Date/Time
Date(s) - 04/07/2023
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Location
B106 JFSB
Category(ies)
The BYU Humanities Center is pleased to sponsor a lecture by Professor Patrick Dove, University of Indiana.
Title: “Mi aciago destino: the desert as figuration of language and thought in Borges’s ‘El inmortal.’”
Patrick’s research explores intersections between literature, philosophy, and political thought in Spanish America. His first two books explored literary responses to problems associated with modernity and modernization in Spanish America. He looks at novels, short stories, and poems as cultural artifacts that possess a double potentiality. On one hand, these works are records of historical experience that can generate insight into the struggles and contradictions of their time; on the other, they give shape to efforts to disrupt the spell of the present and to envision alternatives to the existing orders in which they are written. This double register requires that every literary text be treated both as an historical object informed by extra-literary contexts and as a self-referential gesture whose meaning is shaped by language and creative processes.
He is currently working on a project that examines new forms of conflict and violence in Central America (Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua) in contexts of narco-capitalism, gang violence, migration and flight. He is interested in exploring how the past (recent experiences of revolution, civil war and counter-insurgency as well as older colonial and imperial histories) contributes to shaping present-day conflicts, while also looking at how contemporary experiences pose challenges to established ways of thinking about social conflict and violence. In addition to literary works, he also looks at journalism, film, and other visual media.
