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Patrick O'Connor

Contact Information

E-mail: Patrick.O'Connor@oberlin.edu Phone: (440) 775-8922 Office: Peters 402 50 North Professor Street Oberlin, OH 44074

Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies

Educational Background
  Ph. D. Yale University: 1994
  B.A. Cornell University: 1980

Courses Taught
  202 Intermediate Spanish I
  204 Intensive Intermediate Spanish
  318 Survey of Spanish Literature II
  322 Visions of Mexican Women    
  328 From Page to Screen: Cinematic Adaptation in          Latin America 
  335 Cuban and Cuban Diaspora Narrative: Tropical          Disturbances (in English)
  435 Islands of History: Twentieth Century Cuban and          Puerto Rican Literature
  436 Literature of the Dirty Wars
  452 After Boom and Bust: Latin American Literature          Since 1987
  426 Latin American Literature and the Narratives of the          Perverse (in English)
  458 Fantasy and Violence in Argentine Literature,          1930-1955    
  FYSP 150: Questioning Reality: The North and South          American Fantastic (in English)

Research Interests
  Post-Dictatorship Southern Cone Literature
  Surrealism and Other Avant-Garde Latin American Prose
  Spanish and Latin American Cinema
  Queer and Psychoanalytic Theory in Latin America
  The Novelists of "El Boom" (Cortázar, García Marquez, Donoso, Fuentes)
  Theories of Modernism and Post-Modernism
  U.S. Latino Literatures and Cultures

Selected Publications
  Latin American Fiction and the Narratives of the Perverse: Paper Dolls and Spider Women (New York: Palgrave Press, 2004). Close readings of a sequence of Latin American authors (Puig, Lezama, F.Hernández, Cortázar, Sarduy, G.Hernández) who complicate Freud’s narratives of the male perversions (masochism, homosexuality, fetishism), along with my own parallel attempts to construct a "perverse literary history" of Latin American literature.
  "The Anxiety of the Avunculate: Lezama Lima Reads Martí and Casal," Latin American Literary Review XXXIII, (July-December 2005), pp. 145-174.
  "John Rechy," for Latino and Latina Writers, Alan West, ed. in chief (Scribner’s and Gale Group, 2004).
  "César Aira’s Life in Pink: Beyond Gender Games in Cómo me hice monja," Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, XXV, 2: inv.’01, 259-76.
 

Work in Progress
  Husbands, Wives, and Other Eccentric Objects: Felisberto Hernández and Latin American Women Writers. The avant-garde writer of small, shameless fictions and memoirs Felisberto Hernández (1902-1964) was rediscovered and championed after his death by four novelists who are also critics: Rosario Ferré, Alicia Borinsky, Sylvia Molloy, andCristina Peri Rossi. Each takes up the cause of Felisberto only to "divorce" him later. Their approach to desire and the desirable object can be compared fruitfully to theories of Felisberto's contemporary, psychoanalytic theorist Melanie Klein."
  The Backstage of Post-Modernity: Argentina and the Neoliberal Bubble. How did the Argentina of the Menem years (1989-2001) convince itself and the world that Argentina could participate fully in post-modernism? The project examines, first, image of Argentina abroad, in popular culture, art-house cinema, and the novel, especially through the tango; and then, within Argentina, reflections on post-modernism and especially questions of gender in the writings of Beatriz Sarlo and Néstor Perlongher, and the situation of the novelist through readings of Ricardo Piglia, Angélica Gorodischer, César Aira, and Ana María Shua.