Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Part II Paper SP12

Latin American Culture

Reading List | Learning Support Site

Modern literature from Latin America is rich and exciting. In it many strands of European thought and art converge and develop as they face a new reality. The subcontinent is a region which has faced urgent and dramatic political struggles at many points in its history, which contains a vast range of often hostile natural environments, and a mixture of three principal ethnic groups coexisting or mingling to form new cultures. This paper focuses on major examples of the literature and art produced in the region up to the late 1960s/early 1970s. This is a period which includes multiple attempts at self-definition emerging in the nascent literatures of the new republics, the avant-garde movements of the beginning of the twentieth century, the political turmoil of on-going social struggles and revolutions with their ramifications in art and poetry, and the definitive arrival of Latin American literature on the world stage with the 'Boom' of the 1960s.

SP12 leads on well from the Part IB Topics in Latin American Culture and History (Paper SP5), which provides useful background whilst covering different texts and topics. It also makes an interesting sister paper for those who may wish to study Part II Contemporary Latin American Culture (Paper SP13), although SP12 can certainly be taken independently from either of those papers. The course allows you to study a selection of some of the most exciting world literature written in the twentieth century, covering such world-famous names as Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Juan Rulfo, Alejo Carpentier, Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa and Frida Kahlo. However, it is by no means limited to these modern 'classics': the paper contains a large variety of writers and movements, and includes, amongst many others, topics such as Escritura femenina (looking at the work of women writers, e.g. Rosario Castellanos), Visual Identities (a visual arts topic, including photography), Experimental Fiction and Representing the City.

The Paper is divided into two sections: Topics in Latin American Culture; and Writers and Artists. The topics are an opportunity to study certain themes through history and across a range of authors in a comparative manner. The Authors section includes poetry, which has played a seminal role in Latin American literature, and which has produced several Nobel prize winners (e.g., the Chileans Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda, and the Mexican Octavio Paz). Much emphasis is placed on the major prose writers, from the seminal philosophical short stories of Jorge Luis Borges, the revival of story-telling in the novel with the work of Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, the baroque vision of Caribbean history of Alejo Carpentier, the avant-garde novel of Carlos Fuentes or Julio Cortázar, to the interface of gender and race in the novels of Rosario Castellanos. During your course you will be required to study at least one topic and the work of at least one poet, alongside your studies of narrative.

Brazilian literature is not formally included because there are two other Part II papers which cover it in detail (Paper PG4 and Paper PG5). However, it would certainly be permissible to answer, say, one of the topic questions for Paper SP12 in a manner that showed comparative knowledge of a Brazilian and a Spanish-American writer (so long as you do not draw on substantially the same material for Papers SP12 and PG4 or PG5). Study for this paper can also be combined profitably with Twentieth-Century French Literature (Paper FR10) and The Body (Paper CS5).

Introductory reading

• Jean Franco, An Introduction to Spanish-American Literature (CUP)
• John King (ed.), Modern Latin-American Fiction: A Survey (Faber & Faber)
• Philip Swanson (ed.), Landmarks in Modern Latin American Fiction (Routledge)
• Gerald Martin, Journeys through the Labyrinth: Latin-American Fiction in the Twentieth Century (Verso)
• Julio Ortega, Arte de innovar (México: Ediciones del Equilibrista, 1994)

A full Reading List for this paper is available online, and the paper has a Learning Support Website.

You can purchase some of the set texts from the local bookshops (Heffers and Waterstone's, who are aware of our reading lists), by post from Grant & Cutler in London, or see the advice on purchasing Latin American texts online. You may be able to purchase second-hand copies of some of the books from Heffers (tel. 01223 568568). You might also like to try online book-sellers like Amazon, alibris or abebooks.

All lists are also available online: see the Department's Home Page (spanish), under Reading Lists.