Professor Kathleen Myers
email: myersk@indiana.edu

TR 2:30pm - 3:45pm/section #4370/3 cr./Ballantine Hall 141

Topics in Spanish American Literature
Topic: Sixteenth-Century Theories of Representation and Twentieth
Century Readings of the Chronicles

Columbus’s 1492 voyage and his letter about that voyage
initiated an era of Spanish exploration, conquest, and writing about
America.  As Europeans confronted a “new”continent, they variously
explored, tested, rejected, adapted, and altered contemporary
theories about language, historiography, and the representation of
nature and non-European peoples.  The focus of this course will be
reading contemporary theories about language, history, empire, myth,
human nature, and epistemology (Juan Luis Vives, Nebrija, López
Piciano, Cabrera, among others), and studying how those ideas are
reflected in the works of two key chroniclers: Spain’s first
chronicler of America, Fernández de Oviedo, and Spain’s “defender”of
native Americans, Bartolemé de las Casas.  In addition to reading
these primary sources, we will do extensive reading from theoretical
texts by Michel Foucault Homi Bhabha and others.  In particular, we
will examine the radical re-evaluation of these early narrative of
conquest in the 20th Century and how the methodologies used by
anthropologists, historians, and literary critics for an
interdisciplinary basis for studying sixteenth-century colonial
Spanish American discourse.