Course Description
Summary
Contemporary South American fiction is rife with urgency, politics, and history, as well as narrative mischief, layering, and literary gamesmanship. It is a highly self-conscious stream of writing, with novelists in conversation--and conflict--with earlier writers, with their contemporaries, and with novelists of their own creation. Highly divergent stylists have perforce engaged with the legacies of colonialism, authoritarianism, and repressions of the body, mind, and spirit. We will begin with two major progenitors—Mexican novelist/photographer Juan Rulfo (for whom the silence of the land spoke, and whose characters occupy a liminal space between extinction and survival), and Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine poet who re-invented the short story, turning fact and fantasy inside out. Every writer on our syllabus is in some way connected to one or both of these giants. We’ll read the highly innovative Roberto Bolaño and Cesar Aire, as well as the rebellious Carmen Boullosa, Lina Meruane, and Guadalupe Nettel.
