After this course:

- the student has a profound knowledge of the political, historical and cultural context of violence in the border region.

• the student has a profound knowledge of the literature from/on the border region.
• the student is familiar with several political and philosophical definitions of the concept of violence and the different methodologies that allow us to study the representation of violence in a literary text.
• the student is able to analyze how the development of the study of violence in literary studies is linked to the development of the study of the concept in other disciplines from the humanities.
• the student knows how to evaluate this theoretical discussions critically and to apply them autonomously on a selection of contemporary texts, from a personal perspective and with a thorough argumentation.
• the student is able to elaborate his own research, knows how to delimit a subject, to formulate main and secondary research questions and investigate them with the relevant sources. He/she is able to report on his/her research in a written paper of an academic level.

This course will focus on the representation of violence at the border between the US and Mexico. In the first place, theories on violence will be explored (Achterhuis, Avelar, Dorfman, Galtung, Zizek). This leads to the analysis of the context of violence in the border region and cultural representations of that violence. This background information will help us to analyze several journalistic and literary works in which the representation of violence in the border region is a central issue (Roberto Bolaño, Sergio González Rodríguez, …).