Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Advanced seminar on a topic in World Literature. This course may be repeated for credit when different topics are offered.

COURSE DETAILS:

Latin American Literature: From Modernismo to The “Boom”
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 (who referred to it as 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 America will serve as our point of departure as we examine its literatures more closely, shedding light on both their similarities and differences. Special emphasis will be placed on the social, cultural, and political contexts that shape the issues and concerns reflected in the texts. We will begin by studying the first autonomous literary movement born in the “New World” to exert significant influence on writers in the “Old Continent”: Modernismo. This primarily aesthetic and seemingly apolitical movement –whose most celebrated figure is the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío– witnessed the rise of a distinct socially committed literature: Indigenismo. To gain insight into both the purely aesthetic and the socially engaged branches of Modernismo, we will examine texts by José Martí and Darío himself. In sum, Modernismo represented the first cosmopolitan and autonomous literary movement in Latin America, paving the way for subsequent artistic innovations, including the avant-garde movements that emerged in the region during the second decade of the 20^th century. Indeed, the early 20^th century ushered in a literature that was playful, highly experimental, and self-conscious. To explore this ludic vein, we will analyze Jorge Luis Borges’ little-known role in introducing the Ultraist movement in Argentina, as well as Oliverio Girondo’s Scarecrow and a selection of Vicente Huidobro’s poetry. We will conclude the course by studying three works by some of the most intriguing writers associated with 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.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

• Gain an understanding of the specific sociocultural and political contexts that provide the background and inspiration to 19^th and 20^th century Latin American literary texts and artistic movements.
• Read literary texts through a theoretical lens.
• Gain an appreciation for the rich diversity of Latin American literatures and cultures.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: