The poems and plays by Federico García Lorca during the first half of the 20th century are full of what Sianne Ngai calls “ugly feelings”: shame, anxiety, fear, envy, sorrow, jealousy, and pain. However, these “minor and generally unprestigious” emotions have the power to teach us important lessons that resonate with real social and historical experiences and truths. They often appear as the impossibility of desire to find its way, or life impulses to overcome the attraction of death, or the quest for freedom facing, time and again, different forms of power and tyranny. What cannot fully become life, García Lorca makes it breathe through powerful images and verbal music. This course will explore, through the lens of affect theory, a selection of García Lorca’s poetry (Romancero gitano, Poeta en Nueva York, Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías) and tragedies (Yerma, Bodas de sangre, La casa de Bernarda Alba), literary pieces that also come, as García Lorca himself would say, from “the quivering dark roots of the scream”. Taught in Spanish.
- Instructor of record: Roberto Martinez Bachrich