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Course Description

Summary

Whether or not they form a genre is debatable, but a series of books were published over the first thirty years of Spanish America’s twentieth century that were and are collectively known as “regional” novels. Their telluric inclination supposedly tends to reassert inherent origins, national symbolism, linguistic difference, environmentalism, the lower classes, and indigenous identity, anachronistically casting itself back to foundational myths as an affirmation of self while simultaneously dabbling in modernism’s literary avant-garde. Often the quests are unfulfilled, however, or at the very least distorted. Such explicit assertions of autochthony may paradoxically mean that the latter is a fallacy, and always was. Perhaps the unfulfilled quest for authenticity becomes the “authentic,” in and of itself. This nativism was ironically mirrored during the subsequent Boom years, not to mention in all sorts of discourse in the here and now, so snippets have kept cropping up in recent student work, without our ever quite giving the novela de la tierra its due. This course should therefore provide contextual support for future studies in Spanish, not to mention other fields. Advanced. Corequisite: Students must attend at least two Languages Series events (Mondays, 7:00pm – 8:00pm)