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Listed in: Spanish, as SPAN-295
Ilan Stavans (Section 01)
A panoramic, historical study of poetry and its aesthetic movements in Latin America (including Brazil) from the colonial period to the present. The course explores the way Spanish and Portuguese became the main language of aesthetic expression after the Iberian conquest but also analyzes forms of poetic resistance that aboriginal languages like Nahuatl, Mayan, Quechua, Mapuche, and Aymara have employed. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the astonishing seventeenth-century Mexican nun, starts a journey that continues with Modernistas like José Martí (Cuba) and Rubén Darío (Nicaragua), the Christian meditations of César Vallejo (Peru), the cosmopolitanism of Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina), the motherly vision of Gabriela Mistral (Chile), the negritud of José Guillén (Cuba), and the symphonic endeavors of Pablo Neruda (Chile), Carlos Drummond de Andrade (Brazil), and Octavio Paz (Mexico). Contemporary trends by poets born between 1930 and 1970 are also contemplated. In the region, poetry and politics always go hand in hand and the crossroads is the leitmotif of the course. Conducted in Spanish.
Requisite: SPAN 199, 211 or 212 or consent of the instructor. Limited to 20 students. Fall semester. Professor Stavans.
If Overenrolled: Spanish majors will be given priority.