Today. August still.
Class starts tomorrow.
End of summer. Fall
Begins.
And I am teaching two undergraduate courses on different, yet deeply interconnected topics.
And I feel fortunate because I get to experience the connection firsthand, make the connection happen.
At 9:30 am, UC Berkeley students and I will be exploring the broad cultural production of the Spanish transition to democracy after the death of dictator Francisco Franco in 1975. Apart from reading now canonized works like El cuarto de atrás by Carmen Martín Gaite, we will be watching Zulueta’s Arrebato and reading Leopoldo María Panero’s 1970-1985 poetry. We’ll listen to Kaka de Luxe and we will compare Haro Ibar’s poetry to García Montero’s Diario cómplice, among many other texts, music, and films. I can’t believe I actually get to listen to Glutamato Ye-Yé and call it work (which it is, and hard work, also).
In the afternoon, history advances. I am teaching a course on Spanish technoculture, focusing on the impact of the digital revolution in Spanish literature. This is an adaptation from a graduate seminar I taught last semester, where we read work done by Agustín Fernández Mallo, Jorge Carrión, Javier Fernández and Vicente Luis Mora. This undergraduate class, however, won’t focus only on the so called Mutante writers, but moves beyond print to look at born-digital electronic literature. Since talking about Spain in the Web seems unnecessarily reductionist (if not virtually impossible, and pretty much unfruitful) we’ll be looking at a range of pieces created by writers and artists from Argentina, Perú, Venezuela… and evidently Spain (because I am a Peninsularist after all).
Summer ends.
Y hay un hombre en mi nevera.
A
