BOOKS IN REVIEW (original) (raw)

CONTEMPORARY LATIN AMERICAN NOVEL (LSPA692)

A study of the Latin American novel in the 20th century against a philosophical and socio-political background. This course will focus on canonical authors. The novels selected for required reading are to be studied exhaustively. This course will give the student a broad, general knowledge of the development of major philosophical and literary trends in Latin America. The writers whose novels will be the focus of the course are: Mariano Azuela (México), Alejo Carpentier (Cuba), Juan Rulfo (México), José María Arguedas (Perú), Julio Cortázar (Argentina), Elena Garro (México), Guillermo Cabrera Infante(Cuba), Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia), Luis Rafael Sánchez (Puerto Rico) y Roberto Bolaño (Chile).

The Latin American Novel in English and French

The Oxford Handbook of the Latin American Novel

This chapter examines novels written in English and French by authors biographically linked with Latin America. This is not just a matter of taxonomy or literary history, but of reading new meanings often hidden by narrow notions of linguistic determinism and monolingual national literatures. The main focus is on works by Eduarda Mansilla de García, W. H. Hudson, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, and Jules Supervielle, but the chapter also considers various English-language novels by Latino and Latin American authors working in the United States, as well as French-language novels by Latin American authors living in France. While these readings complicate the well-guarded limits of Latin American literature, they also highlight the long reach of the region’s literary systems and the complexity of its cultural history.

The Oxford Handbook of the Latin American Novel

Rita Indiana'sTentacled Novels, 2022

Queer identities and racialized subjects in a transnational and multi-ethnic context are central to the novels of Rita Indiana (1977), a lesbian writer, performer, and singer, originally from the Dominican Republic, a country where whiteness, anti-Haitianism, patriarchy, Hispanophile culture, and Catholicism prevail(ed). This chapter explores how Indiana's multilayered works, aside from dealing with the well-researched globalizing topics of queerness, race, and transnationality, interconnect with other recurrent tendencies and subjects in contemporary (Latin American) literature. These include auto ction, urban novel, migration, violence, colonialism, science ction, ecocriticism, and political disenchantment. This approach does not overlook the speci c traits of Indiana's poetics, which takes

Hopscotch! Readings in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Latin American Literature: Twenty-One Lectures, with Drinks Pairings

This is a survey of twentieth and twenty-first century Latin American literature. What is the “play”—again, the “freedom, opportunity, or room for action; scope for activity”—that literature offers, once we realize that there is no one “right” way of reading (though there still may of course be wrong ways)? How to take literature both more seriously, as something other than mere reflection or degraded copy of the “real,” and at the same time more playfully, with less anxiety about always getting the “right” meaning, the “correct” interpretation. For meaning is never finite and fixed, and in any case there may well be other, sometimes more interesting, things to do with texts beyond simply interpreting them. This is all a matter of method more than theme: asking less what (Latin American or any other) literature is, and more how we should read it.