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Prerequisites: senior status.

The course focuses on the cultural representation of cities in contemporary Hispanic American literature, essays, visual texts, and films. The problem of “modernity” and “postmodernity” in a peripheral culture and its relationships with public spaces is at the core of all the texts. The main hypothesis will be that urban narratives articulate new experiences during periods of change. Students will be introduced to theoretical writing that reflects on urbanism and space, modern and postmodern thought, and contemporary Hispanic American contexts. We will focus on the representation of urban spaces in literary and visual texts, films, and essays from Spain, Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela. Students will become familiar with major problems and significant political, social and cultural trends in the contemporary Hispanic American world including topics such as elite culture vs. popular culture, practices of resistance, the representation of violence, and Otherness.