| New World Baroque/Neobaroque: Transamerican Fictions of Modernity and Counterconquest (w/CLit 535A) | Kaup | TTh 9:30-11:20 |
This course traces the recent resuscitation of the Baroque by modern and postmodern intellectuals from across the American hemisphere (mainly Latin American, Quebecois, and Caribbean) as a model by which to establish modern and autonomous cultural identities apart from colonizing forms. The twentieth-century return to the Baroque is both a European and a transamerican phenomenon, a recovery begun in the groundbreaking art historical studies of Heinrich Woelfflin and extending (to name only a few landmark theoretical studies) via Walter Benjamin, Erwin Panofsky, Eugenio d’Ors, Mariano Picón-Salas, José Lezama Lima, Umberto Eco, Michel Foucault, Severo Sarduy, Alejo Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz, Gilles Deleuze, Omar Calabrese, Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Irlemar Chiampi, Edouard Glissant, Haroldo do Campos.
What is at stake in the modern and postmodern resuscitation of the Baroque? For one thing, the recovery of the Baroque is linked to the crisis of the Enlightenment and instrumental reason. The 20th-century crisis of Enlightenment rationality opens the way for the rediscovery of an earlier, alternate rationality and mode of thought (Baroque reason) that had been repressed and vilified as an aberration beginning in the 18th century and continuing through the 19th. In the first decades of the 20th century, both European and American theorists and writers rediscover the modernity of the Baroque, that is, the Baroque as the first response, both in Europe and the Americas, to the epistemological and religious crises of the Scientific Revolution and the Reformation. In the wake of the 20th-century crisis of metanarratives, the Baroque, stigmatized by the positivist faith in technological and social progress, newly appears to offer a viable alternative.
In the Americas, meanwhile, the recuperation of the Baroque has had a very different impact. Latin America, where the Enlightenment never really took root and where the discourse of modernity has remained an alien imposition, adapted the Baroque of the Spanish dominion to local purposes, using indigenous artisans and material in ways that produced the idiosyncratic structures and styles now known as the New World Baroque. Building upon the pioneering work of colonial historians of the 1940s (Picón-Salas, Henriquez Ureña) and inspired by cultural nationalism, Latin American intellectuals (Cubans Alejo Carpentier and José Lezama Lima, Mexicans Octavio Paz and Gonzalo Celorio, Brazilians Haroldo do Campos and Irlemar Chiampi) have turned the Baroque into an instrument of contraconquista (counterconquest), a decolonizing form distinct from European influences and an expression of Am(é)rican cultural autonomy. Their position is that the European Baroque was transformed into the American Baroque, a transculturated, syncretic New World Baroque—product of the confluence of Hispanic and pre-Columbian cultures, mixing (however unequally) during the peaceful 17th century, and into the 18th, in Spain’s viceroyalties in the New World. This period saw the emergence of creole and mestizo lifestyles and cultural expressions after the initial phase of conquest and colonization. Thus, Cuban novelist and theorist Alejo Carpentier writes, “The American Baroque develops along with . . . the awareness of being Other, of being new, of being symbiotic, of being a criollo; and the criollo spirit is itself a Baroque spirit.”
This course will turn on the two dimensions of the Neobaroque discussed above—the Baroque’s 20th-century recuperation because of a) its alternate, pre-Enlightenment modernity and b) its decolonizing hybridity. We will discuss key cultural theories as well as literary texts, films, and art and architecture.
One specific goal of the course is to demonstrate the ex-centricity of modernism and postmodernism in Latin America, and strike up new conversations with these formations in the U.S. The Baroque has a long and complicated history in Latin America that modern and postmodern discourse does not, and to engage the latter in relation to the former allows the critic to approach transamerican cultural exchanges in an appropriate way. Reading for north-south connections in the literatures of the Americas will allow us to uncover Neobaroque variations within Anglo American modernism, specifically in the work of Djuna Barnes and William Faulkner. As Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes put it in defense of “Dixie Gongorist” William Faulkner: “The Baroque . . . is the language of peoples, who, not knowing the truth, seek it fervently. . . . The Baroque, language of abundance, is also the language of insufficiency: only those who possess nothing can include everything.”
Texts:
There will also be a Course Packet.
