Lit Rural Modernity in Latam

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

This course will examine representations of rural territories (deserts, highlands, and jungles) from the nineteenth century to the present. We will study how the Latin American elites appropriated rural lands to make them part of their civilizational nation-building project by reading foundational poems, regionalist novels, and modernista short stories. Some issues that we will explore include the creation of a creole identity as a bridge between Europeans and Latin Americans, the abandonment of rural zones due to the contradictions of uneven modernization, and the role of literature in capturing the voice of dispossessed rural actors such as Indigenous women. We will read canonical works that mapped the region’s ecosystems and their heterogeneous populations and the work of women writers who used modern literary techniques to question forms of land-based and sexual oppression. We will also study the work of contemporary authors who destabilize traditional debates about civilization versus barbarism, the dispossession of bodies and territories, and Latin America’s insertion into the global economy.