Houston, TX 77002-1001
The stigma of violence in Latin American foundational fictions is well understood. From the Crónicas de la conquista to the representation of excess in national politics, be it the banana strikers’ massacre in One Hundred Years of Solitude or the cycle of vengeance in La Fiesta del Chivo, violence underscores fiction’s capacity to “protest against the insufficiencies of life”, as Vargas Llosa proposed in his Nobel lecture. In recent decades however, a subjective sensibility towards violence has taken hold. Narrative, film, and music depicting a first-person perspective on violence has emerged, replacing the communal, shared experience of national literatures. The trauma of postmodernity, as seen through the eyes of the ultra-violent realismo sucio or the repression of violence characteristic of impressionistic poetic prose are signs of a preoccupation with epistemological themes where, as Suzanne Ferguson puts it, “all received knowledge becomes suspect”.
This seminar seeks to explore the shift in the depiction of violence within the Latin American context in order to explain how recent literature, cinema, music, and visual arts are portraying violence unique or distinct to the postmodern mind. Why is current fiction characterized by the prolific depiction of abnormal pathologies: mass murderers, suicides, domestic violence, infanticide, schizophrenia, sexual aberration, etc.? How do the structures of power, identity, and memory change when the focus is on individual violence rather than group experience? Is poetic prose used as a silent act of violence against collective memory? Papers in Spanish and English dealing with all forms of violence in any media particular to the postmodern Latin American experience are welcome. Of particular interest will be those papers interested in the intersection between Latin America and narratives produced in other languages relating to the subject of violence.