The Boom and Beyond

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

One Hundred Years of Solitude is the most popular, famous, and influential novel of all time from Latin America. In this course students will have the opportunity to study it closely amid other fictions by the remarkable array of novel and short story writers who emerged in Latin America between the late 1950s and early 1970s. This phenomenon, known as the Boom, includes multiple winners of the Nobel Prize and changed the course of world literature. In addition to exploring the details of each featured text in depth, students will dissect related critical concepts such as “magical realism” and the idea of a “Boom” per se. Alongside literature from the Boom, students will also read and discuss other texts that emerged in and against its wake, including testimonial non-fiction, films, scholarly commentary, and literature from the so-called Post-Boom. Throughout the course, literary and filmic approaches to questions of national and regional identity, gender and sexuality, and various forms of human brutality, will be discussed. Literature to be read will include Aura by Carlos Fuentes, Cien años de soledad by Gabriel García Márquez, El beso de la mujer araña by Manuel Puig, Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela by Elena Poniatowska, ‘Si me permiten hablar...’ Testimonio de Domitila una mujer de las minas de Bolivia by Domitila Barrios de Chungara and Moema Viezzer, and Eva Luna by Isabel Allende. Films will include Big Fish, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Como agua para chocolate, and El laberinto del fauno. The general goal of the course is that students develop a diverse knowledge of the literary expressions of the Boom and its aftermath, and that they practice and improve their critical thinking skills while analyzing those texts. The course will be taught in Spanish and as a seminar in which high levels of student participation will be expected. Requirements include oral presentations, essays, and a love of great literature.