RLSP 238
The Textual City Spring 2014
Division I Writing Skills
This is not the current course catalog

This course will chart the development of identity within the postcolonial Latin American city, focusing on (though by no means limited to) Buenos Aires as a touchstone case. The latter will be read both literally and as a guiding metaphor, as a reality ordered by ideas. We will use interdisciplinary theoretical models as discursive markers, selected from history, architecture, politics, philosophy, literature, and photography, in order to problematize urban design, the site of real dystopia, as the organizer of symbolic space, and vice versa. Spatio-cultural discussion will focus on the dominant narratives of public topography, most notably that of capitalism, and private, individualized responses to them, not least in the work of Carriego, Girondo, Borges, Arlt, Cortázar, Walsh, Sebreli, Piglia and Schweblin. Conducted in Spanish, with some secondary / tertiary reading in English