SELCS
- Home
- The School
- Tutors and Officers
- Centres
- Departments & Programmes
- Staff A-Z
- Who should I contact ...?
- Prospective Students
- Start of Term
- Undergraduate Degrees
- SELCS Writing Lab
- Masters degrees
- Research degrees
- Postdoctoral Research
- Affiliates
- ELCS modules
- Personal tutoring
- Student resources
- Meetings
- Staff intranet
The Short Story in Latin America
Course Code: SPAN2111
Course unit value: 0.5
This course will examine the transformations of the short story from modernismo in the 1880s to García Márquez’s experiments with marvelous realism in the 1970s. Each of the authors’ stories will be studied on the level of both form and historical content. We will explore to what extent each story contains a commentary of modernity and modernization by paying close attention to issues of regionalism, cosmopolitanism, and the fluctuations between realism and wonder. The transnational scope of the course allows student to see the different manifestations of the short story genre during a century of dramatic literary, political, and cultural transformations in Latin America.
Assessment: one 3000 word essay (40%); and one unseen two-hour written examination (60%).
Tutor: Dr Constanza Ceresa
Preparatory reading & set texts:
The texts to be studied in class will be taken from the following collections:
Gutiérrez Nájera, Manuel. Cuentos frágiles (1883)
Darío, Rubén. Azul (1888)
Lugones, Leopoldo. Las fuerzas extrañas (1906)
Quiroga, Horacio. Cuentos de locura, de amor y de muerte (1917)
Ocampo, Silvina. Viaje olvidado (1937)
Hernández, Felisberto. Nadie encendía las lámparas (1947)
Carpentier, Alejo. “Viaje a la semilla” (Guerra del tiempo) (1958)
Bioy Casares, Adolfo. “Trama celeste” in Historias fantásticas (1972)
García Márquez, Gabriel. “El ahogado más hermoso del mundo” (1968)
Vega, Ana Lydia. “Letra para salsa y tres soneos por encargo” in Vega & Filippi, Vírgenes y mártires (1981)
