Spanish-American Crime Fiction

4.0 credits

Crime fiction—el género negro—encompasses a wide number of texts: detective stories, crime novels, and non-fictional true crime books. It has become one of the most popular literary forms in the last few decades and one of the favorite genres of readers. Because it is built around topics like crime and the law, the search for truth in post-dictatorships, and the unstable identity of the subject in societies defined by violence, it has become an ideal vehicle for the expression of the anxieties and fears that dominate contemporary cultures. It has been used by many Latin American authors to express the social and political conflicts of the continent, manifested in the intersections between race, gender, class, sexuality, and language. The goal of this course is to offer a panoramic vision of contemporary crime fiction in Spanish America through the reading of a sample of classic and contemporary authors.