Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Paper SP A3
Introduction to Hispanic Literature
This paper has a Learning Resources Web Site
The ab initio course in Hispanic Literature (SPA3) is designed to develop your reading skills in the language, to introduce you to the wealth of creative writing in the Spanish-speaking world, and to give you a taster of texts which you can study in more depth at Part IB. The paper offers you a selection of four carefully graded texts, two from Spain, and two from Latin America. Teaching will take the form of weekly classes and fortnightly supervisions (in the Lent term).
The current set texts, in the order they will be covered in Lent Term, are:
- Federico García Lorca, Amor de don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín [Spain]
- Carlos Fuentes, Aura [México]
- Carmen Martín Gaite's El cuarto de atrás [Spain]
- Gabriel García Márquez, Crónica de una muerte anunciada [Colombia]
Cambridge bookshops (Heffers and Waterstone's) are aware of our reading lists. 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.
You will find some resources relating to these texts on the the Learning Resources Web Site for this paper at http://www.mml.cam.ac.uk/spanish/abinitio/resources.html.
A word of warning: do not be tempted to read these texts in translation if any are available. Why not? Because if you do, you will lose the unique advantages which the reading of literature provides to language learners: total immersion in the language, expansion of vocabulary, internalization of structures, language use in context. By all means use a translation to help you over difficulties or to understand complex sentences, but you must only use it as an aid to the comprehension of specific words and phrases, not as a substitute for reading the original. If you are to gain the immeasurable benefit that reading can provide you, you must do the hard work of working through the texts in the source language.
