LENA BURGOS-LAFUENTEAssistant Professor
Frank Melville, Jr. Memorial Library N3026
Lena Burgos-Lafuente specializes in Latin American, Caribbean and Modern transatlantic literatures, with strong interests in poetry and aurality. In her dissertation, “Untimely Poetics: Literary Politics in the Mid 20th Century Spanish Caribbean,” she discusses the critical juncture at which prevailing ideological positions induced by the Second World War in the Caribbean met a new political poetics of postwar literature in the encounter between Caribbean writers and Spanish exiles in the late 1940s and 1950s.
In 2006, as the recipient of the Concha Meléndez Prize of Literary Criticism, the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña published her book-length essay Melancólicas inquisiciones: escritura y sujeto en Borges. Her article “Tiempo de isla: Pedro Salinas y los trópicos típicos” recently appeared in Revista de Estudios Hispánicos (2010). She is currently working on a project that engages the intricate relations between sound and image in the film production of the Puerto Rican Division of Community Education (DivEdCo).
Courses taught at Stony Brook
SPN 671 (PHD seminar). Writing Ruins: Time, Modernity and Decay in 20th Century Latin American Literature
SPN 573 (MA seminar) Poetics of Confinement in Latin American Literature.“Escritura y confín: poéticas del encierro en América Latina”.
SPN 435 (undergraduate course). ‘Before the Law’: Writing, Order and Desire in Latin American Literary Culture. “Ante la ley: escritura, orden y deseo en la cultura literaria latinoamericana”
SPN 671 (PHD seminar). Literary Politics in Mid 20th Century Caribbean Literature. “Política y poéticas en el Caribe de mediados de siglo XX”
SPN 585 (MA seminar) Caribbean Discourses: Hispanophone Literature in a Comparative Context
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