Reading & Composition

Reading & Composition

ROOTS/ROUTES/RUPTURES: EXPERIENCES OF TRAVEL IN AND FROM LATIN AMERICA
Course Number: 
R3B.001
Course Type or Level: 
Instructor: 
Karina Palau
Days: 
Tu/Th
Time: 
9:30-11
Semester: 

Course Description: From Columbus’ ‘discovery’ of the Americas to ongoing debates about immigration and labor, travel has played a significant role in Latin America’s story.  But what does it mean to travel? How does the experience of ‘taking a trip’ being ‘out of place,’ or encountering a ‘visitor’ have an impact on individuals, identities, and cultures?  How has Latin America been a site of travels in pursuit of personal roots and unchartered routes, but also a region touched by the unexpected ruptures that can emerge out of experiences of travel?

In this course, we will take these questions as a point of departure for our own semester-long journey through a rich body of materials, visual and literary, all of which touch on the theme of travel in and from Latin America.  Beginning with Columbus’ Segunda Carta, we will consider how travel and cultural contact were seminal to the way Latin America came to be constructed historically.  But we will also examine a number of materials that explore the possibility for travel to break open and re-negotiate these kinds of constructed histories and identities.

In our wanderings from descriptions of homecomings to touristy vacations, from journeys of ‘discovery’ to ethnographic missions, we will try to unpack the tensions inherent in questions of identity, movement, and the dynamics of cultural encounter that have played such an important role in shaping how the Latin American milieu has been both lived and imagined.

Course prerequisite: This is an intensive writing course that fulfills the second half of the University Reading & Composition (R&C) requirement and is designed to help you continue to refine skills taught in an R1A course. We will build on the skills taught in R1A and dedicate ample time to crafting our critical thinking and essay-writing skills, giving special attention to argumentation, analysis, and the basics of how to put together a strong and convincing academic paper.  We assume that you have completed R1A or the equivalent at another institution and that you come ready to write longer, more complex papers and engage more difficult texts than those assigned in R1A.

Language prerequisite: This is also a bilingual course designed to increase your language skills and familiarity with cultural production in Spanish.  Writing assignments will be in English, but we will read texts in the original and regularly conduct class discussions in Spanish. Students must have completed one of the following prerequisites: AP High School Spanish, score of 3 or higher on the AP Spanish exam, Spanish 4 or 25, or be a native Spanish speaker with adequate skills for the class.  A language exam will be given the first day of class.

Writing Assignments: One four-page diagnostic essay

One six-page paper (with rewrite)

One ten-page research paper (proceeded by outline & draft)

Frequent short writing assignments on thesis statement, close textual analysis, outlining, etc.

Possible Primary Readings and Viewings: (Please do not purchase books until after the first class session. We will read works originally in Portuguese in translation.)

 

Christopher Columbus’ Carta a Luis de Santángel

Peregrinaciones de una paria, Flora Tristán

Las Alturas de Macchu Picchu, Pablo Neruda

Los ríos profundos, José María Arguedas

“The Smallest Woman in the World,” Clarice Lispector

“El Etnógrafo,” and/or “El Sur,” Jorge Luis Borges

Selected poems by Nicolás Guillen

Photographs from Carl Lumholtz’ Unknown Mexico

Excerpts from The Motorcycle Diaries, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara

Excerpts from O turista aprendiz, Mário de Andrade

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz

Babel, Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu

Theoretical Readings: Short selections from James Clifford’s Writing Culture and Routes, Mary Pratt’s Imperial Eyes, and works by Richard Rosa, Roland Barthes, and Lévi-Strauss