HISP 387 - Latin American Seminar

Semester Offered: Fall or Spring
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2013/14a: The Poetry of Pablo Neruda. In this seminar we examine the works of the man Gabriel García Márquez once called “the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language.” In addition to studying selections from most of Neruda’s poetry, we read his autobiography Confieso que he vivido, his play Fulgor y muerte de Joaquín Murieta, his manifestos and essays, discuss the movie Il postino and study several documentaries about the poet’s life. By examining the different styles of Neruda’s poetry, we define the major poetic movements of twentieth century Latin America.

Topic for 2013/14b: Literature and Its Discontents: Arlt, Puig, and the Return of the Repressed in the Argentine Novel. The seminar examines the novel as a hybrid practice where lettered and popular culture as well as working and middle class imaginaries, are made to cohere and emerge into national discourse. This meditation will focus on texts by Roberto Arlt (1900-1942) and Manuel Puig (1932-1990) two of the most innovative and influential Argentine writers of the twentieth century. The novels will be read from the perspective of their formal characteristics and as cultural and material interventions in the social field of their circulation and appropriation, while bearing on themes such as the circulation of bodies and labor, the nation, migration and globalization, memory and subjectivity, the spheres and politics of social space, and the political unconscious of melodrama and allegory, all within the context of subalternity. Readings and class discussion conducted in Spanish. Mr. Grunfeld. (a) Mr. Cesareo. (b)

Prerequisite(s): permission of the instructor.

One 2-hour period.