Nationalism, Colonialism, and Culture

This course is designed to question the conventional critical categories with which we have learned to speak about literature at the close of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. Instead of reinforcing the oft-stated divisions between naturalism and aestheticism, we will look at the corpus of fin de siglo writing through a different lens in order to probe certain issues that broadly define culture of the times: hence, the ways in which different aesthetic proposals negotiate the transformation of Latin America and Europe from a rural to urban society, and the representation of the body, illness, and criminality as markers of a society in transition. Along with this, we will look at the kinds of literary languages produced in fin de siglo texts in order to produce a disruption of traditional modes of representation, emphasizing performance or masquerade as rituals of modernization. Finally, we will consider the polemics triggered by cultural modernization, including the professionalization of the writer, the marketing of literary phenomena, the “fashion” of aesthetics and literature destined for a leisure class audience, and the creation of an intellectual bohemia as a counter-public sphere. Texts will be drawn from the literatures of the Southern Cone, the Caribbean, and Peru along with several texts from the British and French traditions.

This course will be continued in the following year with emphasis on literature at the close of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, but it is not required that you continue; nor will students interested in recent culture be required to take this course as prerequisite for admission to the next one.

You need to be fluent in Spanish in order to take this course.