric into bloodshed--between history and literature. If literary texts could be considered cultural artifacts inscribed in and produced by a given socio historical horizon, we will aim at analyzing in depth the ways in which they represent, contest, silence or resist the fundamental political, social and cultural issues of their times. From the foundational moments of nation building to state terrorism and its painful aftermath; from thefounding fathers to the newest narratives, we will revisit major works by Sarmiento, Echeverría, Arlt, Borges, Walsh, etc. as well as films and documentaries that address the key moments of our historical conflicts and cultural imagination.