Spanish 397MA - ST-Madness in Literature

This course reflects on the relationship between literature, madness, and medicine in the literatures of Spain and Latin America (Brazil and Argentina). Through the interplay between madness and its medical treatment, literature has given voice to marginalized groups and deconstructed dialectical dimensions of society (sanity vs. insanity, the real vs. the unreal). Also, due to some literary works put in evidence different modes of representation of reality, they allow us to deeply comprehend mad men and women as subjects of alterity, which, in turn, redefines rationality. Analyzing madness through both a close and a comparative readings of the literatures produced in Brazil, Argentina, and Spain students will grasp how each literature has represented mental illness as a means for the comprehension of the human condition. By the end of the course, students will be able to conceptualize and identify specific paradigms of madness in Spanish and Latin American short stories, and how the predominance of mental illness in them reinstates other dimensions of reality meant to occupy a space where they originally not expected. The class will be conducted in Spanish.