Professor Patrick Dove
Email: TBA (for immediate assistance, email brownjg@indiana.edu)

S582	Contemporary Spanish American Literature II
	Topic: The Cultural Politics of the Boom

MW 11:15am - 12:30pm/section #4559/3 cr./Wylie Hall 111

This course examines trends in Spanish American literature during
the second half of the twentieth century, beginning shortly after
World War II. Special attention will be given to the emergence and
decline of the literary “Boom”—or, roughly speaking, the period
between the 1959 Cuban Revolution and the widespread return of
military dictatorships in Latin America during the 1970s.

Our discussions will consider various interpretations of this
literary event. We will take as one point of departure the claim
that “Boom” literature in one way or another inaugurates a new
beginning for Latin America. With the translation of García
Márquez’s "Cien años de soledad" into more than two dozen languages,
the “Boom” is frequently identified with regional cultural autonomy
whereby Latin America is no longer relegated to consuming—and
producing bad copies of—European works. At the same time, given its
intimate links to the Cuban Revolution, the “Boom” has also been
seen as a cultural avatar of political emancipation in the region,
as an attempt to narrate—and thereby to put an end to—the region’s
long history of imperialism, dependency and authoritarianism.

In reading these works, we will also develop questions pertinent to
our own “post-boom” condition. What can these works say to us today,
at a time when many see literature as having relinquished its
privileged role as encapsulating “the best which has been thought
and said in the world” (Matthew Arnold), and when literature no
longer acts a focal point for the organization of the modern nation-
state in Latin American, as it perhaps did since the generation of
Bello, Echeverría and Sarmiento? What new possibilities do these
texts open up today for thinking about literature, history and
politics?

The course format will be seminar, with occasional lectures and
presentations by students. Secondary critical readings will
accompany each primary text.

Primary texts:
Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones
Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo
Pablo Neruda, “Las alturas de Macchu Picchu”
Octavio Paz, “Piedra de sol,” “Himno entre ruinas”
Alejo Carpentier, Los pasos perdidos
Gabriel García Márquez, Cien años de soledad
Mario Vargas Llosa, Conversación en la catedral	
Cristina Peri-Rossi, Rebelión de los niños
Julio Cortázar, “Axolotl,” “La noche boca arriba”
Griselda Gambaro, El campo
Manuel Puig, El beso de la mujer araña
Tununa Mercado, En estado de memoria