The history of Latin America –and by extension its literature– “has fascinated observers as much as it has mystified them,” as scholar Edwin Williamson has suggested. It is no surprise, then, that magic realism –a concept first developed in Latin America by Alejo Carpentier (what he called “lo real maravilloso”)–, eventually became “a marketing brand that would help the sale of Spanish American novels abroad” (González Echevarría 248). This rather reductive perception of Latin American literature will act as a springboard that will allow us to look at the literatures of Spanish America more closely in order to shed light on their similarities and differences. Special emphasis will be placed on the social, cultural and political contexts which provide the background to the issues/concerns reflected in the texts. We will begin by studying the first autonomous literary

movement born in the “New World” which had a great influence on the writers of the “Old Continent”:Modernismo. This essentially aesthetic and apolitical movement –whose most celebrated member is the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío–, also saw the rise of a unique socially committed literature: indigenismo. We will study texts by José Martí and Darío himself in order to gain an understanding of both the purely aesthetic and socially committed branches of modernismo. Another historic event that helped shape the literature of Latin America was the Spanish-American War of 1898, dubbed “The Disaster of ‘98” by Spaniards. We will try to understand what the demise of Spanish colonialism and the rise of North American imperialism represented to some of the intellectuals of the era by studying texts like José Enrique Rodó’s well- known essay, Ariel (1900). Modernismo, in sum, represented the first cosmopolitan and autonomous literary movement that opened the door to subsequent artistic/literary movements, such as the avant-garde movements that emerged in Latin America during the second decade of the 20th century. Indeed, the beginning of the 20th century brought about in Latin America a literature that was playful, highly experimental and self-conscious. For our purpose, we will study Jorge Luis Borges’ role as introducer of the Ultraist movement in Argentina, as well as Oliverio Girondo’s Scarecrow and a selection of Vicente Huidobro’s poetry. We will end this course by studying three works by some of the most interesting writers of the so-called “Latin American Boom”: Julio Cortázar’s Cronopios and Famas, Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, and Adolfo Bioy Casares’ The Invention of Morel.