RLSP 308(S) Foundations of Latin American Literature: Colonialism and Post-Coloniality (D)
This course offers a survey of major Latin American writers from the beginning to 1900: we will read some of the most significant chronicles of first contact and the conquest, work by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and other writers from the colonial period, and important texts from the wars of independence and early national era. The first half of the course, focusing on the period from 1492 to 1800, will examine some of the artistic forms that emerged in response to colonization and the increasingly heterogeneous polities of Spanish America. In the second half of the term we explore a few of the ways that 19th-century intellectuals revisited these tropes and ideas in shaping the identities of the new republics, raising theoretical questions such as: How do republican artists and intellectuals respond to the racial and cultural diversity of their countries? To what extent is the cultural production of postcolonial Spanish America a continuation of colonial cultural forms? To get to the bottom of some of these issues we will also read those works of postcolonial theory that have proved most thought-provoking for scholars of Latin American literature. This course fulfills the EDI requirement because our reading of canonical Latin American literature is explicitly focused on issues of power, violence and exclusion, including the historical exclusion of women and indigenous peoples from Latin American literature and politics. Conducted in Spanish.
Format: lecture/discussion. Two 5-page papers and one 10-page final essay.
Prerequisites: one 200-level course in Spanish or Latin American literature or permission of instructor. Enrollment limit: 15 (expected: 6).
Hour: FRENCH