Department of Spanish and Portuguese
The Body
Part II Paper CS5Candidates may offer only ONE of the two comparative papers CS5 and CS6.
This paper has a broad chronological and disciplinary scope and offers you a variety of approaches to considering the representation and discourses of the body. The paper looks at the body in relation to pleasure, illness, pain, power, politics, and includes the way we perform with it, experience life through it, and use it as a metaphor for our numerous cultural activities, fantasies and anxieties. The time-span of the paper runs from the 18th century to the present day, and there is a variety of approaches offered in the primary and theoretical texts suggested for study. Texts from history, science, political tracts and propaganda, and philosophy may be part of the primary material, and theoretical approaches will be diverse, including psychoanalysis, anthropology, and film studies. The main focus of The Body is literary, but there will be ample opportunities to refer to other forms of art.
The paper is divided into four sections: Illness and Pain,Mind and Body, Sexuality and Performance, and Power and Politics. You will be required to answer from at least two of the sections in the three questions you do in the exam, and it is advisable to work in detail on three out of the four sections. You will have to cover material from three language areas (which may include English).
Spanish material which you might cover in the paper includes Goya, major 19th century novels (particularly relevant for both hysteria, and gender and power relations), literature written during, and in reaction to, the Franco régime, and film. You will be able to draw on the rich resources of Latin-American literature, including film and the visual arts.
There are three layers to the teaching provided. There is a course of 8 lectures in the Michaelmas Term, which will give you general background, and introduce you to some of the approaches in the four sections. Essential teaching for the papers will be through the Faculty-run seminars. For each section two topics a year will be selected for detailed work, and precise reading for these seminars will be available at the start of the year. Seminar work will be backed up by supervisions, so that you can work more fully on the material of your chosen language areas and adapt and extend the approaches suggested in the seminars.
Introductory reading
1) Sander Gilman, Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS (Ithaca, 1998)
2) Paul Rainbow (ed). The Foucault Reader (Harmondsworth, 1991)
3) M Featherstone, M Hepworth and BS Turner (eds), The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory (London, 1991), esp. pp. 1-35.
There is a sample examination paper available for The Body. Your best guide to work for the year is the list of reading for the seminars. There is also an extensive background reading list that you can consult.
COURSE ADVISER: Dr Rosemary Clark, Clare College.
