José David Saldívar
José David Saldívar
Professor of Comparative Literature
Contact:
Building 260, Room 206
Phone: 650-723-0397
jds1@stanford.edu
Office Hours:
Tuesdays 1:30-3:30; and by appointment in 360, 361F (CCSRE)OVERVIEW:
José David Saldívar is a scholar of late postcontemporary culture, especially the minoritized literatures of the United States, Latin America, and the transamerican hemisphere, and of border narrative and poetics from the sixteenth century to the present.
He is the author of The Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History (Duke University Press, 1991), Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (University of California Press, 1997), and Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico (Duke University Press, 2012), coeditor (with Héctor Calderón) of Criticism in the Borderlands (Duke University Press, 1991), and editor of The Rolando Hinojosa Reader (Arte Público Press, 1985).
Additionally, he has published numerous articles in journals such as Cultural Studies, American Literary History, The Americas Review, Revista Casa de las Américas, Daedalus, Modern Fiction Studies, and The Global South. He has served on the editorial boards of Duke University Press, the University of California Press, and currently serves on the editorial boards of the journals American Literary History, The Global South, Aztlan, and World Knowledges Otherwise. He has received personal research grants from The Ford Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the University of California President's Research Fellowship in the Humanities, the William Rice Kimball Fellowship, Stanford Humanities Center, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford (invitation for a future visit).
His teaching is divided evenly between graduate seminars and undergraduate courses, and some of his undergraduate courses are cross-listed in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.
In 2003, he received the Distinguished Achievement Award for Literary and Cultural Criticism from the Western Literature Association; in 2005, he received the Chicano Scholar of the Year Award from the Modern Language Association; and in 2007 he received the Sarlo Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring Award from the University of California, Berkeley. Before coming to Stanford in January 2010, Saldívar was the Class of 1942 Professor of English and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
EDUCATION:
1983: Ph.D., Stanford University
1979: M.A., Stanford University
1977: B.A., Yale University
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Courses
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COMPLIT101Aut2011-12
How critics and authors from different eras and different parts of the globe have considered how literature, as a traditional cultural form, can or cannot, help to sustain societies faced with concrete historical crises such as war, revolution, and colonization. How the aesthetic work of verbal art has been seen to offer the possibility of continuity in the face of change. What, if anything, can be continued? How does art perhaps aid in accommodating change?
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COMPLIT149Win2011-12
Focus is given to emergent theories of culture and on comparative literary and cultural studies. How do we treat culture as a social force? How do we go about reading the presence of social contexts within cultural texts? How do ethno-racial writers re-imagine the nation as a site with many "cognitive maps" in which the nation-state is not congruent with cultural identity? How do diaspora and border narratives/texts strive for comparative theoretical scope while remaining rooted in specific local histories.
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DLCL310Win2011-12
Meets regularly throughout the year to advise and support dissertation-level students as they prepare a prospectus, begin writing, submit chapters, and complete their projects. Focus of the workshop shifts from term to term as appropriate to the participants. Supervised by the graduate affairs committee of the DLCL. May be repeated for credit.
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COMPLIT142ASpr2011-12
Will attempt to open up "America," beyond the United States. Have we reached the end of an era in our national literary imaginations? What is the utility and durability of the idea of the nation in a global era? New developments in hemispheric, Black Atlantic, and trans-american studies have raised questions about the very viability of US literary studies. Should we, as Franco Moretti suggests, map, count, and graph the relationships in our close (rhetorical) and "distant" readings of texts in the Americas? Topics include the definitions of concepts such as coloniality, modernity, time and the colonial difference, the encounters between world views of Europeans and indigenous Native American peoples, and the inventions of America, Latinamericanism, and Americanity.
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COMPLIT41NAut2010-11
In this seminar we will focus on the transnational themes of memory, identity, and US-Mexico border thinking and writing. We will explore the transnational poetry, autoethnographies, short stores, novels, and rock en español musics/videos by Americo Paredes, Gloria Anzaldua, Sandra Cisneros, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Carlos Fuentes, Elly Guerra, and Cafe Tacuba, among others.
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COMPLIT242Spr2010-11
A detailed study of Faulkner García Márquez Morrison and Cisneros¿s major imaginative writings in the aesthetic and geopolitical contexts of the South and the Global South. What does it mean to read South by South? South by North? We will be considering the idea of the South as a real and imaginary territory a rich ideological geography and a geo-culture where regional mythology ethnic and racial formations and divisions national and transnational contestations and the new imperialism together produce extraordinary narratives.
