SPN 416 - Postcolonial Realities in Spanish American Literature

Course unit(s): 1
Meets GAR: Meets general academic requirement or DE and HU.
Prerequisite(s): SPN 304 - Advanced Spanish Conversation & Composition .
Reading and discussion of selections by Spanish American writers from the late nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries. For many Spanish American authors, obscuring the line between reality and fantasy becomes a literary game in the search for true reality within countries racked by civil strife that underscores the postcolonial paradigm in the Americas in terms of the subaltern issues of race, gender, and social class. Thus, students will delve into the artistic subconscious as they examine the legacy of the Spanish Conquest in the prose and poetry of literary periods that include modernismo, posmodernismo, and vanguardismo as well as the Boom and Post-Boom with their techniques of realismo mágico and realismo crítico. Emphasis is placed on an understanding of technical development of various genres within each literary period and on thematic content of work as it relates to that period’s historical, political, social, and philosophical context. Class is conducted in Spanish.