Latin American Literature 1

he course is entitled "Latin America: the invention of a continent" and is divided into the following three topics, which will be dealt with in sequence:
A: The rediscovered America: chronicles, stories, visions B: The Independence revolutions between emancipation and new forms of coloniality
C: The vision of the vanquished: indigenous and Afro-American voices in the processes of nation-state building
The course aims to offer an initial general overview of Hispano-American literature from its origins to the threshold of the 20th century. The common thread will be the construction of the continent's identity after its discovery and colonisation, the search for an expression based on cultural resistance to imperial domination. First of all, the issue of the Discovery and Conquest of a new world will be addressed, to which are attributed on the one hand the characters of myth and dream, and on the other those of the nightmare of barbarism and the demonic. We will observe the processes through which European culture will construct the image of the different, an image that will remain a restless and disturbing foundation of modernity. In the second instance, we will focus on the literary representation of the processes of Independence, in order to understand the painful intercultural mechanisms that characterise the history of the continent in its emancipation. Finally, in a seminar session, the essential literary trajectories of the indigenous and Afro-American question in the Hispanic-American context will be addressed from a diachronic perspective, with a specific focus on the theme of the relationship with the other, the comparison between self-representation and exogenous representation of the indígena, and the dynamics of contact and dissonance between communitarian oral traditions and written literatures. All students intending to acquire 6 CFUs will stick to the syllabus of topics A and B; all students intending to acquire 9 CFUs will stick to the full syllabus (A, B and C). The course programme is valid up to and including September 2025.