Senior Seminar: Writing the Disaster: Poetry, Film, and Infinity

This seminar explores how poetry and film confront experiences that exceed ordinary forms of representation, including catastrophe, exile, transcendence, revelation, and historical rupture. Moving from medieval lyric and mysticism to the baroque, modernism, and more contemporary writing, the course examines how artistic form responds to disaster while remaining open to experiences of beauty, alterity, and infinity. Readings revolve around Iberian works in a comparative framework. Authors may include Ausiàs March, Luis de Góngora, Fernando Pessoa, Forugh Farrokhzad, Georg Trakl, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andreson, Salvador Espriu, Alejandra Pizarnik, Emmanuel Levinas, Bracha Ettinger, Paul Celan, and Maurice Blanchot alongside films by directors such as Francis Ford Coppola and Andrei Tarkovsky. Topics include rhythm, testimony, mystical language, alterity, fragmentation, memory, silence, and survival after catastrophe. Taught in English.