Courses

According to Susan Buck-Morss, the dream of the twentieth century was the construction of mass utopia. Dreamworlds of modernization—mass sovereignty, mass production, mass culture—were accompanied by catastrophes in the form of nationalist world wars and terror, the exploitation of labor and the natural environment, and anesthetizing mass culture phantasmagorias.  Since the second half of the 20th century, the implementation of the great neoliberal utopia has led to the destruction of the collective institutions capable of counteracting the effects of the logics of dispossession that exploit both human labor and natural environments. As a result, recent debates have discussed the problematics of end-of-history narratives and the decline of utopias as forms of political and aesthetic imagination, and reflections around the notion of “capitalist realism” and the “slow cancellation of the future” (Fisher) have also addressed the growing difficulty of imagining a future beyond the reality of capitalism. At the same time, new proposals emerge to rethink new historical sequences of the notion of dreamworld as both a poetic description of a collective mental state and an analytical concept.

The discussions over political and aesthetic imagination, aesthetic and political avant-gardes, the questioning of the myths of progress and development, and the social and political uses of memory, tradition, and nostalgia will be interrogated in our seminar from different historical vantage points. The course focuses on the historical continuities and discontinuities of the cultural and material logics of dreamworlds and catastrophes in Modern and Contemporary Spain throughout literature, essays, visual texts, comics, and social and cultural practices.