COMP 272
Literature of the Americas: Transnational Dialogues on Race, Violence and Nation-Building Spring 2010
Division I Writing Skills Exploring Diversity Initiative
This is not the current course catalog

This course will present some of the methodologies and issues involved in studying the literature of the American hemisphere, with particular emphasis on the dialogue between US and Spanish American writers in the 19th century. Then as now, some of Latin America’s most important intellectuals were profoundly affected by the experience of living in the US, and their influential formulations of Latin American identity reflect their ambivalence towards the northern neighbor that was both enviously successful and alarmingly imperialistic with regard to the rest of the hemisphere. Reading Domingo F. Sarmiento, José Martí, and other Spanish American authors in dialogue with Emerson, Whitman and the like, we will examine the various and intertwined ways in which American writers from both North and South of the Río Grande addressed questions of fundamental importance to the new nations of the Americas, including the legacies of slavery and colonial violence, the scope of democracy and women’s participation in it, the link between geography and national identity, and the nature of inter-American relations. This course fulfills the EDI requirement by challenging students to engage in a comparative study of the US and Latin American societies, focusing on the ways that political events and decisions in the US have affected Latin American lives and the ways that Latin American writers (and their audiences) have viewed the US. This course will be conducted in English.