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I am posting this as a benchmark, not because I think I'm playing very well yet.  The idea would be post a video every month for a ye...

Thursday, March 21, 2013

I almost have enough ideas for another whole project on exceptionalism in the Hispanic field of academia / in Spanish literary culture generally. A lot of it is a familiar twist on very well-known tropes of identity. What I bring to it is a skepticism toward such narratives and a deconstructive sense of their reversibility. I am familiar with the whole nationalist debate in recent Spain, but not an expert on it. The idea would be to dismantle the rhetoric itself, not to engage in yet another round of rhetorical games.

I would need to learn a whole lot more about a lot of things to write it, but that is a good thing.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Look at this that just came across my Facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/events/546210038753207/?fref=ts

Friend Stephen Bocskay.

He is working on exceptionalism and I just discovered him. Mostly Brazilianist bu works on Catalan too. Friendly, too: I liked his event on Facebook and immediately got friended. He does poetry and music.

Anonymous said...

P.S. At Brown.

Anonymous said...

And also -- I know you do not cover Brazil but for this I think you should look at it for examples of exceptionalist rhetoric. They are heavily exceptionalist.

(This historian I have just rediscovered, Jeff Needell, was a graduate student with you at Stanford. Was smart then and is smart at Florida now. Works on contexts for these issues.)

Jonathan said...

I will look at Brazil too as an example of this. This might have to wait until I get through the Lorca book. I think Brazil and Japan, US and Spain, are the best examples of national exceptionalisms among larger nation states.

Americanism as a whole is exceptionalism (including US and Latin America).