Discover Latin America: Literature, Culture & Cinema

3 units

This seminar aims to explore the identity of Latin America through its own literary production and cinema. Our point of departure will be the popular image of Latin America in a permanent state of crisis. We will analyze how this extended condition has determined a resliient search for original survival strategies. We will take these artistic forms as the space of resistance against social, historical, economic and cultural impositions. We will particularly study the short story tradition within Latin America and its main contributions to the self-exploration process. We will concentrate on issues such as the confrontation between nature/environment and man, tradition vs. change, the economic struggle and social exclusion/inclusion, the urban movement and the realist portrait, the fantastic exploration and the power of the unconscious, the Latin American boom and new directions, the strategies of humor and transgression, and the female voice and its personal challenges. In turn, we will discuss a selection of films that depict the diverse range of Latin American realities in connection with specific scenarios of crisis--the literary crisis (the fantastic representation, the magical realist answer, the neo-baroque turning point), the political crisis (dictatorships, revolutions, wars, national mythologies, exile, censorship), and the social/cultural crisis (mainstream machism, patriarchal traditions, imperialism, language andorigins, hybridity, gender issues, poverty, injustice, margins). The course consists of the critical reading/watching and formal literary/visual analysis of the selected texts and films. The main goal is to open an engaging dialogue among participants to better understand what we call Latin America, and also to learn to think critically when it comes to tradition, identity, and paths of self-discovery.