Monthly Archives: January 2012

Image via Wikipedia

Exciting news! Next spring, I’ll be teaching a new senior elective at my school, called “20th Century Latin American Literature.” Here’s the description I wrote when proposing it:

Torrid sonnets of love, magically realistic epics, post-modern murder mysteries: all of these and more comprise what we call Latin American literature. As the world becomes increasingly globalized, great literature is an ever more powerful key to understanding both that which seems foreign, like the mountaintops of Chile or drug cartels of Colombia, as well as that which remains universal, like the importance of love and family or the human quest for independence. In 2010, Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru (The War of the End of the World, Conversation in the Cathedral) became the sixth Latin American author to become a Nobel Laureate in Literature, joining an illustrious list that also includes Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude) and Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Works from these authors, as well as writers like Octavio Paz of Mexico (The Death of Artemio Cruz) and Jorge Luis Borges of Argentina (Labyrinths, The Book of Sand), would form the majority of our reading list, and students would produce both formal critical essays and more personal, creative or poetic pieces in response to these readings. Previous studies in Spanish helpful, but not at all required.

How cool does that sound? This is a course I’ve been wanting to teach for a few years, partly because I think it fills a real gap in our offering of electives, and partly because it’s an area of literature I have wanted to study deeper myself. I’ve read the majority of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s work, for example, and I’m thrilled to get to teach One Hundred Years of Solitude (P.S.) for the first time. I’ve also long been a fan of Neruda, but the rest of the authors on my proposed list will be new for me, and I’m looking forward to diving in. Right now I’m reading The Feast of the Goat: A Novel to see if I would want to teach it, and I think I’ll try Ficciones (English Translation) next, as I’ve been really intrigued by the descriptions of the works within.  In conjunction with developing this course, I have plans to refresh my knowledge of Spanish, which I haven’t studied formally since high school. My dream would be to have enough fluency by next spring to read some of the literature in the original, and I’m hoping to increase our conversations in Spanish here at home.  I’m also very lucky to have a theater-teaching colleague who’s going to hook me up with some contemporary plays by Latin American female authors, since my proposed list is light on women.

It’s been years since I’ve gotten to do this, design a course around books I’m choosing entirely because I really like them, and getting be more adventurous with assignments than I am with my freshmen.  This is also what it means to me to be a lifelong learner: continually pushing myself, exploring new fields, adding new skills, traversing new landscapes, and maybe even getting to bring my students along for the ride.

Related articles

• Shakira’s Love for Gabriel García Márquez (manonmona.wordpress.com)
• World literature tour: Chile (guardian.co.uk)
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (dayistartedreading.wordpress.com)
• The Value of Literature (Third and Last Part). (examiner.com)