Latin American and Iberian Cultures
Graduate Seminar
M 2-4PM
Speculation is an extremely ambivalent concept. A term that derives from the Latin word speculum (mirror), speculation means both to reflect an empirical fact and to conjecture about a reality hidden behind experience without any evidence. For instance, speculative fiction engages in the literary invention of a world beyond our everyday experience in an alternate future. In Latin America, speculative fiction appears to be an umbrella term that commits to the creation of fictions that imagine alternate realities, blurring the distance between fictionalization and philosophical speculation in hybrid genres such as fantastic literature, climate-fiction, cyberpunk, horror, steampunk, and science fiction. The literature we will read in this course dwells extensively on emotions such as creeping dread and inevitable doom provoked by the intrusion of outside forces. Both speculative fiction and speculative finance converge on the reliance of images and abstractions separated from material realities. While speculative fiction attempts to dismantle the dualisms of nature and culture (which, according to the proponents of the world-ecology project are the cause of capitalism and the ecological crisis), it also serves as allegories of a vampiric capital: the Thing.
Link to Vergil
Note: only courses offered during the two previous semesters have active Vergil links.