CLITR 1150 FYS - Who Am I? Transgression in the First-Person Singular
This is a First Year Seminar course about identity and transgression. We will study narratives, art, and cinema from Spain and Latin America that speak in the first person singular and reveal disobedient individualities. We will embark in a journey that will take us to early modern Spain, 20th- century Latin America and contemporary United States. We will become witnesses of the transgression committed by several characters, such as a sixteenth-century picaresque Spaniard (Lazarillo de Tormes), a seventeenth-century Basque cross-dresser (Catalina de Erauso), a Latin American twentieth-century revolutionary (Ernesto Che Guevara), and a contemporary Latino writer in the United States (Richard Rodríguez), among others. These stories provide the foundation for this course: a journey of transgression, an exploration of how language can reveal and conceal, and a reflection of the complexities of transgressive identities. Through these characters' "I"s, we will explore the contexts of their existence. Note: Seminar held in English.