Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages

Part Ib Paper SP5: Latin American Culture
 

Reading List

This paper has a Learning Support Website which has links to online resources at www.mml.cam.ac.uk/spanish/sp5/. If you have not already read it, please see the Description of the Paper.

Important Note

This paper requires you to work in a comparative manner on the texts studied, understanding them in terms of their place within broad intellectual (and/or historical) currents within Latin America. Your essays in supervisions should for the most part be comparative and take into account at least two texts, as will be the case in examination. This will not prevent you from carrying out close analyses of texts, so long as they have regard to the question being asked. The emphasis of the paper is on culture (including literature, cinema, and visual arts). History is not taught as a separate component, but for many of the topics you are encouraged to set culture within its historical context, and some historical background will be given in lectures. [Some questions which can be answered with historical methodology: please consult your supervisor if this is of interest to you.] The paper has a Learning Support Website at www.mml.cam.ac.uk/spanish/SP5/.

There are no fixed prescribed texts for this paper, but instead a list of suggested reading. You are advised to cover a fair proportion (but not all) of the texts suggested, as these will be at the core of the teaching provided for the topics. However, you are also free to explore around the topics and discover texts which might suggest new approaches within the overall topics you are studying. For suggested summer reading as preparation for the topics on this paper, please see the description of the paper. During the year you will study four or five of the topics (and many students will want to have a taster of all six). For examination purposes you will need to revise a minimum of four topics to be adequately prepared (in the examination you will have to answer on three). Each topic will have four questions on the paper, one of which may (for relevant topics) be specifically directed at historical issues. This paper can be studied for the Portfolio of Essays option.

Nation and Narration

  • Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Facundo (1845)
  • Esteban Echeverría, El matadero (written 1841)
  • Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Sab (1841) [use the Manchester Hispanic Texts edition, edited by Catherine Davies]
  • José Enrique Rodó, Ariel (essay, 1900) and Roberto Fernández Retamar Calibán (essay, 1971)
  • Samuel Ramos, El perfil del hombre y la cultura en México (essay, 1934)
  • Octavio Paz, El laberinto de la soledad (essay, 1959).
  • Edward Lucie-Smith, Latin American art of the 20th Century [for visual arts component]
  • Dawn Ades, Art in Latin America: The Modern Era 1820-1980 [for visual arts component]

Sample examination questions

  • "Latin American writers and statesmen saw their nations as blank pages upon which to ‘inscribe’ European civilization." Discuss with reference to AT LEAST TWO writers and/or statesmen.
  • Discuss the extent to which the opposition ‘civilización/barbarie’ is upheld AND/OR undermined by Latin American thinkers. Your answer should refer to TWO OR MORE writers, essayists, or artists.

Nightmares of the Urban

  • Roberto Arlt, El juguete rabioso (1926)
  • Ernesto Sábato, Informe sobre ciegos (1961) (or preferably Sobre héroes y tumbas)
  • Luis Zapata, El vampiro de la Colonia Roma (1979)
  • Manuel Puig, The Buenos Aires Affair (1973)
  • Carlos Fuentes, Agua quemada
  • Luis Buñuel, Los olvidados (1950) [film]
  • Eliseo Subiela, Últimas imágenes del naufragio (1989) [film]
  • Walter Doehner Pecanins, Íntimo terror (1990) [film]
  • Guillermo del Toro, Cronos (1992) [film]
  • Ricardo Piglia, Plata quemada (1997) novel and film 

Sample examination questions

  • "If Latin American Urban fiction portrays the cities as physical and ideological prisons, they are at least partly redeemed by language, imagination, and new fictional techniques." Discuss with reference to TWO OR MORE texts.
  • Give an account of the social effects of urban modernization in ONE OR TWO countries of Latin America in the period 1914 to 1969. You may refer to the history of the period, OR to literature, OR BOTH.

Charting Revolution

  • Mariano Azuela, Los de abajo (1915)
  • Juan Rulfo, El llano en llamas (1953)
  • Carlos Fuentes, Gringo viejo (1986)
  • Elena Garro, Los recuerdos del porvenir (1963)
  • Jorge Ibargüengoitia, Los relámpagos de agosto (1963)
  • Elena Poniatowska, La noche de Tlatelolco (1971)
  • Ángeles Mastretta, Arráncame la vida (1985)
  • Nellie Campobello Cartucho (1931)

Sample examination questions

  • "Narrative dislocation is an inevitable result of the attempt to map social upheaval and revolution in literature." Discuss with reference to AT LEAST TWO works.
  • Give an account of the rôle of class difference in the Mexican revolution. You may refer to literature dealing with the revolution OR to the history of the period OR BOTH.

The Racial ‘Other’

  • Rosario Castellanos, Balún Canán (1957)
  • Clorinda Matto de Turner, Aves sin nido (1889)
  • Alejo Carpentier, El reino de este mundo (1949)
  • Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Sab (1841)*
  • Jorge Icaza, Huasipungo (1936)
  • José María Arguedas, Los ríos profundos (1958)

*For the edition of Sab, see above under Nation and Narration. You can use this text for either topic, but you may not write about it twice in the examination.

Sample examination questions

  • "The voice of the subaltern is always betrayed when it is translated into the words of the dominant culture." Discuss with reference to AT LEAST TWO works.
  • Give an account of the rôle of mythology in Latin American writing dealing with 'race'. Your answer should make reference to TWO OR MORE writers.

Penning the Dictator

  • Miguel Ángel Asturias, El señor Presidente (1946)
  • Isabel Allende, La casa de los espíritus (1982)
  • Marta Traba, Conversación al sur (1981)
  • Luisa Valenzuela, Cambio de armas (1982)
  • Jorge Zalamea, El gran Burundún-Burundá ha muerto (1952)

Sample examination questions

  • "Dictators and writers operate within the field of language. This is the reason for writers' continued fascination with the subject of dictatorship." Discuss with reference to AT LEAST TWO works.
  • "The horror of dictatorship will always outstrip the writer's ability to symbolize it." Discuss.

Labyrinths of Fiction

  • Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones (1944)
  • Julio Cortázar, Relatos
  • Gabriel García Márquez, Crónica de una muerte anunciada (1981)
  • Carlos Fuentes, Zona sagrada (1967) or Aura (1962)
  • El sueño de los héroes [film, 1997]
  • Mario Vargas Llosa, Elogio de la madrastra
  • Juan José Arreola, Confabulario (1952)

Sample examination questions

  • Discuss the image of the labyrinth in AT LEAST TWO works of Latin American fiction.
  • "For metafictional writers, the world is always a 'text'." Discuss with reference to TWO OR MORE writers.