HUMANITIES CENTER BROWN BAG COLLOQUIUM SERIES
Thursday, October 27, 2016 12:30-1:30pmRoom 2339Faculty
Administration Building
Intimacy and Sexuality in Luisa Valenzuela’s Black Novel with
Argentines and Diaries of New York
Jorgelina Corbatta, Professor, CMLLCProfessor Corbatta has a
Licenciature in Literature from Universidad Nacional del Sur (Bahia
Blanca, Argentina), and a Master and Ph.D. in Hispanic Literature
from University of Pittsburgh. She is also an Advanced Academic
Candidate at the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute. Professor of
Latin American Literature and Culture at Wayne State University
since l988, Prof. Corbatta has taught at universities in Argentina,
Colombia, France, Sweden, Austria, Belgium, and Spain. Recently she
was invited as a Visiting Professor at Universidad de Concepción
(Chile). She has been invited to present at the American
Psychoanalytic Association Conference in Chicago, at the
International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) in Boston, and at
the Dallas Psychoanalytic Center as well as at the Depression
Center in Ann Arbor by the Michigan Psychoanalytic Society. She was
also Director of Women Studies at Wayne State University.
The purpose of my talk is the analysis of some texts of the
Argentine writer Luisa Valenzuela (Buenos Aires, 1939) focused on
the notions of intimacy and sexual-ity. I will combine literary
criticism and psychoanalysis, from Freud to Leo Bersani and other
contemporary theorists, in order to explore not only the behavior
of Valenzuela’s fictional characters but also the represen-tation
of her personal life narrated as auto-fiction (ac-cording to the
definition of Serge Doubrovsly).
Intimacy is a fundamental human need but many fac-tors inhibit
this capacity. The capacity for intimacy develops from the matrix
of the mother-infant relation-ship with its initial symbiotic phase
to the subsequent separation-individuation process. Without proper
pas-sage through this process, fears of engulfment and abandonment
will stifle intimacy. In Valenzuela’s nar-rative, especially in
Black Novel with Argentines and in her Diaries of New York,
personal conflicts are fictional-ized and represented in her
characters or in her fiction-alized alter ego putting into evidence
the thorny nature of human intimacy (as in Schopenhauer’ fable
about porcupines often quoted by Freud).
For more information about the Humanities Center, call (313)
577-5471 or visit http://research2.wayne.edu/hum/
Professor Jorgelina Corbatta
The Humanities Center’s Brown Bag Lectures are FREE and OPEN to
the public
