Latin American Literature 3

The course is entitled
Women's Tales. Memory of Argentinean migrations"
and is divided into the following three topics, which will be dealt with in sequence:
A: Migrating: the freedom of the poor. The socio-cultural and literary context of the great migrations from Europe to Argentina.
B: Journey into the emotions of the migrant woman through three Argentinean writers: Syria Poletti, María Angélica Scotti, María Rosa Lojo.
C: Semiotic methodologies of textual analysis. Theory and practice.
The course is set in the historical context of the migrations from Europe to Argentina, which have produced an immense and magnificent literature. Begun at the end of the nineteenth century and continued until the 1970s, these migrations have prefigured a human, cultural and social experience that has a particularly intense dialogue with the present day. Argentina has been one of the nations in the world that has been built almost entirely on migratory contributions. This has consequently produced a rich set of literary texts that profoundly narrate the meaning of migration for individuals, families and communities. Literature is the place where the human story of the migratory experience gathers and is better represented, since it abandons statistics and enters the intimacy of emotions, of lost and found affections, of the answers to the encounter and the clash with new languages, new cultures, new societies. In Argentina, it is above all women writers who take up the challenge of thinking about the world through the incessant movement of people between lost and found homelands, a movement that gives rise to powerful interior processes: from the pain of the loss of original ties to the reconfiguration of one's own identity. In their literature, women - always forgotten in the history of migration, both yesterday and today - return to the forefront, showing themselves to be an essential element in activating the processes of change, acceptance and resistance that are indispensable for facing the reality of elsewhere. Mothers, daughters, grandchildren are the privileged characters of the novel of migration, which always coincides with a family novel. They therefore tell a story finally seen "from the inside", which allows us to understand the extreme complexity of the migratory experience and at the same time all the richness it produces in terms of the formation of a culture, individual and collective, transactional, global, in movement.
First of all (part A), the framework of the literature of migration in Argentina following the arrival of a flow -perceived as 'flooding'- of migrants during about a century will be developed. In particular, we will study the production of women writers in whose work the history or the memory of migration is represented.
The second part (part B) will focus on three works of particular interest and reading pleasure, such as Syria Poletti's Gente conmigo (1961), María Angélica Scotti's Diario de ilusiones y naufragios (1971) and Ana María Rosa Lojo's Árbol de familia (2010), built on the act of remembering one's own experience as a migrant (Poletti, Scotti) or that of one's family (Lojo).
After having acquired and elaborated the necessary knowledge on the subject in the first two parts of the course, in the last part (part C) we will dedicate ourselves to the textual analysis of the works considered. In order to complete the preparation already started in the previous years, the tools provided by semiological analysis will be deepened. The aim is both to make the students autonomous in the exercise of understanding and interpreting the texts and to start them off on the writing of the final paper.
The course programme runs up to February 2024.