SPA 363 The Latin American Short Novel
Shorter than a novel, but longer than a short story, the novella (or short novel) is a curious literary genre. Often maligned by the publishing industry that favors novels, the novella is nonetheless a highly complex–in most cases, one could say immaculate–text: precise in its scope and use of language. Many of Latin American literature’s most aesthetically innovative and culturally significant texts are novellas, and in this class we’ll take advantage of the genre’s manageable length to read several of them. Through our reading we will study several of Latin America’s literary movements such as the avant-gardes and the boom, and key historical moments in the region, from the Mexican revolution to dictatorships to the neoliberal present. This is a reading intensive course that seeks to provide a historicized focus on the key themes and aesthetic trends in Latin American literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.