SPAN 323 Space and Place, City and Nature in the Hispanic Imagination

This course focuses on how debates about space and place, cities, and nature serve as forums of contemplation and contestation of the political, historical, geographic, and literary foundations of Hispanic imaginaries. Authors have found in natural and urban landscapes a suggestive literary locus of unrest and ambiguity to problematize and disrupt the physical, metaphysical, and ontological symbolic value ascribed to them by predecessors. Writers adopt these changing representations in order to point to paradoxes and contradictions in notions of the colonial, the imperial, the national, the local, and the global. We will dedicate part of the course to contemporary reconsiderations of the relationship between urban life and the natural world taking place in Latin America, and conduct engaged research on civic engagement through literature, art, and philosophy, as expressed in Cartonera publishing in Memphis.