Contemp Latin American/ Latino Short Story

Catalog description

This upper level course is designed to engage the student in a complex process of critical thinking and transcultural interpretation as we explore a relevant body of XXI Latin American short narratives of the New Milenio. Concentrating on analytical, argumentative, and creative reading and writing practices, we will identify relevant textual, ideological, and cultural representational strategies of postmodern short narratives, sudden fiction, and hint-fiction. The New Milenio Latin American short story embodies a contemporary aesthetic sensibility which deals with history, politics, culture, class, and gender, exposing, contesting, and mapping disintegrating socio-cultural contexts impacting a diverse majority of Latin American communities. These contemporary Latin American writers engage the reader in alternative reading practices embodied in distorted perceptions, raw literary textures, peripheral voices, weird characters, or eerie elliptic stories. Readers are cross-examined about extreme social situations such as poverty, homelessness, hunger, domestic violence, toxic family relationships, social injustice, scarcity, oppression, climate change, corruption, sexual abuse, and socio-political and environmental decay without regard for human life or natural ecosystems. Satisfies Literary Studies, Creative writing, and Rhetoric requirement. Satisfies Post 1800 requirement. Prerequisites & Notes Pre-requisites SPA260, 271/272 or its equivalent