Course Offerings for the 2024 Graduate Summer Program at Universidad de Belgrano
BORGES AND CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL THOUGHT (TAUGHT IN ENGLISH)
Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was a terribly sophisticated fiction writer who had a long and ambivalent relationship to Argentine and Latin American politics. Although he was not, strictly speaking, a “political” writer, his texts nonetheless constantly engaged in the interrogation of our shared, political worlds. The course will thus proceed to read Borges' fiction and non-fiction writing by paying attention to the implicit and explicit allusions to “the political” as such. Three twentieth century political theorists will be central to the course discussion: Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, and Claude Lefort. They are known as the “thinkers of the political.” Intertwined with a close reading of Borges' work, we will thus explore the theoretical implications of his political interrogation of the questions of the same and the Other (in dialogue with Schmitt,) the imaginary and the real (in dialogue with Arendt,) and chaos and cosmos (in dialogue with Lefort.) Dr. Martín Plot is Research Professor of Political Theory at the Institute of Advanced Social Studies (IDAES/UNSAM—CONICET.) He was the founding director of the MA Aesthetics and Politics Program at the School of Critical Studies, California Institute of the Arts (USA) and also taught at Columbia University, the New School, and NYU. He is the author, among other books, of The Aesthetico-Political (2014,) Indivisible (2011) and has recently edited Critical Theory and Democracy (2012, with Enrique Peruzzotti,) and Claude Lefort: Thinker of the Political (2013.) His current research focuses on two major subjects: on the one hand, the study of political regimes as horizons for the configuration of collective life; and, on the other hand (under a broader research umbrella that poses the question “what is political art?”) on Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges’ work and its relationships to twentieth-century political thought.
US Credits: 6/8
ECTS Credits: 12/16
Class Hours: 60
Category: Course taught in English
ESCENARIOS CONTEMPORÁNEOS DE AMÉRICA LATINA: LITERATURA, ARTES VISUALES Y FORMAS DE VIDA
This course examines contemporary culture focusing on Agamben´s notion of forms-of-life and lifestyles. In recent years, the cultural studies are paying special attention to the relationship between the symbolic production and the biopolitical dimension of “life”, which will be considered as an individual and collective biological substance intervened by symbolic languages. Art also poses questions in the form of narrations (e.g. literature, short stories, poems, films and other visual art forms) that this course will consider. The course proposes to avoid a sociological perspective of the work of art and try instead to think in which way contemporary Latino American art critiques life, and at the same time is nurtured by it. Life will be considered as an individual and collective biological substance intervened by symbolic languages. The corpus of texts include novels, films, works of art, short stories, poems by Argentine, Brazilian, Chilean, Mexican, Peruvian, Cuban and Colombian authors such as Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, Patricio Guzmán, Antonio José Ponte, Mario Bellatín, Oscar Muñoz, José Watanabe, Eduardo Coutinho, Fernanda Laguna and Alejandro Zambra. Álvaro Fernández Bravo BA in XX, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, Fecha MA and PhD in Romance Languages, Princeton University. Fecha and Fecha Álvaro Fernández Bravo is a researcher at the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) and teaches graduate courses at the University of San Andrés, Argentina. He was a CAPES posdoctoral fellow at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil. He has taught at Temple University, the University of Buenos Aires, the National University of Rosario, the National University of Mar del Plata, the National University of Salta and the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio). Between 2008 and 2013, he was Director of New York University Buenos Aires. He writes on cultural patrimony, literary theory, and Latin American contemporary film. His book O museu vazio: acumulação primitiva, patrimônio cultural e identidades coletivas, Argentina e Brasil, 1880-1945 will be published by EdUERJ (the University Press of the State University of Rio de Janeiro) in 2015.
US Credits: 6/8
ECTS Credits: 12/16
Class Hours: 60
Category: Course taught in Spanish