Courses

Prerequisites: reading knowledge of Spanish Reading knowledge of Spanish is required. By conceiving authoritarianism as a historically produced–and therefore historically changing–notion, we will travel across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to examine how phenomena associated with different forms of political domination were understood in their time and how they are understood today. Nation-building processes, class and gender conflicts, cultural politics, and the examination of past and current political and social movements will be the center of our discussion. Several questions will be raised (and hopefully answered) along this journey: How can we understand the specificity of Spanish forms of authoritarianism in the Euro-Atlantic scenario? How can we explain the reappearance of extreme right-wing populisms? How have transnational forces influenced old and new authoritarian dynamics? To address these issues, we will read essays, short stories, graphic novels, as well as theoretical texts that offer varied approaches to history, aesthetics, and politics. The works by writers Juan Marsé, Sara Mesa, Isaac Rosa, Carmen Martín Gaite, film-makers like Edgar Neville, José Luis Sáenz de Heredia, Carlos Saura or philosophers such as Benjamin, Adorno, Schmitt, Villacañas or Rodríguez Palop will be some of the materials from which to study the cultural logics of Spanish authoritarianism in a Global Age.