SPAN 597 Contemporary Latin American Fiction and Film: The Rural and the Wild in an Urban Age
SPAN 597 Contemporary Latin American Fiction and Film: The Rural and the Wild in an Urban Age
Credits: 3
As of around 2007, a majority of the world’s population is believed to reside in cities. Yet in the past couple of decades, Latin American literature and film have registered a renewed preoccupation with rural and “wild” locales such as jungles, the pampas, deserts, sierras, semi-urban periferias, and the Brazilian backlands, or sertão. At the same time, some geographers have started to question the urban/rural binary, arguing for the need to think about urbanization as a process that not only transforms more concentrated settlements, or “cities” (though what exactly is a city?), but also actively creates the hinterlands to which they are intimately linked.
To gain some historical perspective, we’ll begin by reading two classic depictions of rural areas from earlier in the twentieth century: Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo and Graciliano Ramos’s Vidas Secas (Barren Lives). The majority of the semester, however, will be devoted to novels, short stories, and films published or released in the twenty-first century, along with related theoretical and critical texts. Among the questions we’ll consider are: How have industrial farming and the intensification of natural resource extraction (re)shaped images of “non-urban” spaces? How do Latin American literature and film reflect and/or reject the tendency to treat nature as something that stops at the (often fuzzy) boundaries of the city? Given the long history of associating women and femininity with nature and rurality, has the increasing prominence of trans and non-binary identities impacted ideas about the rural/urban divide?
This course is open to graduate students from any department. Almost all (if not all) of the works we’ll consider are available in English translation, though students in SIP are expected to read those in Spanish in the original and are encouraged to tackle the Brazilian works in Portuguese. The language of class discussions will be either English and/or Spanish, depending on the language skills of the students who enroll.