The Modernist Chronicle in Latin America

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

The goal of this undergraduate seminar is to analyze Latin American literature in the cultural-historical period of the so-called "modernizing impact," which covers the last two decades of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century and is commonly known as Modernismo. The journey will focus on the birth of the genre of the modern chronicle, a hybrid zone between literature and journalism, between information and imagination, between politics and the market. In Latin America, this complex object has brought together numerous critical perspectives that read local modernization against the backdrop of global modernity, whether as a dyschronic modernity (Ángel Rama), a disconnected modernity (Julio Ramos), a peripheral modernity (Beatriz Sarlo), a dissonant modernity (Gwen Kirkpatrick), a translinguistic modernity (Julio Ortega), or a modernity in translation (Mariano Siskind). From the discussion of these fundamental perspectives for the study of the field, specific prose texts by Rubén Darío, José Martí, Julián del Casal, and Julio Herrera y Reissig will be addressed. The chronicles of modernity will serve as a platform to reflect on current and relevant problems in literary studies, such as the representation of American cities, the crisis of modern subjectivity, the tension between the Eurocentrism of global modernity and American nationalisms, migratory processes, the phenomenon of secularization, the emergence of mass culture, the transition from the model of the "nineteenth-century literary man" to that of the "professional writer," the role of translation, and the assimilation of cultural traditions foreign to the Latin American sphere.