Senior Seminar in Comparative Literature

When James Joyce (citing Wilde) wrote that the “cracked lookingglass of a servant” was a symbol of Irish art, he pointed to a condition that was to mark culture throughout the colonial world.  In his meditations on cultural politics and the estheticizing dimensions of language that might answer metropolitan powers, Joyce supplied a rich field for future inquiry by Latin American writers; his legacy is most notably felt among intellectuals in Buenos Aires. This course will investigate those traditions that have taken liberally from James Joyce, transforming his texts in order to accommodate a peculiar Argentine literary sensibility for depicting the interrelationship between history and language, popular and high culture, and modernist and postmodern esthetics.  The center, of course, is the city. In this line, the literary representation of Dublin and Buenos Aires–with their multiple voices, popular subjects, and endlessly nomadic characters–will be the center of sustained comparison.

In this course, we will read /Ulysses/ (and a sections of Finnegans Wake) and then turn to several canonical Argentine texts, among them Borges’s Ficciones,  Ricardo Piglia’s La Ciudad Ausente, and Manuel Puig’s The Buenos Aires Affair. Two seminar papers, several class presentations, and a few brief writing assignments will be required.

Book List:

Borges, Jorge Luis. Ficciones. Buenos Aires: Emecé.

Joyce, James. Ulysses. New York: Random House-Vintage.

Piglia, Ricardo. La ciudad ausente. Buenos Aires: Planeta.

Puig, Manuel. The Buenos Aires Affair. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana.