People
Patrick E. Dove | Faculty
Director of Graduate Studies
Associate Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Office: Ballantine Hall 874 / 849
TEL: 855-6136 / 855-6691
Email: pdove
Education
Ph.D., Comparative Literature, State University of New York at Binghamton, 2000
M.A., Philosophy, SUNY-Binghamton, 1996
B.A., Comparative Literature, University of Wisconsin, 1992
Specializations
- 20th Century Spanish American Narrative
- Political thought
- Continental Philosophy
- Psychoanalysis
- literary theory
Selected Publications
- The Catastrophe of Modernity: Tragedy and the Nation in Latin American Literature. Bucknell University Press, 2004
- “Contratiempo literario: geografías de la historia del presente en Boca de lobo.” In Sergio Chejfec: Trayectorias de una escritura, ed. Dianna Niebylski. Pittsburgh: International Institute of Iberoamerican Literature. Forthcoming, 2012.
- “Rewriting Tragedy: Singularity and Memory in Griselda Gambaro’s Antígona furiosa.” Special edition of Hispanic Issues, ed. Jennifer Duprey. Forthcoming, University of Minnesota Press, 2012-13.
- “Literary Futures: Crime Fiction, Global Capitalism and the History of the Present in Ricardo Piglia’s Blanco nocturno.” Special edition of A Contracorriente on “The Generation of 1972: Latin America’s Forced Global Citizens,” eds. Sophia McClennen and Brantley Nicholson. Forthcoming, 2012-13.
- “Postular las suposiciones: la razón, la acumulación originaria y el origen ausente de la historia del presente.” In Crítica de la acumulación: Acontecimiento, hegemonía, subalternidad y multitud: Las encrucijadas teóricas de América Latina, eds. Oscar Cabezas, Elixabete Ansa-Goicoechea and Alessandro Fornazzari. Santiago: Instituto Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Sociales, 2010.
- “The Night of the Senses: Literary (Dis)orders in Nocturno de Chile.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 2009.
- “Post-politics, Technics, Aesthetics: Literature and Mass Media in Contemporary Argentina.” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos XLIII: 1, 2009: 3-30.
- “Memory, Ethics and Politics in Post-dictatorship Argentina: La carta de Del Barco.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 17:3 (December 2008): 279-98.
- “Metaphor and Image in Borges’ ‘El Zahir’.” Romanic Review 98:2 (March-May 2007): 169-87.
- “Living Labour, History, and the Signifier: Bare Life and Sovereignty in Diamela Eltit’s Mano de obra.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 15:1 (March 2006): 77-91.
- “Narrativas de justicia y duelo: testimonio y literatura del terrorismo de Estado en el Cono Sur.” In Escrituras, imágenes, escenarios ante la represión, eds. Ana Longoni and Elizabeth Jelin. Siglo Veintiuno de España Editores, 2005.
- “Tonalities of Transition in the Southern Cone: The World of the End of the World, or Marcelo Cohen's El oído absoluto.” CR: The New Centennial Review, 4:2 (Fall 2004): 239-67.
Teaching
Graduate Courses (Spanish and Portuguese, Comparative Literature, CLACS)
- Literature and Disaster: Bolaño’s 2666 and Sebald (Spring 2013)
- Literature/Politics: Sovereignty and the People in the Río de la Plata
- The novela negra in Latin America
- History of Theory and Criticism: Aesthetics, Technics and Nihilism
- “Latin America”: The Politics and Poetics of Naming
- Seminar in Hispanic Studies: Dictatorship, Terror and Memory
- Contemporary Spanish American Literature II: The Cultural Politics of the Boom
Undergraduate Courses
- The Politics of Memory in Latin American Culture
- Women in Hispanic Literature
- Argentine Literature
Honors and Awards
- Summer Faculty Fellowship, Indiana University (2005, 2007)
- New Frontiers in the Arts and Humanities Exploration Travel Fellowship (2006, 2007, 2008, 2009)
- Various workshop and conference grants (2004-present)
- Nominated for 2007 NEH Summer Stipend (2006)
- Faculty Fellow, Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions (2006-07)
- Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, University of Southern California (2001)
Current Research Projects
- “Literature and Interregnum in the Southern Cone”: An examination of contemporary Argentine and Chilean novels based on two hypotheses. The first is that the historical constitution of the aesthetic as a category has always been shaped by forces external to the world of art (epistemological, political, economic, and so on), even and especially when the aesthetic comes to be seen as an autonomous realm promising emancipation and freedom. The second hypothesis is that the aesthetic ideology which sustained the concept of “literature” since the 19th century no longer plays a foundational role in the production of social subjects. I look at a number of writers (Aira, Bolaño, Borges, Chejfec, Cohen and Eltit) for whom the literary marks a limit for prevailing regimes of signification while also opening to the possibility of alternative historical temporalities.
- “The Politics of Memory in Post-dictatorship Southern Cone”: This project considers the way in which “memory” becomes a political signifier in post-dictatorship Southern Cone societies that can be appropriated by a number of different aims or discourses (human rights, new forms of militancy, as well as neoliberal reformers). At the same time, I also propose that the increasing interest in the past in the decades after dictatorship needs to be understood in light of present-day conflicts and anxieties—in particular, in view of transformations in the way we experience “time” and “history” at the end of the millennium. If late modernity is synonymous with the speeding up of time and the end of history understood as archive of alternative futures, then memory politics can be understood either as an attempt to revitalize our sense of historicity or as aesthetic compensation for—and hence deepening of—our inability to live historically.
