Rural Modernity in Latin America

Catalog description

This course focuses on literary representations of rural Latin America in the 19th and 20th centuries. While it remains common to understand rural societies as traditional or backward in contrast with the city (considered the true center of modernity), this course approaches rural social orders as sites of modernity and modernization in their own right. We will be primarily concerned with examining how works Latin American literature and film created rural visions of modernity, particularly in relation to land reform, political revolution, and capitalist agriculture. While our principal focus will be literature, we will also consider how other forms such painting, film, and political documents envisioned rural transitions.