Honors
HNRS 173-01: Colombia: Narratives of Violence
High in the Andes, in
guerrilla territory, there is a five-color river few eyes have seen. Its purple
and emerald waters flow through a violent country, not very different from the
country registered by the 19th-Century travelers Charles Saffray and Edouard
André in their Fabulous Colombia’s Geography. In our course we will study the
current situation of Colombia
and its historical background. Social injustice, civil wars, political
violence, drug-trafficking, guerrilla groups, terrorist attacks will be some of
the topics in our discussions. We will study, for the most part, artistic and
literary testimonies. We will begin with the fascinating engravings Saffray and
André included in their journey books; we will examine important events in the
history of Colombia
as recreated in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and
Laura Restrepo’s The Dark Bride. We will study the destruction of Bogota
registered by Life Magazine in 1948, the artistic responses in the paintings of
Debora Arango and Fernando Botero, the dilemmas moderns Colombia face as
portraited in Fernando Vallejo’s novel Our Lady of the Assassins, the film by
Victor Gaviria, Rodrigo D. No Futuro, and the academic essays collected in
Peace, Democracy and Human Rights in Colombia.
The word course has a variety of meanings. Among other
things, it means a race, a process, and a trajectory. A course is a travel.
Could we tell the story of an intellectual journey as we travel? As we become
familiar with Colombia,
its history and its culture, we will exercise our critical thinking by telling
the story of our learning. It is a story made of words, pictures, and videos.
We will compose a digital story that borrows its form both from the academic
paper and the personal essay. We will try to answer the following questions: Is
Colombia a violent country? Why is it violent? What is the history of that
violence? How is violence portrait in the materials we study? How is it
connected to us?
In our course we will collaborate and share resources with
the Honors studio art course on Performance / Action Art, a course that is an
exploration of storytelling with the language of artistic actions and gestures.
We will share our reading of One Hundred Years of Solitude, we will meet with
Colombian artist and curator Miguel González, and we will organize a
storytelling symposium at the end of the courses.
Spring Term: 2008
Credits: 4
Fulfills: GE Requirement in Humanities (U)
Meeting times: 10:00-11:20 TR
Instructor: J. Eduardo Jaramillo
Open to: First-years/Sophomores/Jrs/Srs
Note: HNRS 122-01 and HNRS 173-01 are constructed in a fashion that the two sections
work well together. Both courses will share classes at the begining of the semester
as well as various activities and a symposium at the end.
