Latin American Literature 2

The literary tale is a narrative with a singular strength: it is short, enjoys a high degree of intensity, and contributes to drawing fictitious scenarios with great symbolic significance. It is a relatively young genre in the West, but one with a recognisable tradition based on popular oral narratives, fairy tales and fables, and hagiography. These early textual narratives, however, were not inhabited by artistic aims, nor by metadiscourse on forms and structural models; only from the second half of the 19th century did the tale begin to reflect on itself. The course aims to present aspects and structures of the 20th century Hispano-American short story through the main cultural and historical junctures that accompany its evolution. After examining the peculiar characteristics of the genre through the tools offered by narratology, the poetics of the authors under investigation will be examined in their geo-historical contexts. The textual corpus, which will be dealt with in full during the lectures, will be divided into three sections: a) The masters of the tale; b) When realism is magic: the surroundings of Boom; c) Thresholds of the fantastic and other allegories. In educational unit A, the theoretical foundations of the Spanish-American short story and their evolution from the early 20th century to the Boom will be analysed, thanks to the lessons of the main masters. (Quiroga, Bombal, Ocampo, Borges, Rulfo). In teaching unit B, the main innovative elements of the contemporary Hispano-American narrative will be tackled from a diachronic perspective, and in particular the narrative in the Boom will be analysed. The problem of the other and the tension between American identity and European models will be central (Alejo Carpentier, García Márquez; Elena Garro, Carlos Fuentes)
In teaching unit C, we will focus on the development of the fantastic genre in the peculiar form of the short story and through its main exponents (Cortázar, Monterroso, Pizarnik, Ferré, Valenzuela).