In this course, we will be reading literary texts–mostly novels but also some poetry, short stories, and one testimonio or testimonial novel–from Latin America, that were originally written or published in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Many are by authors you will probably have heard of: they include some of the most famous names in Latin American literature, among them five Nobel Prize winners (one of them, however, the Guatemalan Rigoberta Menchú, won the prize for Peace, rather than Literature). Others are more obscure, but one thing they have in common is that each of these books, one way or another, has been judged noteworthy or influential.
That does not mean you will always enjoy them, but they will be worth reading. Each text provides food for thought and analysis, and so helps us meet this course’s first and minimal goal: to engage with a series of interesting and challenging texts, devise strategies to read them well, and expand our horizons through this exploration of new texts, new readings. If we achieve nothing else, I will be happy, and you should be, too.
A second and more ambitious goal is to seek patterns of commonality and difference between our readings. What, if anything, binds these particular texts together? What concerns do they share? Alternatively, what makes each one different and distinct? Can we see tendencies or changes over time or according to the various (historical, geographical, social) contexts in which they were written?
The image I propose for this course is hopscotch. This is, of course, a children’s game, played in streets and playgrounds worldwid. The rules are simple enough, though with many local variations. All you need is a stick or a piece of chalk to mark a court of squares and numbers in the ground or on a pavement, then a pebble or coin to act as a marker: you throw the marker into this set of etched-out squares in sequence, and hop around the court accordingly, picking the marker up on your return. Out and back, out and back, the game requires precision and agility and is often accompanied by a rhyme to complement the rhythm of the player’s hops and steps. A player runs the risk of falling, losing their balance by trying out new forms of perhaps ungainly movement, but a good player makes it look as graceful as dancing.
The third and final goal of this course, then, is to think about the many things we can do with literature, as well as what literature does to us. What is the “play”–the “freedom, opportunity, or room for action; scope for activity”–that literature offers, once we realize that there is no one “right” way of reading (though there still may of course be wrong ways)? How to take literature both more seriously, as something other than mere reflection or degraded copy of the “real,” and at the same time more playfully, with less anxiety about always getting the “right” meaning, the “correct” interpretation. For meaning is never finite and fixed, and in any case there may well be other, sometimes more interesting, things to do with texts beyond simply interpreting them. This is all a matter of method more than theme: asking less what (Latin American or any other) literature is, and more how we should read it.
Your response to this third challenge will largely be up to you: I will not prescribe how you should be approaching literary texts. Which is not to say that anything goes: there are no games without rules. The question is what to do within the limits that those rules impose, unafraid to fall, prepared always to get up and play again.
