LALS 227 - Colonial Latin America

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

(Same as HISP 227) Studies in Latin American literary and cultural production from the European invasion to the crisis of the colonial system.

Topic for 2016/17b: The Invention of America. This course explores a variety of texts and genres that trace the process of the “invention” of the New World. We begin with the Mayan myth of creation in the Popol Vuh and examine a variety of forms of mythical, literary and historical fabrications in texts like Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios, Bartolomé de las Casas’s Brevísima Relación, Clorinda Matto de Turner’s Aves sin nido and Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab. In these and other texts we trace the invention and reinvention of Latin America in popular and scholarly imagination until the end of the nineteenth century. Michael Aronna

Two 75-minute periods.

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